The Americans S5 E12: The World Council of Churches

Omens of death were hard to miss this week on The Americans. Oleg has a meaningful conversation with his father, asks his mother about the camps and shares a meaningful look, then goes walking on a bridge. I thought he was going to jump off, like I thought he would jump off the roof he was on a few weeks ago. Paige starts doing something with a rope in the garage and for a second, I thought she was going to hang herself, but that would be too dark, even for this show.

Speaking of dark, we come to Tuan’s plan to get Pasha to slit his wrists (just a little slitting, not like hitting an artery or anything) so the family will move back to the USSR. This is siiiiiiick and the Soviets need to be held accountable for it. Elizabeth and Philip sat by and did nothing to stop this teenager from being bullied, even when his mother showed her anguish over it. Now Tuan actually instructs the kid to slit his wrists. These people have done terrible things but this seems different since it’s a child.

And for what? What great victory will they win, what great danger will they avert, if this family returns home? It’s not going to be worth the human toll, and that’s the point.

That was quite a suspenseful walk down the sidewalk to the Morozovs’ house, with the three spies trying hard to walk briskly without running to try to prevent a teen suicide. At least the Jenningses have enough common sense and morality to realize how wrong this mission can go and how horrifying this plan is. Meanwhile, someone is watching the spies from the street, and next week’s episode preview looks especially dire.

Oleg has kept the grocer woman out of prison but it sure looks like the FSB is wise to his treason. He has his father on his side to fight, but will it be enough if Oleg has to pay a price for tipping off the FBI about the lassa virus? “Now I can crush people if I have to,” Igor tells his son. “I’ll crush them for you. Not just because you’re my son. But because you’re good.” Oleg did something for the greater good but may still go to jail or pay a terrible price for it.

Pastor Tim ships out to Belize or wherever, with the Center arranging a new job at the World Council of Churches. Paige, thoroughly disillusioned by the diary, unburdens herself of her crucifix necklace by (a little melodramatically) throwing it in the trash. Elizabeth puts it back on her neck (she could have at least wiped it off), and tells her daughter, “You have to wear it until he’s gone.” The charade isn’t going to end quite yet for her.

Tim actually has some advice for whether the Jennings family should pick up and move to the Soviet Union: “You can’t predict what a person’s life will be like and you can’t deny them the challenges that will shape them.” Claudia has some harsher advice that the family probably shouldn't tell Henry they’re moving until he steps off the plane in Moscow.

This is an enormously stupid idea. Henry is just starting to strike out on his own with a solid plan to attend boarding school, and the parents would basically kidnap him to a strange country. Paige is already depressed and disillusioned and moving her may shove her off a cliff like Pasha’s. Plus, when they get home, Elizabeth and Philip will find the USSR is a broken, desperate, hungry place. The move would destroy their family.

They can leave the spy game but they can’t go home. After decades, their family is just too tied to their adopted homeland. For better or for worse, they’re all Americans now.

Pull up to the bumper, baby

Like many people, I have a commute that is Kafkaesque in its length and brutality. It’s stop and go for most of the 25 miles with no viable back roads. So I have a lot of time to think and I have come up with a way to ease the commute for everyone.

When stuck in a long line of traffic, some drivers seem to leave very long following distances between their cars and the cars ahead. When traffic begins to move, they will hang back and then start moving gradually and slowly. I think this only increases traffic and would like to see people start driving immediately when the way clears, leaving a normal following distance (like under half a mile).

I know why people do this. You’re clearly not going anywhere so what does it matter if you react right away to an opening ahead of you? You’re just going to stop at the red light.

This works well if you’re looking ahead of you. Do drivers every look behind? Do they see how traffic is stacking up behind them, making other drivers miss lights and causing more traffic? That’s not the result of some irresistible force like gravity. That’s the result of you not keeping up with the flow of traffic.

This is what I call the Baltimore Pike Effect. Drivers are so used to traffic on Baltimore Pike that people drive like 25 mph, regardless of the actual traffic, because they just know they won’t get to the speed limit of 40. It’s like everyone is sighing resignedly because what’s the point in trying? After all, that green light will be red. But if people just tried a little harder, maybe they could do 40 (I’ve found you can do 40 if you’re awake on this road). There are a lot of stretches like that on my commute on 202 where there’s no earthly reason to drive so slowly. Maybe everyone is just too busy doing the Serenity Prayer in needlepoint on pillows just to pull up a little quicker, and I’m sorry, but I drive two hours every day and I’m not suffering any fools.

