Do you think Paige is regretting her curiosity into her
parents’ mysterious lives? This week she deals with the fallout from last
week’s revelations, grilling Elizabeth and Philip like a pro. She hasn’t
forgotten last season’s bizarre middle-of-the-night vacation to the woods and
is now probably going back over the rest of her life, looking for what might be
spycraft.
The shock has worn off and it’s sinking in for Paige just
how much of a lie her life has been. She pointedly asks Elizabeth how she can
believe anything her mother says. Cut to commercial because there can be no
answer. Philip already told her a casual lie when she asked if her parents were
really married. If this girl could only see herself, though, she would have an
answer to whether she is really a Jennings child. She’s never been as much like
her mother when she told a curious Henry to shut up and eat his breakfast.
The flip side to all these trust issues in the Jennings
household is how much the parents can trust the daughter not to rat them out.
This tension now colors all their scenes together.
I saw the beginnings of some sympathy in the end scene in
the bedroom when Paige finds out that her grandmother is dying. She knows the
cost to Elizabeth possibly never seeing her mother again before she dies. Yet
there’s a flip side to that, too: Paige probably wonders whether the espionage
will throw up a similar barrier between her and her mother when one cannot be
there for the other in a time of need.
You have to feel for the titular Anton Baklanov. People he
trusted ripped him from his homeland and his family doesn’t know if he’s alive
or dead. He writes letters to his son that the boy will never see. I have to
wonder how much of Nina’s interactions with him are genuine and how much is her
playing him to win her release.
The scene with Martha focusing on the tip of Walter Taffet’s
nose was a bit of comic relief in a tense story. As Philip says, Taffet’s job
is to make her think he knows. I think he suspects Martha planted the bug. It
would make sense as she’s the closest administrative person to Gaad and would
have the most access. Also in the comic relief department were the bored Oleg
and Tatiana imitating the beeping of the bugged mail robot. Who knew they were
such goofballs?
Is it me or have Maurice and Lisa turned the tables on
Elizabeth? They don’t know exactly who she is but they’ve figured out that
she’s after information from Northrop and are willing to trade the secrets from Lisa's workplace to save their house. It was really unexpected and exciting to
have this guy, who doesn’t seem to have his life together at all, come closer
to discovering Elizabeth’s identity than any of the government agents. Elizabeth played it cool
but I don’t expect him to survive the season. Between this guy and her
daughter, the walls between Elizabeth and her true identity are getting more
porous.
This was a quiet episode after last week’s bombshell. It’s
setting the table for the end of the season (and the show has been renewed, so
yay!). There are two more episodes of The
Americans left and I don’t know where it’s going to go next.
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