The Americans S6 E9: Jennings, Elizabeth

At the end, the Jennings family will have nothing left but one another. Philip barely escapes the FBI, sends a code red message to Elizabeth, and she grabs her go bag and prepares to exfiltrate her family.

Elizabeth has done the right thing, refusing to kill Nesterenko. She’s spurred on by the memory of the weirdest car/horse accident ever, where she refused to help a dying man so as not to blow the mission as a young girl, but her handler reminds her of the greater good, and not to leave a comrade behind. But now she really does have nothing. “What’s left for you? Your house? Philip? Your American kids?” Claudia calmly taunts her. This sounds like a pretty good life to an actual American, but with the way Elizabeth wavers, she is devastated. The one thing Elizabeth didn’t want was to become an American.

Now that the jig is up, she also may not have a native Russia to return to. Claudia warns her the Centre will collapse once the party finds out about the botched coup against Gorbachev. Elizabeth has killed a comrade and that will leave her outside the protection of the USSR. Her broad-daylight assassination of a disguised Tatiana was badass. We had to rewind to watch it again. Bad. Ass.   

At home, during yet another confrontation over that kitchen island, Elizabeth also loses the trust of her daughter. Paige confronts her mother about sleeping with Jackson, who says she ruined his life. Paige’s eyes are open to the nature of her mom’s work, at least sexually (she hasn’t yet learned about the really gruesome things Elizabeth has done, like drop a car on a guy).

In a thrilling moment, Paige calls out her mother’s hypocrisy about using sex for work: “Does dad know he married a whore?” Our jaws dropped at home.

In a sense, it was an earned moment for Paige after being subjected to so many lectures from mom. (There was some sexism in the whore charge, since she doesn’t consider that Philip slept around as much as Elizabeth did.) But now she’s gone and done it: Elizabeth’s Bulging Forehead Vein of Doom comes out. “What was sex” in the grand scheme of serving their country. “Nobody cared, including your father.”

Elizabeth feels betrayed by Claudia’s lies, saying, “If you knew me, you’d know never to lie to me.” (The last time Claudia lied, Elizabeth bashed her face in and waterboarded her.) At home, she lies to her daughter, and Paige tells her, “If you lie to me now, after everything, I will never forgive you.”

Oleg trades on his long almost-friendship with Stan to try to get him to send a coded message back to Moscow. The two sit in a windowless cell, which Oleg is prepared to spend the rest of his life in. Poor Oleg, one of the few who has tried to do the right thing in this show and answer to a morality higher than country. When the FBI nabbed him on the street, he accepted his fate in such a resigned way. He’ll probably never see his family again, another character who has lost everything.

Stan knows his neighbors are spies, even though he doesn’t have any evidence yet. A search of “Jennings, Elizabeth” on the computer turns up nothing. (Or is it suspicious that there’s no information on her, like she sprung up out of nowhere?) Pastor Tim won’t rat out the Jennings family, presumably since he wants to protect Paige. Stan sounds crazy to Adherholt when he airs his suspicions.

But a few catty Russian Orthodox priests put the FBI on the trail of Philip, who evades capture in a thrilling moment. The jig is up, and the family has no ideology left, nothing left but one another.

I’m not ready for The Americans to end.

The Real Tide Pod Challenge

Tide makes those liquid detergent pods that look like candy wrapped up in bright colors. This has caused some hand-wringing over the last few years since kids could mistake the pods for candy, eat them and die.

Procter and Gamble has taken a few steps in recent years toward making this product safer so parents won’t need to call poison control. These steps include making the packaging bitter so kids won’t bite into them, making the packaging opaque, child safety warnings and all other kids of safeguards. I don’t know whether or not it’s working but for any parents who are nervous that their kids will eat a Tide pod, I have a foolproof solution:

Don’t buy them.

The easiest way for your child not to be poisoned by Tide pods is not to buy Tide pods. I realize the actual easiest way would be for Procter and Gamble to stop making them, but since stopping the march of capitalism isn’t going to happen, take matters into your hands and stop buying them.

You don’t have to buy Tide pods. There are other forms of Tide that will not tempt kids to consume them. Like, nobody will take a swig out of the big bottle expecting a sweet treat, and nobody will eat the powder. There are also other brands of detergent that don’t look like Easter treats.

I buy regular liquid Tide in a smaller size because larger sizes won’t fit upright in the cabinet in our laundry room. But if there were a documented risk that our 9-year-old would drink the small size bottle, I think I’d probably use my head and buy something else.

