This post discusses plot details of the season finale of The Americans.

And so, we end where we began, with the music. Back in the first episode of The Americans, when Phillip and Elizabeth made love in their car after dumping the body of the man who raped Elizabeth during her training in the Soviet Union, “In The Air Tonight,” a distinctly unromantic song was unsettlingly perfect for that tentatively romantic moment—and as a frame for the rest of the season. “I’ve seen your face before my friend, but I don’t know if you know who I am,” Phil Collins sings in perhaps his most famous single. “Well I was there and I saw what you did, I saw it with my own two eyes / So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been / It’s all been a pack of lies…I know the reason why you keep your silence up, / oh no you don’t fool me / Well the hurt doesn’t show, but the pain still grows / It’s no stranger to you and me.”

The Americans is deeply concerned with questions of complicity, intimacy, and the difference between them, and fittingly for a show interested in those questions, it’s often its best when the camera is lingering on two people, capturing the claustrophobia or wide-open possibility that marks their relationship at any given moment. When The Americans began, Elizabeth and Phillip were the only pair who were both complicit and intimate, in murder and in marriage. But by the end of the show, their children Paige and Henry had attacked a man who may have meant them no harm and fled from the scene, and their neighbor Stan had become entangled with Nina, a staffer at the Rezidentura, at considerable cost to his own marriage. The characters on The Americans draw charmed, poisoned circles around themselves and their collaborators and lovers, and not just because some of them are spies or cops. It’s almost a condition of adulthood, the show argues, to have secrets, and a test of true intimacy to share the full extent of those ugly secrets with another person, and to accept that they won’t reject you for them. Stan’s inability to share his secrets with Sandra dooms his marriage. And it’s an expression of truly withering contempt for Claudia to tell Elizabeth “I know you better than you know yourself. And you don’t know me at all.”

The spread of that secret-keeping like a disease makes Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers,” his scathing critique of international affairs, a triply appropriate song to close out The Americans‘ first season, and not just because Gabriel’s description of figures “Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games,” is a great shout-out to the Jennings’ wig collection. “Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane / Jane plays with Willi, Willi is happy again,” he sings. “Suki plays with Leo, Sacha plays with Britt / Adolf builts a bonfire, Enrico plays with it.” The description of spreading nuclear knowledge in that first verse is the perfect conclusion to an episode that reveals that Elizabeth and Phillip have been risking themselves for information that is truly “incredibilis,” and that the world is gearing up for an arms raced based on clever fantasy rather than substance. Just as countries cascade into the game, The Americans‘ characters have been pulled into deception, whether as a condition of their jobs, or because adulthood is a disease that infects us all with secrecy. And for a show that depicts its main characters having a lot of unprotected—both physically and emotionally—sex with people not their primary partners in the years before AIDS became a visible public health catastrophe, there’s something chilling about the viral nature of the song.
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This post discusses plot points from the April 24 episode of The Americans.

I’d been feeling a little anxious about The Americans over the past few weeks, given the good scorching Homeland gave me—and I suspect many of you—last season. But last night’s episode riffed on the conventions of spy dramas in a way that was a sharp contrast with the way Homeland too often gave into them. And it did so in not one but three storylines that argued that fear, pain, and greed aren’t the only things that motivate people in high-stakes scenarios. Sometimes faith, ideology, and emotional attachment—as well as accidents—are just as important as anything else.

The accident comes first. There’s something grimly funny about Elizabeth, Phillip, and Claudia getting tremendously anxious about whether or not to believe that Sanford’s recruited a source, or to decide that he’s trying to extort $50,000 from them to feed his gambling addiction, only to have him get popped on an entirely unrelated result of his own shiftlessness. “Not FBI. Failure to pay child support,” Claudia tells Elizabeth, exasperated. So much of spy drama depends on the idea of an almost machine-like efficiency of the parties on both sides that they forget to acknowledge how easy it is for grit to get in the works. It’s nice to see The Americans acknowledge, as it so often does, that spies are people too, with families, and day jobs, and personal passions, and all of those obligations can tug them away from a laser-like focus on espionage. And even if their focus is squarely on their tasks, their bodies or minds can fail.

