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.
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