What, do you have some special washer that only works with Tide pods and you’re still nervous about the kids getting into your stash of surfactants? No? Then stop buying it, moron, and you won’t have to worry about any of this. Now I just saved a bunch of societal hand-wringing about the easiest way to prevent something that is easily preventable. It appears the real Tide pod challenge, now that there is a well-known risk of poisoning, is using your head.

The Americans S6 E8: The Summit

After six seasons of being a Sovietbot, Elizabeth Jennings begins to crack. She is betrayed at home and at work. First Philip admits that he spied on her on behalf of Oleg and the USSR moderates. The couple has been through betrayals before but this is the worst because it undermines not only a marriage but undermines Elizabeth’s life’s work. He tells her he wants her to think for herself, not just doing what the Center tells her, and be a human being. She balks but this plants a seed, and it plays across Keri Russell’s face for the entire hour.

Then Claudia admits that Elizabeth’s motherland has been lying to her. The Centre wants to kill and then frame Nesterenko, a moderate Soviet influence, so the hardliners can depose Gorbachev. Elizabeth knows this man is not a traitor and refuses to kill him, unwilling to set in motion something that, in the show, would have changed world history.

The old Elizabeth would have killed Jackson, her young informant at the State Department, after he discovers the bug she planted. Instead, she hesitates and lets him live in an act of mercy. (There was a mini-theme in this show about the person you don’t notice who notices more than you think. Jackson seems like a patsy but finds the bug. Stavos has known for years that something was going on in the back room of the travel agency, but never called the police.)

In a brutal act of mercy, Elizabeth euthanizes Erica. It’s a dark, sick joke that the artist chokes on her paint brush, throwing up bile like green paint, but there is some kindness in the way the disguised nurse kisses the sick woman on the forehead. It’s also a sacrifice since it ends Elizabeth’s chance at bugging Erica’s husband.

What does Elizabeth see in the painting she inherits? It’s a woman in pain and doubt (and she reminds me of Oleg’s mother). I think she sees that Erica is gone but will pass on something that will last forever. What will Elizabeth pass on? We know her work will be for nothing in a few years. She hesitates, but in the end burns the painting, taking no chances (what a gorgeous image of smoke drifting over the smoky face).

It's a very Americans-type irony that Elizabeth would rebel against the Soviet Union just a little too late, after Stan is finally onto her. After last week’s hushed suspicion, they pulled back a little this week, but there was time for Stan to pull on an old thread—Gregory—visiting one of the man’s friends at a Roy Rogers. I’m assuming this was the mysterious Roy Rogers in Franconia from a few seasons back? The man tells her Gregory’s girlfriend had hair like a Vidal Sassoon ad and smoked like a chimney.

With two episodes left, there are a few threads left dangling. One, Stan is very close to finally understanding who his neighbors are. Two, Elizabeth is going to meet with Oleg and place herself in danger. Three, Philip is going to meet with Father Andrei and place himself in danger. Four, is Renee actually a spy or illegal or what? She’s finally landed that desk job at the FBI. I’m still not sure how this will all end.

Whither Thomas Markle?

Is he going? Will Meghan Markle’s dad go to her wedding?! Will he walk her down the aisle?!? Will he?!?!? WIIIIIILL HEEEEEE?!?!?!??!!!!1!!!!

The world waits to know this information, and I am certainly also waiting with bated breath. Whither Thomas Markle? I woke up yesterday to have my birthday nearly ruined by the news that Meghan, the future Mrs. Prince Harry, had not yet spoken to her father, who had decided not to go to the wedding. But on the other hand, I have been heartened by the fact that Good Morning America has for the last two days led the half-hour with an extensive report on this made me assume that absolutely nothing else newsworthy was going on in the world, and that we had perhaps achieved world peace.

I was shattered when I saw those staged photos of Markle Père getting ready for the Windsor nuptials. How … how could he?! He staged photos and sold them to a common tabloid like a commoner? What a profound disgrace. This is the most embarrassing thing to beset Britain since Neville Chamberlain declared “peace in our time.” Staging tabloid photos for money before a Royal Wedding of the sixth in line to the throne simply isn’t done. One doesn’t do it.

I will go to a shop on High Street and buy some pearls just so I can have something to clutch. My eyes will widen in horror and I will drop my monocle into my highball and collapse onto my fainting couch.

And God knows what the Queen will do if Markle dares show his face at Windsor Chapel. I imagine she will suffocate him with her ermine or impale him with her Royal Crown. So I just don’t think he’ll have the heart to show up for the wedding. Think of the disgrace it would visit upon him and the next seven generations of his descendants.