Just. Get. On it. It’s not hard.

I once read a book a traffic engineer about traffic (called Traffic) that said drivers aren’t caught in traffic but they are traffic. So maybe I’m wrong but I just think we would all be better off if everyone got on the ball and pulled up promptly when traffic cleared ahead of them. Rush hour is a delicate dance that involves all of us being competent and then we can all get home quicker.

The Americans S5 E11: Dyatkovo

After a long stretch of quiet tension, the Jenningses exploded into violence this week, and it looks like it’s made Elizabeth snap.

“I want to get out of here,” Elizabeth tells Philip, the one who usually wants to escape. We should just go. I mean it. Let’s go home.” Philip is no longer willing to pull that trigger and Elizabeth may not be far behind him.

After that shocking admission from the more committed half of the couple, a brutal fade to black. This follows the excruciating murder of a Russian woman who helped the Nazis execute her fellow Russians after World War II. Philip can’t bring himself to shoot Natalie/Anna so a furious Elizabeth takes charge. She pointedly shoots the woman’s innocent husband so she has to watch him die first. The show makes us feel every inch of the horror of the murder, lingering on this couple’s story—Natalie’s guilt and remorse, and her husband’s loyalty. They beg for their lives and their deaths don’t sit easily, with real questions remaining of how much the woman’s youth and coercion mitigate her actions and how much she has changed. The relative quiet in the previous few episodes really sets up the horror of this one.

Elizabeth is tearful and furious at the woman, and in a rare slip, speaks Russian in the field (which guarantees the woman must die since she knows too much). “You’re a monster,” Elizabeth tells her, an echo of Pastor Tim’s diary calling the Jenningses monstrous. Elizabeth and Philip are parallels with Natalie and John. Natalie was indoctrinated into helping the Nazis at a young age under duress, while Elizabeth got indoctrinated into Soviet ideology. No matter how far either couple may run, the past will catch up. Maybe these two saw the older couple as their future.

The arguments on behalf of the USSR are increasingly falling apart. Oleg discovers that corruption goes deep in his country. Claudia confirms that the Soviets did weaponize the lassa in Afghanistan. Now it’s known as Variant V, named for Vitaly, William’s real name. After all those years of service, his memorial is a horrible instrument of death.

All this is piling up to the point where the Jenningses, never closer to each other and never seeing more eye to eye, want to get out.

In the episode’s one lighter scene, Stan takes Henry on a tour of the FBI, noting that he has to stay so on guard that he’d have to treat the kid like a spy. They walk past the eavesdrop-proof vault and see the mail robot (yay!). “It’s been more trouble than it’s worth,” Stan says of the machine, and a dead woman named Betty would agree.

Philip resignedly agrees that Henry can go away to the boarding school, perhaps knowing that the kid has to get far away from the toxicity of the family. This raises some questions for me: When Elizabeth wants to get out, what does she mean? Does she want to retire and still live in the US? Does she want to go to Russia and somehow bring the kids along? Does she want to defect?

Who is Mantis?

God, Mantis. I thought it was pretty mean in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 when Drax was making fun of her looks and generally being terrible to her. Mantis wasn’t bad in the movie but in the comic, something about her always annoyed me.

Mantis first appeared in the Avengers comics of the ‘70s. In contrast with the movies, she’s not an alien. The daughter of criminal Libra (of the Zodiac gang), she is a young woman raised in Vietnam among an alien Kree sect. She is highly skilled at physical fighting and has limited empathic powers. She is very humble and refers to herself as “this one” instead of “I.”

The big storyline for Mantis was Celestial Madonna, involving the search for the woman who would mate with an alien Cotati to birth the Celestial Messiah. What bothered me about this was the other two candidates for Celestial Madonna were the Scarlet Witch and Moondragon, who I thought were much more interesting. The Scarlet Witch is a powerful reality warper, longtime Avenger and daughter of Magneto. Moondragon is an arrogant telepath who has been a hero and anti-hero, the Earth-born daughter of Drax who was raised on the moon Titan.

