I was actually okay with the way they played the Eli-Ray parallel.
Israeli families where at least one parents are on a job like that tend to... congregate in neighbourhoods or small towns. (Tel Aviv has a neighbourhood that got named for that, no lie.) Not everybody lives in those clusters, but a lot do. So in my head-canon, Ziva would've grown up in a couple-thousand-people town where you were weird if you didn't have at least one parent in the Community, and where this kind of jobs and what it does for family were... out in the open. It wasn't a secret.
Her parents divorced. The job-family conflict is very much an American thing that Israelis are less afflicted by, and this was even more true twenty years ago. The way Israeli culture is structured just doesn't give to that: the way Israelis undersand "job" and "career" and "family" is different. So the way Eli failed on this, and the way her mother responded? Those would've been Big Deals, and she would've been surrounded by families with similar circumstances that didn't get broken up and angry this way.
For reasons the show never explores (and which, in my head, go back to Tali and to the way she and Ziva were together before Tali was killed), Ziva internalized this conflict and resolved it by fully taking the job path, not even trying for anything else.
And then that ended in tragedy, where Eli deliberately slammed on the worst buttons he could find to drag her away from NCIS and send her on a suicide mission. And never knew what to do with her after.
Given all that, I think it's a reasonble bet that "Do not be like Eli" is a critical life goal of Ziva's.
We saw Ziva be invested in two men: Michael and Ray. The show played Michael as a second Ari, both in his demeanor (and physical appearance) and his relationship with Eli. "Metaphorical son to Eli" opens the possibility of him not just being a second Ari, but of Ari and him both being reflections of Eli.
(I think Ziva did love Ari. To pieces. And that she's quite aware that he played her personally, not just as a Mossad agent. Given again Eli's behavior in Aliya...)
Ray started out more removed, but just that they made him CIA said that this won't end well, and how. The echoes would've been in Ziva's head, the hall of mirrors; she'd be sensitized to it. The first sign of a compartmentalization failure or maladaptive priorities on Ray's part - and what we get is that scene on the rooftop, and then that scene on the tarmac.
Unrelatedly, I do love it when the show plays up the Ziva-Gibbs-family angle. There's a complex relationship there that goes both to their screwed-up family histories and to their military identities and what both their familial and miliary identities mean to them, and I do love that.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-01-12 10:09 am (UTC)Israeli families where at least one parents are on a job like that tend to... congregate in neighbourhoods or small towns. (Tel Aviv has a neighbourhood that got named for that, no lie.) Not everybody lives in those clusters, but a lot do. So in my head-canon, Ziva would've grown up in a couple-thousand-people town where you were weird if you didn't have at least one parent in the Community, and where this kind of jobs and what it does for family were... out in the open. It wasn't a secret.
Her parents divorced. The job-family conflict is very much an American thing that Israelis are less afflicted by, and this was even more true twenty years ago. The way Israeli culture is structured just doesn't give to that: the way Israelis undersand "job" and "career" and "family" is different. So the way Eli failed on this, and the way her mother responded? Those would've been Big Deals, and she would've been surrounded by families with similar circumstances that didn't get broken up and angry this way.
For reasons the show never explores (and which, in my head, go back to Tali and to the way she and Ziva were together before Tali was killed), Ziva internalized this conflict and resolved it by fully taking the job path, not even trying for anything else.
And then that ended in tragedy, where Eli deliberately slammed on the worst buttons he could find to drag her away from NCIS and send her on a suicide mission. And never knew what to do with her after.
Given all that, I think it's a reasonble bet that "Do not be like Eli" is a critical life goal of Ziva's.
We saw Ziva be invested in two men: Michael and Ray. The show played Michael as a second Ari, both in his demeanor (and physical appearance) and his relationship with Eli. "Metaphorical son to Eli" opens the possibility of him not just being a second Ari, but of Ari and him both being reflections of Eli.
(I think Ziva did love Ari. To pieces. And that she's quite aware that he played her personally, not just as a Mossad agent. Given again Eli's behavior in Aliya...)
Ray started out more removed, but just that they made him CIA said that this won't end well, and how. The echoes would've been in Ziva's head, the hall of mirrors; she'd be sensitized to it. The first sign of a compartmentalization failure or maladaptive priorities on Ray's part - and what we get is that scene on the rooftop, and then that scene on the tarmac.
Unrelatedly, I do love it when the show plays up the Ziva-Gibbs-family angle. There's a complex relationship there that goes both to their screwed-up family histories and to their military identities and what both their familial and miliary identities mean to them, and I do love that.