But I could be wrong: Thomas Markle could show his devalued face under that vaulted ceiling and walk his daughter down to the Archbishop of Cantergloucesterburyshire and give her away to the Mountbatten-Windsors. So I’ll be watching starting at 4 a.m. Saturday, with fascinator on head and Princess Diana commemorative plate on lap. It is very important to me whether some British couple’s wedding goes according to plan.

Period

At my job, the first thing I do when I edit is formatting. Concentrating on the look of the article first standardizes its appearance and removes distraction, making it easier to then concentrate on the content. If the author has skipped two spaces after a period, the first thing I do with that article is delete one space after every period, like a factory worker picking out imperfections on an assembly line.

There is a study in Attention, Perception and Psychophysics noting that leaving two spaces after a period helps with reading comprehension, allowing the eye to move faster over text, but I’m not buying it. It should be one space after a period. The new study may have attacked this question from a scientific viewpoint but I will argue it from an aesthetic viewpoint. Leaving two spaces just looks ugly. When I see two spaces, it just looks distracting to me, like holes in a T-shirt.

The whole reason people used two spaces in the first place was because of typewriters. With typewriters, each letter fit in a slot of equal size. Since “w” took up all that slot, there was less space around it than the slot around the letter “l.” The spaces around letters were uneven by default, so two spaces after a period stood out and let people know that was the end of the sentence. I think this is why so many people use two spaces: they learned on typewriters or learned from someone who learned on typewriters. It’s a style that seems as outdated to me as using a slide rule. In proportional fonts, which we’ve had for the last 40 years or so, we don’t have that problem, since the letters bump right up against one another. So we don’t need that extra space.

The study notes that reading comprehension was not affected by punctuation spacing but participants’ eye movement suggested that two spaces after a period facilitated their initial processing of the text. The effect in the study seems small to me, and it’s not as if having one space after a period has a huge negative effect on reading comprehension or speed, so why use two spaces if they look ugly on the page?

There is a big flaw in this study in that researchers used Courier New, a typewriter font that was designed for two spaces after a period, so of course two spaces would be more helpful. But few people outside the government use this font, so I think it would be fairer to conduct a test in a modern font. Amusingly, the online and PDF versions of the study used one space after every period.

Keep in mind that this is just one study in favor of two spaces after a period. On the other side, we have people like me, who have worked for over 20 years in publishing and know what is readable on the page. We also have publishers, the great majority of which have decided one space after a period is the way to go. Find a professionally published book or magazine or something online that uses two spaces after a period. Outside of the government (which uses typewriter fonts) and some academic materials, you won’t find much.

There must be a reason for that and I think the fact that an overwhelming majority of professionally published materials use one space after a period should overrule what people learned in keyboarding class in 1990 and overrule the results of one study. 

By the way, if you read anything about this study and the headline is some variation of “Science proves it,” it means the author has no idea how to write about a scientific study.

The Americans S6 E7: Harvest

It was always a pretty thin fiction that running a travel agency would keep the Jennings parents at work in the middle of the night, or running off at the spur of the moment to solve some never-ending hotel booking emergency. What could possibly be so important to have these travel agents act like doctors on call? Paige saw through it years ago, but most other people bought the excuses, including Stan.

It’s just too much of a coincidence that Philip is following Elizabeth to another city on Thanksgiving Day to solve another vague emergency, so after all these years of seeing them get home at 3 or 4 a.m. from work, Stan has begun to doubt. Nothing Philip tells him is a lie—he really is helping his wife with a difficult client and the business really is going under—but it’s still a huge lie of omission, and I don’t think Philip’s sadness is an act. He really does hate lying to his best friend.

After all these years of mostly being sidelined, Henry is the impetus for Stan suspecting that his neighbors are something more nefarious than harried travel agents. Showing his memory is powerful, Stan gently works the teenager about ancient show history like the time when the Jennings family went to take care of a sick aunt and then Elizabeth was gone.

Stan gets so close. He knows where to look in the basement, and pokes around the electrical panel, but doesn’t find the opening to discover the cache of fake passports. I loved the way his eyes moved over the happy Jennings photographs, a detail this drama has never really shown us before. In FBI meetings, other ancient strands come together in Stan’s mind, like the wife of the guy abducted from the street way back when. If someone can produce sketches that look like his neighbors, he’ll believe what he doesn’t want to believe.

