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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Yesterday at The Daily Beast, I got to dig into an idea that’s been striking me for a while: that in the age of anti-hero dramas, teenage girl characters have become almost as prevalent as middle-aged men with dark secrets who we shouldn’t root for, but do. In a look at Game of Thrones, Homeland, Mad Men, and The Americans, I explained:

Like almost every major anti-hero drama on television today, Mad Men is also a story about what it’s like to be a young girl discovering the realities of the world she’s living in. The secret of today’s prestige television is that it can all be read as young adult fiction….

In Homeland, Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), the prisoner of war who returns home after years of captivity by the terrorist Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), reconnects most easily with his daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor). She’s pulled into her father’s plan to become a suicide bomber and the CIA efforts to stop him when agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), deep in a bipolar episode, asks Dana, in desperation, to help stop him. Dana insists that she doesn’t believe he could possibly be a terrorist, but calls her father anyway. A year later, when Carrie is interrogating Brody, she tells him, “It was hearing Dana’s voice that changed your mind, wasn’t it?” Dana, whether she intended it or not, has become a full participant in the moral world of grown-ups, due to her father’s plot. And she finally reaches maturity in the second season, when she realizes that Carrie was right, though for the wrong reasons—she’s finally capable of seeing Brody independently, rather than through the haze of daughterly love…

Mad Men has always had Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka), who was a little girl for much of the series, but one with secrets of her own, including her relationship with Glenn Bishop (Marten Holden Weiner). But this year, she is growing into maturity. After Betty’s cited for reckless driving, Sally tests her mother’s limits, announcing to Henry, “Isn’t somebody going to say something? Betty got a ticket.” She may have rushed home after getting her period last season, but now Sally’s shutting the door on Betty’s face to have some privacy on the phone and asking to go to New Year’s Eve parties.

The regular presence of teenaged girls, particularly teenaged girls in juxtaposition to anti-heroes, isn’t a new development, either. The Sopranos had Meadow Soprano, Tony’s daughter, The Wire had Felicia Pearson, 24 had Kim Bauer, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer let the teenaged girl herself be at the center of the frame—and even sometimes let her be a little bit anti-heroic herself. At this point, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead are notable in part for having teenaged boys in relation to their main characters, and in giving them fewer opportunities to critically assess their parents than shows like Homeland, Mad Men, or The Americans do, and Justified and Sons of Anarchy are notable for not really featuring teenagers at all.

What’s interesting—and I think considerably unremarked on—about the rise of a teenaged girl as a staple of big, prestige, often anti-heroic dramas is that these characters function as built-in critics of the behavior of the adults who are at the ostensible centers of the shows they share. Sally Draper is one of the first people to really see the cracks in her family’s facade, whether her parents are late to pick her up from ballet practice, or failing to be on the same page as parents, with Betty shunted into the role of enforcer while Don gets to be Fun Dad. One of the things that’s made Morgan Saylor’s performance as Dana so impressive on Homeland is the way that Dana simultaneously loves her father deeply and comes to see his true flaws—not the conversion to Islam that upsets her mother so much—more quickly and clearly than anyone else in her family. On Game of Thrones, teenaged boys like Jon Snow, Robb Stark, and even to a certain extent Loras Tyrell, get sucked into pre-packaged narratives of chivalry and bravery, while it’s teenaged girls like Sansa and Arya Stark, Margaery Tyrell, and Daenerys Targaryen who see the real truth of the system in which they’re forced to live their lives, and find ways to circumvent or expand the boundaries placed upon their lives. And while in The Americans, it’s probably too early for Paige and Henry to figure out the real nature of their parents’ work and marital arrangements, their experiences with American consumerism, latchkey kid culture, and emergent sexuality are as important expressions of the show’s themes as Elizabeth and Phillip’s dalliances with sources and conversations with Claudia, their handler.

This isn’t to say that Don Draper, Tyrion Lannister, Nicholas Brody, or Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings don’t matter. But if you want to know how to judge the dark princes and princesses of prestige television drama, you might be better off keeping your eyes on the girls standing off to the side, rather than watching the throne.

This post discusses plot points from the April 3 episode of The Americans.

The Americans has been with us long enough, and debuted as a confident enough show that by its ninth episode, it has clear and distinct preoccupations and approaches. And it’s also in a place where it can pull all of them together as it did in “Safe House,” an extremely impressive episode of television that burnished Noah Emmerich’s chances for an Emmy.

There’s something fitting about the fact that this episode begins and ends with staples of American cuisine that are also examples of American excess. The Americans has made a habit of using Paige’s shopping habit, her trips to the mall, her Girl’s World magazines small ways to get at the allure and the danger of American consumerism, so it makes sense that the show would move on to the more visceral sense of taste and smell. “Can I have another piece of fried chicken, please?” Paige asks at the dinner where Phillip and Elizabeth tell their children that they’re separating. She and Henry spin off into a fantasy of fried chicken every day—or at least twice a week—a dream of delicious, deep-fried plenty, before being blindsided by another particularly American phenomenon: the prospect of their parents’ divorce. At the Beeman’s party, Elizabeth asks “Paige, do you want a hamburger?” Her daughter’s shrugged rejection is a refusal to participate not just in the meal, but in the allusion that everyone is all right. And when Stan tells Vlad “Nothing beats American fast food. It’s probably full of all kinds of nasty shit that will kill you, but it sure tastes good,” before shooting him in the head, he does so with a certain amount of pride in American lethality and American toughness, the ability to down a thousand hamburgers and still be fast enough to carry out an execution.