And their motivations can change. The first person to behave in an unpredictable manner is Viola, the Weinbergers’ maid. Elizabeth and Phillip may have largely put the damage they did to her conscience, her sense of security, and her son out of their minds since she agreed to plant the clock. But she has clearly not forgotten. And after listening to her pastor explain that sins “weigh down our hearts with sorrow and corruption. They banish us from the kingdom yet to come, now and forevermore,” she decides to risk her employment rather than her soul, and come clean to her employer. “I was afraid. Not for myself. For Greyson. They made him very sick,” she explains to Gad when Mrs. Weinberger takes her to the FBI offices. “They said they could help him, that they were the only ones who could help him. But if I said anything Greyson was going to die. He put a pillow to his face and said he’d be dead in 15 seconds. I begged him. I begged him to stop. So I said I’d do it. I put the clock back into Mr. Weinberger’s office.” Rather than being fired or arrested, Stan tells her “You’re a very brave woman.” And the FBI examines the bug and decides to keep it. “Now that we know they’re listening, we’ll know what to say,” Gad explains. With some of her fear removed, Viola’s faith wins out. And at least for now, it’s rewarded.
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This post discusses plot points from the April 17 episode of The Americans.

“They kill us. We kill them. It’s the world we live in,” Stan’s boss says to kick off this episode, in an apt description of both the not-so-cold war between the FBI and the KGB and the approach The Americans is taking to its first season. One of the things I appreciate about The Americans is how lean and clean the show is—it’s the shark of television dramas. But “Covert War” left me with my first significant concern about the show: that it’s burning through characters and plot lines a little bit too fast.

One of the best things about “Covert War” was how much material it seeded for the future by reaching into the characters’ pasts. “He was the first guy I slept with. Of two,” Sandra told Elizabeth about Stan over Harvey Wallbangers—the orange juice in that cocktail repeats in Phillip’s dismal hotel room—when the two of them went out to drink, dance, and blow off some steam about the state of their respective marriages. It’s a revelation that clarifies how devastating it is that Sandra is coming to believe that her her husband is cheating on her, given his late nights, and the discrepancy between where he says he’s spending them and his office knows about where he is. And it also underlines the gap between Sandra’s more global innocence and Stan’s broader experience, something he’s tried to shield her from at the expense of their marriage.

The expansion of the relationship between Zhukov and Elizabeth was a nice touch, too. His lecture to her on the meaning of love was simultaneously a striking and adult definition of the emotion, and a good bit of spycraft training in how to play the long game. “Malish has taught me what it means to love,” he told her in Moscow. “Do you know what love is, Elizabeth?” “It’s a feeling,” she advances cautiously. “The most profound feeling,” Zhukov encourages her. “He isn’t particularly smart, he isn’t pretty, but I love him. You know why? Because I take care of him, every day, and in his own way, he takes care of me. If you take care of something, one day you will discover that you love this creature and your life would be empty without him.” And Zhukov also helps Elizabeth understand life in both the United States and Russia better. “She’s in a play group,” Elizabeth tells him of Paige at three. “There are no demands on children in America, no chores. All we do, all day long, is watch them play.” “Play is serious. It’s how we learn to read one another, and the world,” Zhukov tells her gently. “I don’t remember much of that as a child,” Elizabeth insists to him. But he tells her “Because of the war you never had the pleasure of playing,” reminding her that for all Elizabeth’s zeal, her rigid absolutism isn’t necessarily the Soviet ideal the two of them are fighting for.
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This post discusses plot points from the April 10 episode of The Americans.

I’ve been rewatching all of Mad Men in recent weeks, and one of the things that’s struck me about the show on a second go-round is precisely how broad it is, from its limb-removal via lawnmower, to the bluntness and bigotry of Mrs. Blankenship, to its frequent use of vomit. The show’s silliness and sometimes obviousness are a counterpoint to the often opaque natures of its characters’ motivations and the slow burns of its plot arcs. I mention this to begin a consideration of this week’s The Americans because of how austere the show is shaping up to be, and how clear its lines are. I don’t think these are faults, or that they make the show boring—The Americans can do an action sequence or a domestic scene and make each hit like very few other shows on television, and do them equally well—but because there’s something fitting about the show’s clarity and nakedness given its exploration of absolutists on both sides of the Cold War.