I love the way they’re playing Stan’s slow revelation. The Americans doesn’t need a Breaking Bad Hank-on-the-toilet epiphany, because it’s a different type of show. This isn’t a traditional spy drama as much as a drama about relationships that look at those relationships through the prism of spying. The way Stan can barely stand to put the pieces together mirrors how someone would put together, piece by piece, the long-term betrayal of a loved one—or a best friend who has shared countless six packs with you. He doesn’t want it to be true, and knows it will ruin his career, so his mind is only handling the truth bit by bit. This is great work from Noah Emmerich.

I looooooved the flashback to William’s deathbed words: “Couple of kids. The American dream. Never suspect them. She’s pretty. He’s lucky.” I’ve always thought that summed up the heart of The Americans in a few minimalist lines of poetry. Those words from William (one of the best things I think the show has ever done) have haunted me a little since he said them in season four and I guess they’ve haunted Stan, too.

Not that there wasn’t plenty of traditional spying to go along with the emotional content. The mission in Chicago goes pear-shaped. Harvest dies, Marilyn dies, two FBI agents die, and everybody loses, with only Elizabeth and Philip skating away for now. The Soviets outsmarted the Americans but I liked how the FBI agents were on top of things enough to track the cars in the convoy and salvage something of the mission. And now there will be absolute hell to pay with the FBI because yet more agents are dead.

Philip knows beheading the corpse of his coworker and cutting off her hands was necessary to prevent discovery but it’s one more awful thing that chips away at their souls. It’s also one more cautionary example in this show, since the two know one may have to behead the other someday, or do some other terrible thing to preserve secrecy. That sentiment haunts every time Philip or Elizabeth has watched the horrible fate of a fellow agent, like shooting Hans after his accidental infection, or packing Annelise into a suitcase, or Gregory’s suicide by cop. That could be them someday. One of them could be swallowing a cyanide pill and dictating dying words to their parents.

They could also end up older and grayer, with war stories but finally out of danger, like the couple they were disguised as on the flight home, but that doesn’t seem likely with three episodes to go. I am really loving this season so far.

The Rules Don't Apply to Me

I could give you comprehensive reasons but you couldn’t possibly understand them. Take my word for it: the rules don’t apply to me.

Rules and social norms are for other people, the hoi polloi, the great unwashed. I scoff. I scoff and I sniff at them. Here is how I will behave.

Since I drive a BMW, my stop signs aren’t really stop signs, so when we get to a four-way intersection, I’m going to give just the barest butterfly tap on my brakes and barrel through the intersection, even though you clearly got to the stop sign first, since I drive a BMW.

I’m in group 8 to board the plane, but I’m going to push my way into group 5 to board with people who were on top of things enough to check in early, rather than doing everything at the last minute and then rush around, disheveled and panicked, acting as if it’s everyone else’s responsibility to accommodate them, like I do. Oh, and I’m also going to stash my ukulele and golf clubs overhead and refuse to check either one.

We’re just going to push these three tables together here without asking and upset the careful order that the wait staff has organized, and we’re also going to substitute every menu item for another menu item and we’ll also all need separate checks.

Space is at a premium here but I need a separate chair to put my bag on so even if you’re exhausted and need somewhere to sit, don’t even think about taking that chair because that’s the bag’s chair.

I’m just not paying taxes because the collective interest only exists when it benefits me, and here is a crappy, toddler-drawn Gadsden flag and some magical thinking about gold fringes on American flags to rebut any counterargument. 

My text to my friend, an RSVP to a BBQ a month from now, really can’t wait, so I’ll do it while negotiating this curve at 65 mph in the rain, since when they say texting while driving is dangerous, they’re obviously not talking about me.

Please make a note of the preceding.

The Americans S6 E6: Rififi

In six seasons, I don’t think The Americans has ever given us this much Henry at once. It became a running joke in past seasons that the younger Jennings child was always at a friend’s house, a convenient excuse for his parents to talk shop without fear of eavesdropping. Then he went away to boarding school, removing the last impediment to his family openly talking about overthrowing the government.

Now he’s back home, facing the threat of having to leave school as the travel agency faces hard times (poor Stavos), coming up with a smart plan to save it. He notes if he gets through three years of school and doesn’t graduate, it will all have been for nothing, a neat parallel to Elizabeth feeling all her years of spying will soon amount to nothing. His mother calls him as if to catch up on his entire life, which works as foreshadowing of Elizabeth’s death and a heartbreaking reminder that she doesn’t know who he is.