Then Mantis is just kind of—eh. We keep hearing about how she’s the perfect woman and what not but the comics more told us this than showed us. She just didn’t appeal to me. One amusing wrinkle to her story was that she was flirting with the Vision, which endlessly pissed off the Scarlet Witch. Celestial Madonna wasn’t all that bad a story, since it offered the first in-depth look at the Vision’s origin, and some other stuff. But the great promise of Mantis as a character never really did it for me. (They later retconned that the Scarlet Witch had much more potential for power and was more important to the multiverse than Mantis.)

The whole story ended with the time lord Immortus performing a double wedding: the Vision married the Scarlet Witch and Mantis married the Swordsman, a recently deceased Avenger whose body was reanimated by an alien Cotati. In conclusion, The Seventies.

The Americans S5 E10: Darkroom

I wonder where Mikhail and Nadezhda will be going for their honeymoon? Will they be using DuPont Circle Travel to plan the getaway?

The subterranean wedding was one of the rare romantic moments in The Americans. Under their real names, the two spies get married in Russian by a real Russian Orthodox priest in a gorgeous ceremony. They’ve committed to one another in ways most married couples don’t but this is the wedding their fake/real marriage never had. Philip doesn’t bat an eye when the priest asks if he’s committed himself to anyone else. It’s a beautifully sentimental moment between two characters who can finally be themselves.

As romantic as that wedding was, with the symbolic crown and all the other trappings, there was a definite gothic darkness to it, a hint of Romeo and Juliet getting secretly married before their deaths. After all, it was an underground covert wedding in an abandoned warehouse. With all the foreboding and setup of this season, was this the one happy moment before the end?

Immediately after the warm darkness of the wedding, the Jenningses looked like they’d descended into hell in the darkroom scene. Paige’s photos of Pastor Tim’s diary were displayed in devilish red for the parents to see, like an indictment: “Are they monsters? I don’t know but what they did to their daughter I’d have to call monstrous.” Wow.

Well, the good pastor may have a point. Their daughter is clearly in crisis, sleeping in the closet, waxing the floor in shock, and dealing with things no teenager should have to face, regardless of whether she asked to hear the truth. This was a slap in the face on par with Betty in the machine shop telling Elizabeth that what they do is evil.

But it’s very complicated and I’m trying to figure it out. Did Paige reveal these diary pages so publically just to throw in her parents’ faces how damaging their actions have been? This is a double-edged sword because she is confronting her parents’ actions and also becoming disillusioned by Tim’s private judgments of her. “She’s starting to see him for who he is,” Elizabeth says about her daughter and Tim, but those photographed diary pages also mean she may see her parents for who they are. There’s no easy way out of this and now the whole family is in very deep.

However, we also see Elizabeth and Philip being more open and considerate in their own way. Two seasons ago, they would have gotten Tim a job offer without even telling Paige. Now they consult with her, giving her a choice.

In the first Rezidentura scene of season five, Tatiana returns, trying to get Evgheniya to return home. I missed Tatiana. She always seemed like she was secretly running the USSR and could destroy you with a thought. Something bad will definitely happen with Pasha and I worry that it will be suicide after being harassed by kids in school.

The slow burn continues.

There's always some dimwit

up ahead at the front of the line, creating traffic by sheer force of their breezy, unhurried incompetence. “We’ll get the next one,” they chirp as the light turns red while they’re lost on their phone or in a wasteland of thought. “We’ll get there,” they say to any suggestion that just maybe they could do better than they have been.

The dimwit calmly puts change back in a wallet, carefully arranging each dollar, blissfully unaware of the line piling behind. The dimwit assigned to help you knows you are in a hurry but just cannot muster the major act of will required to hurry along just a little.

There’s always some dimwit holding me up. I just know it. I can almost see them in my mind’s eye: with that smile that says, “If you could put an ear next to my head, you would hear the roar of the ocean.”

The Americans S5 E9: IHOP

The ghosts of the recent past came out this week on The Americans. Kimmy, glanders, Gabriel, Oleg’s brother and the woman his mother was, Gaad, and Martha (!!!) made return appearances in one form or another to haunt the cast.

Oh God, poor Martha. She’s in a very depressing apartment, with laundry hanging to dry over her bed, cooking some onions or something for dinner (she says it’s a snack but that seems like a way to save some dignity). Gabriel shows up just to check on her. “Your life will get better when your Russian improves,” he tells her.

Really? Will Martha somehow be able to magically transcend the hunger and dire economic straits that so many Russians found themselves in? Will she make some friends? Will she finally get the one thing she really wants: Contact with her family?

