"They flutter behind you your possible pasts
Some bright-eyed and crazy some frightened and lost
A warning to anyone still in command
Of their possible future to take care..."

This is a pared-down version of a possible past idea I had and posted to the old forum a couple of years ago after we met Naomi Hyland. It's probably way off, but I was exploring how Carla and Jennifer might fit into the story as we know it.

Red was at the Naval Academy from about 1979-84. He would have been 19 when he started fall semester of 1979. Four years later he would have graduated in Spring 1983, within Ressler's assertion that he graduated by the time he was 24, which would have been in Feb. 1984. Upon graduation, he would have been required to serve in the Navy, aboard a ship, for five years. That would have taken him to 1988. However, if your tuition is paid by some other way, you don't have that requirement. So the Timeline might not be affected by his time at sea. He was a Naval Intelligence Officer. If he was a good as everyone says he was, he could have been anywhere. Even southern California. He was in Panama City, FL at some point on a ship. So it might not be too far out to think he met Katarina Rostova in California.

But I digress. Let's just say that Red possibly met Carla either before or during his Academy days. For all we know maybe they were high school sweethearts. Midshipmen are not allowed to be married or have families, that is grounds for dismissal. If Red and Carla were together during that time they would have had to sort of sneak around and if she got pregnant he would not have been able to marry or even live with her until he graduated. Apparently there are a lot of marriages that take place right after graduation in the real world. So if Jennifer was born during this time, Carla would have been raising her as a single mother with an absent father, Carla may have always felt she was "MY daughter." If she was born between 1979-83 she would have been several years older than Liz, maybe the age of "ballerina girl". So Red and Carla probably got married right after he graduated. But he got shipped off and she probably didn't see him much, and was left to raise Jennifer pretty much on her own. She probably didn't care for the arrangement and maybe that's why she was a "miserable housewife." During the time he was gone he certainly had his affair with Katarina. Was she the only one? Did Carla find out. Maybe that's why she called Red a "miserable man."

Assignment or not, Red had an affair with Katarina Rostova, who had their child who she tried to pass of as belonging to her husband, Konstantin Rostov. I still think the pregnancy only seemed accidental and is part of a larger plot, but that's another theory. Katarina fell in love with her "target". And at first I wasn't sure, but now I am thinking that Red loved her just as much. Neither one of them were free to divorce their spouses and go off together, because of their intelligence connections. It wasn't just jealous angry spouses they had to contend with, it was the KGB and US intelligence so it was trickier. Masha lived with her unsuspecting unreal father for four years, Red said Konstantin was in and out of the house a lot. So Red must have been there when he wasn't, I am thinking. Katarina's journal says he tried to get them to leave and go with him. So was Red ready to give up his career and everything for them? Sounds like it. But he had gotten involved with some pretty powerful people. Maybe they were blackmailing him, since having an affair with a KGB agent and possibly giving her secrets was an act of treason and they found his position useful. Plus the USSR was becoming unstable and unsafe for those KGB agents. So Red had a plan. He decided to use those same powerful people against themselves. He got ahold of The Fulcrum. Why did the Fulcrum even exist? I think Red had help from some powerful people, who didn't like or trust the others, to create it just for him to use as his own blackmail. Call it counter-blackmail. He would use it to get Katarina and Liz out safely from the USSR. But Something Went Wrong. Maybe we will find out the details in a couple more episodes. But I think it ended with Fire Night.

What happened on Fire Night? We only have Liz's sketchy half-memories, but she probably shot Red after he'd had a huge argument with Katarina. She might have thought she was protecting her mother from him. Anyway, he went down, the house burned, everyone got out. But Katarina thought Red didn't make it out. Here was the man that she was ready to betray her country for, dead, killed by their own child. She went to pieces. I get the impression she was maybe not the most stable person in the world to begin with. And that's why Red loved her, she was a lot like him. Always in the moment, in love with life. We've seen bits of that Red many times, maybe that was more like he was all the time in the past. Meanwhile, Red ends up in the hospital for quite some time due to being burned. He can't get word out to Katarina and she has become so distraught that she decides to end her life and take Masha with her. Maybe she has even said that if anything happened to Red she would kill herself. He finally gets out and goes looking for them, traces them to Cape May. He gets there in time to see her carrying Masha into the sea (or something like that), but for some reason he can't get to both of them and has to decide which one to save and which to let go. He saves Liz, of course, or we wouldn't have the rest of the story.

Anyway, not as short as I would like it, but that's one idea. Probably full of typos, too! LOL!

Just wanted to add that I now think Red put the Fulcrum in the bunny, but the bunny got lost for a couple of decades and he thought Liz might have known where it was if anyone did.
I will also touch on what I think might have happened between Feb and Dec 1990 in another post. Gotta go to dinner!

Last edited by Honey West (2/25/2017 9:27 pm)