The irony to all this is that the ignored child may have been the one to spur Philip to go back to Elizabeth’s side, or maybe the one to alert Stan to his parents’ activities. Henry points out the obvious to Philip: that his wife is now deeply unhappy. In the opening scene, the husband and wife have a quietly vicious fight over Elizabeth killing Gennadi and Sofia in front of their son, and Philip not going through with the Kimmy mission (she gets in an especially cruel dig about him wanting to have sex with her, since she knows how agonized he was by that possibility). Then Elizabeth leaves on Thanksgiving Day to go to Chicago and exfiltrate USSR agent Harvest, with a tender parting word to Philip: “You can take your Forum bullshit and you can shove it up your ass.” (This is probably the most profanity-driven episode of this show ever. I think it’s the first time they’ve dropped F-bombs, which made it shocking when they did.)

Just when it looks like the Jennings marriage has hit bottom, Philip decides to reunite with Elizabeth. Henry’s phone call tells him his wife knows she’s in dire straits—which is very sad, since it implies the only reason she would call her son is when fearing her own death—and she confirms that she isn’t sure she can do what she came to do. He offers her the break she gave him at the end of season five, asking her to come home, but of course she won’t. He goes to her and although Elizabeth tells Philip nobody’s asking him to come, she doesn't say no to him. From next week’s preview, it looks like the weird behavior of both parents leaving around Thanksgiving may tip off Henry, which may tip off Stan.

The FBI is closer than ever to uncovering the illegals program, thanks to Aderholt’s brilliant, if unglamorous, plan to look through the records of every car bought with cash in metropolitan areas. When Aderholt told Stan to get cracking on the endless paperwork, it reinforced how far Aderholt has come through the bureau and how smart he’s always been (he was the one who discovered the bug in Gaad’s pen). I am loving the fan service this show is giving us with the Mail Robot’s appearance. It’s been debugged for awhile—otherwise it would have picked up anything Stan and Dennis said in the elevator—but it’s reassuring to know it’s still out there.

What was going on with Stan’s Lee Greenwood-level speech about America over Thanksgiving turkey? Does he suspect something about the Jennings family or is he just venting over the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Teacup, underlining just how awful the Soviets are? As uncomfortable as Philip (his lying about Elizabeth’s whereabouts was noticeably less professional than usual) and Paige looked, I imagine Elizabeth would have had an aneurysm. It was very resonant to have this scene on Thanksgiving. It’s the quintessential American holiday and emphasizes the idea that the Americans celebrate having that second helping of mashed potatoes while the USSR was often left with scraps.  

How much of Philip going to Chicago is out of altruism? He spies on Elizabeth’s secrets at the safe house, then sends Oleg a dead drop with information. What will that invisible ink uncover? Will our two spies betray each other or go down together?

We Found Him

It’s finally official: Steve and I are adopting!

We will soon be the parents of a wonderful 9-year-old boy. He stayed with us a few times for respite care and during his visit on spring break, we realized we wanted him to join our family. He’s a great kid and fit in right away. He found a spot on the couch one night while we were watching a movie and it was like that had been his spot all along. (I’m not sure if I want to say his name online and we’re explicitly forbidden from posting photos.)

I didn’t want to say too much ahead of time since I didn’t want to jinx it. The Permanency Planning Committee approved us last week. We were at the airport waiting to board when we got the news. We had planned a vacation before he was on our radar, since we realized during this process that you can’t put the rest of life on hold while you’re waiting or you would go crazy. So Steve and I were getting all emotional when we were boarding the plane.

So he’s a great kid and we’re quite attached to him (obviously). He’s smart and pretty good athlete. He was a little quiet at first but opened up to us pretty fast. He’s pretty well-adjusted.

Right now, he’s been living with wonderful foster parents a short distance from us. Our caseworker and his caseworker met him after we got the approval to tell him the good news. We heard he was all happy and smiling.

He’ll be moving in with us officially in June, after the school year ends. Luckily, he can stay in the same school with the same friends, and can also stay in touch with his foster parents (the more family and support he has, the better). We’re grateful for that, since I imagine it’s tough to relocate foster kids. We’ll have a summer of pool time and bonding and getting him adjusted to the house. Then after about six months, a judge will officially approve us and we’ll legally be a family forever.

Steve and I couldn’t be happier. Our families are thrilled and we can’t wait for everyone to meet (I hear he’s excited that he’ll have a lot of cousins). It’s been a long road for us, over two years since we first started working with the adoption agency, and longer than that since we started discussing parenthood. It was hard at times, looking through endless profiles to find a kid we’d be a match for, putting up with delays and setbacks.

But we found him, this is happening, and Steve and I couldn’t be happier or more grateful.