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?
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