It’s also characteristic of the show, which has been an exercise in using geopolitics to illuminate intimate politics, to have a war between spies grow out of jealousy between men. Phillip is indulging himself, taking the affection that he can’t get from Elizabeth from Martha instead. “Clark, I’m in love with you. I’ve waited my whole life for you. And I would do anything for you,” Martha tells him. “Anything. All you have to do is ask.” All she wants, then, is for him to “stay with me. Please? Just this once?” And in giving her the comfort of him sleeping in her bed, Phillip runs smack into Chris Amador.

It’s possible that Chris is keeping an eye on Martha because her reaction to him interrupting her at the file cabinet made him suspicious. But it seems more likely that he’s jealous of her high-heeled shoes, her sense of renewed vitality, the sense that it’s the result of some guy other than him. “You’re just a guy who spent a night with a girl,” Chris spits at Phillip, when he tries to imply that he’s no one, rather than going for the spy angle. And after Phillip stabs him in self-defense, the misunderstandings escalate in precise accordance with the anxieties of the people who make the mistakes. Stan, terrified after his experiences underground, gets rough with Nina, asking her “Who put the finger on Amador? My partner.” Amador assumes that Arkady has been taken because he can’t believe that the FBI would step wrong, though as it turns out, and in keeping with the episode’s fast-food frame, Arkady’s been injured in a freak accident that keeps him from his regular run in the park. “Burnt it on a potato,” he tells Vlad. “It exploded in the microwave. They want to graft my skin. American technology.” Elizabeth, the paranoid interrogator of American culture, assumes that Amador is working them, rather than grasping for one triumph after death. “He fingers the head of Directorate S to protect a first tour officer?” she asks Phillip, certain there must be some bigger plan at work.
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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 points from the March 13 episode of The Americans.

Last week, I posited that on The Americans, the working definition of marriage is that “the person you love is the person whose secrets you keep.” The show seemed to double down on that theme this week, showing what happens to marriages, the real one between Sandra and Stan, and the one between Elizabeth and Phillip, which Elizabeth wants to become real, when one partner in each relationship carries a secret he can’t share with his wife.

The possibility of Irina has been there since the early episodes of The Americans, when we watched Phillip crumple up a photograph of her and commit with a bright-eyed enthusiasm meant to transmute grief into joy to getting to know Elizabeth. I’m torn on the idea that the KGB would have taken the risk of pairing the two of them for the assignment, unless either the organization doesn’t know about their romance, which seems unlikely, or it needs to use it. If much of The Americans has been concerned with Phillip’s reaction to the news that his wife is a survivor of sexual violence and his difficulty dealing with the fact that he can’t protect her from it happening again, this episode reversed that dynamic. Phillip may be the only person Irina could handle doing something tremendously ugly but necessary to her, beating her face and then having sex with her to leave evidence that would make it plausible that she’d been raped after she was unable to seduce the Polish dissident who was their target. Trusting someone to hurt you without going so far as to render the pain, emotional or physical, unbearable, is the flip side of trusting someone to protect you.

And the assignment leaves Phillip with two secrets. First, he’s had sex with Irina again, though I think it’s an open question whether or not the context of it means Phillip is telling Elizabeth the truth when he insisted that “Nothing happened.” And second, Irina has raised the possibility that she and Phillip have a son. I’m not sure whether I believe it’s true that they have a child. Irina’s decision to go off the grid would have terrible consequences for her son, if only likely forestalling his military career, once her KGB handlers realize that she’s given them the slip. And when Phillip asks if it’s true they have a child, Irina’s bitter response that “Only duty and honor are real, isn’t that what we were told?” is ambiguous. Maybe she means the boy doesn’t exist. Maybe she means that while Phillip got her pregnant, she can’t really think of her son as his child. Maybe the idea of him is a test for Phillip, to see if he’s still loyal to Elizabeth after their shared ideal. But in any case, he’s an unresolved question, and it’s difficult for me to imagine Phillip exorcising the possibility of another child of his from his mind, much in the same way he never really forgot Irina. What consequences that shard of an idea has for his ability to commit to Elizabeth remains to be seen.

Elizabeth doesn’t know about Phillip’s newly-acquired secrets, but back in Washington, as she, Henry, and Paige join the Beemans for dinner, Sandra Beeman confesses that knowing Stan has secrets is eating at their marriage. “I miss talking,” she confides in Elizabeth. “I mean, I understand. The crazy hours. National security, it’s not like you can turn it on and off.” When Elizabeth commiserates in the understatement of the year that “Marriage is hard,” Sandra lays out her philosophy of building a family: “Well, it’s not for sissies. That’s for sure. But at the end of the day, you just choose to keep going or you don’t…we’ve been married for 20 years. That’s a lifetime. It has to count for something.”
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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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