This week’s episode divided into three very well-defined tracks: the escalation of the FBI from an investigative agency to a body on a war footing, the impact of that kind of escalation on the people who practice it, and the limits of the actual appeal of Phillip and Elizabeth’s Communist ideals. It was an elegant and painful triptych.

After Amador’s death, the FBI mobilized to respond, and Stan and Chris’s boss rallied his team with rhetoric that served as a sly reminder that the militarization of law enforcement dates back further than the War on Terror. “So, um, I knew Chris when he started here at CI. He’s— he was a good agent, a good friend, just…a good man. I’m sure you all have your stories about him. I was a little hard on him sometimes. But he did a lot of his department and his country,” he explained. “And now here’s what wer’e going to do for him. we’re going to take every resource we have, every ounce of energy and focus, and we are going to hunt…And we are not going to rest until they are behind bars, or better, until we zip them up in a body bag.” In that moment, he’s just a step away from Mark Strong in Zero Dark Thirty demanding lists of people to be killed. And later, he told Stan “It may be a secret war, but it’s a war. We have to fight like soldiers now, and your’e one of our best…In a war, blood gets spilled. That’s how it goes.”

But one of the strengths of The Americans is that it reveals the hollowness of that pep talk, in this case in a pair of scenes in which Stan and Phillip are each confronted with the impact of what they’ve done in killing Chris and Vlad. There’s something incredibly sad about Stan seeking out Phillip in the hotel room where he’s living out his separation, telling him “No offense, Phil, but this place is kind of depressing,” and then unloading about his friend’s death to his neighbor, who is the author of his misery. “He was stabbed,” Stan explains, and Phillip, for reasons of both friendship and self-preservation, asks “Who did it?” “Bad guys,” Stan tells him decisively, unaware that his confidant is the author of his misery, and that Phillip stabbed Chris in self-defense in a fight motivated by jealousy rather than international intrigue. “We’re going to find them.”
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This post discusses plot points from the April 20 episode of The Americans.

“None of the agencies are working to share the information,” Phillip in his guise as Clark tells Martha in last night’s episode of The Americans. “Each one wants to be the hero.” His weary description of bureaucratic breakdown and self-interest is a perfect framework for the episode. Interagency communications troubles have created the problem that Elizabeth and Phillip have to solve tonight, stopping a KGB agent who isn’t available to have his orders countermanded. Stan and Nina’s relationship is first enabled by the needs of one bureaucracy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then complicated by the workings of another, the Rezedentia. And Elizabeth and Phillip, after a thawing in their marital Cold War, are forced to reckon with the extent to which their relationship is a bureaucratic arrangement rather than an organic, living thing—and to confront the possibility that they may need to engage the legal bureaucracy to dissolve their union.

“We have to stop an assassin,” Elizabeth says when she explains their assignment. “They need to straighten things out at the Center. Ordering hits, then countermanding them?” Phillip asks her in the understatement of the year. Part of his reaction is to the Center’s apparent incompetence—how do you hire an assassin and not retain the ability to stay in touch with that person? And part of it is that the organization is acting emotionally rather than rationally, making one decision and then changing its mind. It’s hard to devote your life to fulfilling the missions you’re given if they can alter at a moment’s notice, forcing you to be as dedicated to one goal at one moment as you were to its antithesis a moment before.

And the KGB’s display of incompetence is juxtaposed with the FBI’s reaction after three of its agents are murdered by the explosives expert Phillip and Elizabeth could shoot, but not neutralize, given his penchant for time bombs. Stan and his colleagues are personally shattered by the news, and how could they not be? Working for a large bureaucracy doesn’t actually strip the component employees of that organization of their humanity or capacity to react. But they don’t allow their feelings to dramatically shift their mission or operational playbook. You don’t go to war over the loss of three men, however badly you might feel about their deaths in your personal capacity as a functional human. If the Soviet Union and the United States are locked together by the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, a concept that’s more promise than threat, the United States just demonstrated a command and control that could help it avoid self-destruction.
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This post discusses plot elements from the March 6 episode of The Americans.

