“You can’t choose your neighbors,” Elizabeth tells Tim when
the pastor remarks on the serendipity of a KGB family having dinner with an FBI
agent. The Jenningses didn’t choose Stan as a neighbor and didn’t even choose
to have him over for dinner (thanks, Henry) but everybody got through the
dinner, just as the viewers got through a tense but amusing scene, with Philip
and Elizabeth yet again becoming agonizingly close to having their cover blown.
It was another scene this season that played like a satire of
a sitcom scene. For as grim as season four has been, it’s also showing more of
a sense of humor. I liked the joke of Stan referring to the roast in Alice’s oven
as she stood next to pregnant Keri Russell, holding a big wooden salad bowl to
obscure her stomach.
Elizabeth simultaneously seems to be working Tim and trying
to use him as a confidant. She’ll have more opportunity to see him with Paige
working at the food pantry. (It looks like she found “more shit to volunteer
for at the goddamn church” like her mother and her bulging forehead vein
requested.) She is flailing after losing Young-Hee as a friend and desperately
needs somebody to talk to.
Elizabeth also didn’t technically choose Young-Hee as an
asset but did make the choice to be her friend. Now the loss of that friend is
tearing her apart. It’s her time to break down, as Philip did last season.
There’s another parallel here, with Alice falsely accusing the Jenningses of
kidnapping (which Elizabeth sees as a positive after it resolved peacefully)
and Elizabeth falsely accusing Don, which is nothing but negative.
The entire plot of Patty faking a pregnancy and suicide,
followed by a disguised Philip and Gabriel demanding funeral money, made my
stomach turn. It’s one of the cruelest things they’ve ever done, made worse by
the fact that Don seems like a decent guy, who barely batted an eyelash when
Philip asked for the money. I mean, Elizabeth once dropped a car on a guy but
we didn’t get to know him like we did with the Seongs. Now Young-Hee may never
know what happened to her friend (I wonder if he’d tell his wife) and Don has
to live with the unbearable false guilt of cheating on his wife and causing the
suicide of the mother of his child.
In the end, nobody gets the access codes to level four —
just some crap from a 5.25-inch floppy disk, making this an even sicker joke.
All for nothing.
Stan is also at one of his lowest points after the death of
Gaad. “They’re animals,” he tells Philip about the KGB. “You have no idea. They
do things you cannot imagine.” Oh, Philip can imagine both the hurt he causes
deliberately and the hurt he causes inadvertently, as he is perhaps indirectly responsible
for Gaad’s death by revealing his whereabouts in Thailand.
Gaad’s death is the latest awful thing for Stan, after the
death of Amador. He snapped and killed a Soviet after his partner died but this
time, Stan doesn’t want Oleg’s death on his conscience and instead of a
gunshot, he offers a parting handshake. Still, Stan is getting closer to
unraveling several mysteries. The FBI also gets tipped off (with the Mail Robot
making a triumphant reappearance in the background — YAAAAY!) to the death of
Betty at the machine repair shop. It’s fitting that the death of this woman,
coming in one of my all-time favorite scenes in The Americans, may come back to haunt the spies. She seemed so
prophetic then.
Paige gets to the real truth at the end of the episode when
she witnesses her mother kill a mugger. Sure, it was self-defense, but
Elizabeth could have just disarmed the guy. Instead, she reflexively goes
Sovietbot and lets him bleed out. There’s no telling how badly Paige will react
to the revelation that her mother was lying that she never killed anybody (the
efficiency of the death was not the act of someone unpracticed). And of course,
the other guy got a good look at them both and got away.
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