Martha is buying none of it. She kicks Gabriel out and tells him she understands everything now. I don’t know if these two are done on the show or not but this was a terribly sad coda for both.

On the other end of the class spectrum is the Burov household, which is just as tied to the past. Oleg’s father reflects on how his wife changed after she came back from the camp, offering the haunting observation, “I never saw her again, the girl I knew.”

Oleg goes to prison to confront the guy arrested from the food distribution scam, seeming to tell him to surrender and that everything is expendable. His brother “was an officer. Now he’s a picture on the wall.” I think something inside Oleg broke this episode. In the prison, he had the strangest expression of a man who has sadly surrendered to the inevitable.

Oleg is probably going to be targeted by a second attempt at blackmail, as Stan tells Linh Gaad the FBI wants him to get Oleg as revenge for Frank’s murder. He tells the widow some meant-to-be-comforting thing about Gaad not wanting revenge but she isn’t having it. Her husband would want revenge, she says, and she’s absolutely right. Did Stan meet Gaad? If he was so pissed off about the Russians recruiting his secretary, imagine how pissed he be about his pointless death.

All that skeevy fraternizing with Kimmy finally pays off. Philip bakes her a cake for her 17^th (eww) birthday and gets information that the glanders may have turned up in Afghanistan. This will further disillusion the Jenningses, since the USSR was not honest with them about what they’re using the biological weapon for.

While his parents were off pretending to be flight attendants and having weekly dates with high school kids, Henry is making something of himself in a very American way: getting into a boarding school via scholarship. Elizabeth and Philip may as well let him go; it’s not like they’ve been having too many family dinners with him anyway. With Henry gone, this would remove the last impediment toward just talking at full volume about their missions at home. (This was the first episode in a long time not to feature Paige.) I think this Henry thing could go several ways. It could be a way for the show to write him out completely or The Americans could be winding up to do something big and poignant with his alienation.

Elizabeth and Philip are also having a dilemma with their fake son Tuan, who has been hanging out in an IHOP in Harrisburg (it’s OK but it’s no Benningan’s). The scenes with Elizabeth searching his house and then the confrontation were tense and scary. Does Tuan’s brother really have leukemia or is there something more nefarious going on?

“Maybe Tuan wants to be pulled out of this shit and start over,” Phillip says.

“That’s not who he is,” Elizabeth says, with the camera lingering just long enough on Philip’s face to show their conversation could easily apply to him.

Back to the Drawing Board

Nope. Last week we found out that we are no longer in the running to adopt the two brothers we had wanted to parent. Now it’s back to the drawing board, which is everyone’s favorite place to be in the adoption process. There weren’t any major problems or anything on our side that took us out of the running and DFS said it was a tough decision. DFS just found parents who were a better match for these kids, and obviously that’s priority. There are other children out there and we’ll just need to start again.

What upsets me is that we waited two months of back and forth just to get to “no.” Waiting is part of this game and I understand that the process needs to be slow to make sure we are addressing the children’s needs as best as possible. It doesn’t make this any less frustrating.

Logically, I know I shouldn’t take this personally, but adoption/parenting is pretty much the most personal thing there is. In this situation, it’s hard not to feel like you’ve failed something before it even started. So much of this process seems to hit at the heart of who you are as a person. You ask so many big questions. What have you done with your life to this point to prepare you for parenthood? What have you not done that might impede you? What special needs can you handle in children? Which kids do you accept and which do you reject? Exactly how wide can you open your heart?

Sometimes you have to compartmentalize for your sanity, so you can pick up and start again. It can be easy at times to keep a positive attitude but then the clouds shift and it looks darker. Sometimes I feel like it doesn’t matter if I take this personally or not because the end result of this setback is the same: No kids. And I’m staring down 43.

I have a hard time seeing the bright side in general but I’m trying to do so here, in my own way (I never bought that Hallmark Horseshit like “Everything happens for a reason”). I tell myself this is a setback and a delay but we’ve only been approved to parent for seven months. It’s not as if we’ve been rejected over and over.

Plenty of people know what this is like. Plenty of parents, adoptive or biological, probably felt, before kids came along, like it would never happen. It did happen for a lot of those people so I’m trying to have some hope, no matter how high that mountain seems sometimes.

After all, what choice is there but to have hope? With hope, there’s at least a chance that you’ll be happy, and if you give up, there’s none. I am trying to steel myself for the challenges ahead, especially since the real challenges begin after we actually become parents.