Since its very first episode, The Americans has used its baroque scenario, which takes two KGB spies in an arranged marriage that serves as their cover as an ordinary American couple and plants them across the street from an FBI agent coming out of deep cover with white supremacists, as a way to blow out the biggest issues that face even ordinary marriages. This week’s episode took the idea that your spouse knows you better than anyone else—or as Curtis Sittenfeld would put it, ““Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable?”—and reframed it a different way: what does it do to people to share profound secrets? What does it mean to betray them? And what happens if you share those secrets, as Elizabeth does with Gregory and Stan now does with Nina, with someone other than the person you’re married to?

Stan may have been drawn to Nina from the beginning because she’s an attractive woman who is apparently more independent than her fellow Soviets in Washington. But increasingly, the two of them are pulled together because Nina, unlike Stan’s wife, though in a situation of Stan’s own making, understands what he went through when he was undercover with the white supremacist groups he was investigating in a way Stan’s wife does not. “Listen to me, Nina,” he told her when they met in the museum. “I’ve been where you are. I’ve lived it. I know what it is to feel fear in every fiber of your being and not be able to show it. I can get you out. But you have to stay with me, okay?” When he tries to quell her fears about being caught, shot, put on a plain to the Soviet Union and being found inevitably guilty, Stan tells her “You won’t be. You can do this, Nina. We can do this,” with a conviction that’s born out of doing it himself. When Stan and Nina pull off the caper that plants the diamonds in Vasili’s tea and the camera with pictures of documents on it in his radio, Stan is simultaneously proving to himself that, despite his boss’s belief that he’s not a good liar, he still has the wit and skills to protect himself should he need to, demonstrating to Nina that he can protect her, and freeing her from having to sleep with Vasili—which potentially makes her sexually available to him. As awful a thing as it’s been for Stan to put Nina under this kind of pressure, The Americans has done a subtle, careful job of demonstrating how tied up Stan is in the idea that she can survive. Giving her a new life is a proxy for returning to his own: the success of each enterprise seems to depend on the other, and if Nina were to be caught or killed, I can imagine Stan withdrawing deep into himself.

That’s a risky equation for the health of Stan’s marriage. And the impact on his wife of not knowing about his life undercover and his work at present is clear, even though she’d likely be even more wounded if she knew how much he was sharing with Nina. “I get that you can’t tell me things, the secrets and stuff. But there has to be something you can share with me from work. Your boss gets on your nerves, your partner thinks he’s funny,” Stan’s wife asks him a little wistfully. And in return, he relaxes a little, but only enough to tell her the safe version of the story. “Sometimes what I do get scary. Not for me,” he says, avoiding revealing the emotional connection between himself and Nina. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore. But I have to worry about people. And today, it got pretty scary. But it worked out. It was a tough day, but it was a good day.” Stan may be in bed with his wife, but the relationship he’s putting work and emotional investment into is the one with Nina.

Elizabeth and Phillip, by contrast, find themselves torn from their homes by forces who first appear to be American agents, because while Phillip thought he and Elizabeth were functioning like a real couple, she was doing her duty and reporting her doubts about him to their superiors. “You told them. You told them I considered defecting. That’s why this is happening,” Phillip realizes, horrified, after finding out that Elizabeth wasn’t tortured, simply pressured with pictures of Paige and Henry, while Phillip, by contrast, was beaten and waterboarded. Elizabeth tries to convince him otherwise, but given what we’ve seen that Phillip hasn’t, we know she’s being partially untruthful when she insists “If I said anything that made them think, if I said anything, it would have been so long ago….I told them that you liked it here too much.” Elizabeth may have convinced herself that she wasn’t indicting Phillip by acknowledging that she had had doubts about him. But in reality, telling their superiors that she was no longer experiencing doubts about Phillip’s loyalties likely made Soviet higher-ups more suspicious of her than secure of him.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 27 episode of The Americans.

It’s not new for The Americans to discuss marriage, but this is the episode in which the show’s main theme ran most strongly through all three of the main storylines in play. When Elizabeth visits Udacha, she uses his widower status to make him emotionally vulnerable. “I’m very sorry about your wife. It was 35 years, right?” Elizabeth asks. “And eight months,” the man reminds her. She may be playing him, but when Elizabeth remarks “That’s really something,” you sense that she means it.

But what that “something” means, she isn’t exactly sure. After the defense contractor she’s seducing beats her badly with a belt under the cover of adding a little BDSM to their encounter—”It’s supposed to hurt,” he tells her—Phillip, newly enlightened to Elizabeth’s experiences with sexual trauma, refuses to accept that what’s happened to her is simply one of the consequences of her job she has to accept. But just because Phillip found out with Elizabeth in training doesn’t mean she’s ready to accept his protection. When he tells her “I’m going to deal with it,” Elizabeth is dismissive. “You’re going to deal with it? If I wanted to deal with him, you don’t think he’d be dealt with? I wanted the intel and I got it,” she tells him. “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me. It’s over.” But he isn’t willing to accept her independence in this matter. “Somebody beat the shit out of my wife,” he insists. “I’m not your daddy. I’m your husband, Elizabeth. What do you think husbands do?” “I wouldn’t know,” she spits back at him. And she’s still skeptical when, after their caper with the car (the best action sequence the show’s filmed so far), Phillip comes after her instead of leaving her to extract herself. “You didn’t have to pick me up,” she tells him. “I didn’t have to bring you coffee, either,” he explains. “Or a vanilla cream donut.” Left unsaid is that husbands, at least in Phillip’s conception, do the little things as well as the big ones. And when Elizabeth asks Phillip to “Show me another way” to live her life, she’s telling him that she’s willing to listen to what he thinks marriage means, and to accept some of his desire to be good to her.

And down the block, Phillip’s raquetball partner is having trouble living up to his own standards for what it means to be a good husband. When Stan’s wife comes downstairs in a new nightie, she tries to tear him away from his study of Cyrillic—meaningfully, given his mix-up in tone with Nina from earlier in the episode, he appears to be taking them from a robot—with memories of what their relationship used to be. “You know, a few years ago, before your long stint undercover, we used to go line dancing, you and I,” she tells him. “And we used to drink Chianti at the bar at the old Spaghetti Factory, and host bridge nights once a month. And we used to have those family double bubble blowing contests. And you knew your son’s three best friends’ names. Life was pretty frickin’ great, wasn’t it? Remember?” Stan has ideas about what it means to be a good husband, telling Chris that he should try to be nicer to Martha if he wants to win her back, and later snapping at him “What you don’t know about marriage, and family, and responsibility, and obligation, and answering to people on a one-on-one personal level for 23 years? I could fill a goddamn warehouse, Chris.” What’s harder for him is that he knows who he wants to be, and he’s failing to be it. Part of him got lost out there with the white supremacists, and he still hasn’t managed to recover it.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 20 episode of The Americans.

When The Americans debuted in late January, one of the things that excited me about the show was the way anti-heroism functioned within it. Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, the deep-cover KGB agents at the heart of the show, weren’t being made sympathetic to us because they were incredibly badass despite using their powers for evil, as is the case with a Walter White, or many of the characters in Game of Thrones. Instead, we were being persuaded to sympathize, even more so than is the case in Showtime’s Homeland, with characters who want to bring down the United States government, and to see the United States through the lens of their ideology and their geopolitics.

Last night’s episode of The Americans was a through-the-looking-glass perspective on the Cold War that revealed the disadvantage the Soviet Union perceived itself to be at relative to the United States, and how the paranoia that governed the Soviet system poisoned its own agents’ decision-making. The catalyst for that exploration? The shooting of President Reagan outside the Washington Hilton by John Hinckley, Jr., a mentally ill man who hoped to impress Jodie Foster. As its lens on those events, The Americans generally stayed out of the inner circle, and focused on people who had a small role in the events. For Stan, the Jennings’ FBI agent neighbor, that meant confirming that Hinckley was a lone gunman rather than a Soviet agent. And for Elizabeth and Phillip, that means trying to make sure that the federal government doesn’t blame the Soviet Union for the assassination attempt.

Both parties are caught off guard in the task, though Stan gets a head start. Agent Amador is quizzing him on his Russian, and bribing him with jelly beans, in a nice nod to Reagan’s tastes, for right answers, when the news comes in. Phillip and Elizabeth, by contrast, are late to the country’s upset—they were secluded in a hotel for an afternoon tryst. “Thank you…For making us take the afternoon off,” Phillip tells Elizabeth. “That’s what you want to thank me for?” she asks him playfully. But once they see the news on a television in the hotel lobby, they’re all business, and the show parallels Stan and the Jennings activating their sources.

Elizabeth, motivated by her memories of Stalin’s death as a child in the Soviet Union, is convinced that a coup is underway, especially when Al Haig, then serving as Secretary of State, announces on television that he’s taking charge until Vice President Bush, who was on an airplane at the time, can land, be briefed, and assume command until Reagan is ready to return. Stan’s source believes the same thing, and tells him so, seeing Haig’s military rank rather than his diplomatic position. “Are you serious?” Stan asks her. “He’s one of your top generals and he’s announced he’s taking control,” Nina explains. “What do you call that?” And The Americans gives some support to the idea that the Soviets aren’t purely viewing the events through the lens of their own experience. In a downtown bar, a low-level Bush staffer complains about the constitutional questions posed by “Al, ‘I’m In Control Here’ Haig”‘s actions, while a similarly low-level Haig staffer insists that “It reflects the political reality.”

But Phillip’s one of the few characters who is able to parse that the American anxiety about Haig’s action stems from a different place than the Russian fears—it’s more about process, and less about the prospect of a long fall away from the American tradition. “All these years, walking these streets, living with these people, you don’t really understand these people. Haig could have ten nuclear footballs, and they wouldn’t have a coup,” Phillip tells Elizabeth. “Can you please just try to get yourself in a different way of looking at things?” She’s not having it. “I remember where I came from. Not having all these things. Having it be about something different than myself,” she spits at him. “You don’t think they’re all about lies and conspiracy like everything else? Why do you think it’s so different?” Phillip doesn’t have a really good argument for her yet, though he manages to win this round of the debate by switching the subject to the weakness of Soviet command and control, and convincing Elizabeth that they need to stop a war from happening. But his ability to answer Elizabeth’s query convincingly in the long run will be critical to resolving the tension between them, and the question of whether they defect and stay together, or whether Elizabeth stays loyal, while Phillip is pulled inexorably away from her, America as a whole his green light at the end of the dock.

And they aren’t the only couple who are having trouble with their cover, and with making assessments from underneath it. When Stan returns home, his wife is concerned less about Reagan’s shooting than with how they’re doing. “I thought we were going to get a chance to know each other again, living in the same house,” she explains. “You never talk to me. Why is it so hard?” Stan’s forced to confess that his stint underground, referred to memorably in the pilot of The Americans is still affecting him—he hasn’t been totally able to resurface. “I was living with psycho militants for too long. I don’t know, okay?” he tells her. “It just doesn’t feel like it did before.” Elizabeth may be unable to gage American politics because of the experiences of her childhood, while Stan’s increasingly unable to fit smoothly back into the American life from whence he came because of what he saw of his own country. What makes America different may be scarier than Elizabeth believes, or that Phillip has been able to see.

Contra my hope that Disney’s announced Star Wars Episode VII would draw storylines from the Expanded Universe—I’ll just have to hope for a Rogue Squadron television show, someday—it sounds like Disney’s going to start from scratch. As E Online reports, “‘It’s an original story,’ a LucasFilm source tells me. In other words, forget the Star Wars novels. Forget the graphic novels. Forget everything you think you know about what happens to Luke Skywalker. According to my sources, Episode 7 will literally be nothing you’ve ever seen or read before from the Star Wars universe.” The Guide To The Star Wars Universe stone-cold nerd in me will admit to being somewhat disappointed (though I still don’t think this means they scrap the continuity for sure—it could just mean they spin out to a different era or part of the galaxy). But I still think it’s worth thinking about what made both Star Wars and the Expanded Universe so addictive, and what could distinguish this franchise from the other ones in play in the media landscape.

One possibility, which I wrote about in Slate today, is that the franchise could jump ahead of its competitors by focusing on the female characters that have always been one of its strengths: Read more