It’s a testament to Alison Wright’s superlative performance
and to the writing and directing that I don’t think I’ve ever been more
concerned over the fate of a television character. The Americans is walking on a high wire with this Martha story and
“Travel Agents” was one of the series’ best episodes yet.
Wright brings increasing gravitas to her situation,
especially during that gut-wrenching goodbye phone call to her parents. Her
options are to turn herself in to the FBI and either get arrested or have to
testify against her husband, go on the lam and get killed by the KGB, or start
a new life in the USSR. All of those are horrible and I really felt the pain
and claustrophobia of Martha’s situation. I had no idea which option the show
would pick and it was hair-raising.
I needed a defibrillator after those scenes of Martha in
Rock Creek Park. I didn’t think a show could get so much suspense out of
someone on a payphone but there she was, starting to tell Philip where she was,
then almost hanging up, then finally telling him. Elizabeth trying to get
Martha to come back to the safe house was ridiculously
tense. Never has the show come that close to shattering. The FBI is trailing
Martha and is so close to capturing the Jenningses and meanwhile, Elizabeth has
something ominous in her pocket for Martha. I couldn’t even.
Giving us a short breather was the domestic scene as the
Beeman and Jennings kids drink beer underage while their parents play a
cat-and-mouse game with international-incident implications. I don’t think,
after the day they had, that the parents would be too upset to come home to
such petty law-breaking.
Pity poor Agent Gaad, who is increasingly shell-shocked
about the role he unwittingly played in the Soviets infiltrating the bureau.
“They seduced and married my secretary,” he says of the KGB. “I’m in charge of
FBI counterintelligence and my secretary married a KGB operative.” He might as
well tell off the deputy attorney general because his career is over. Stan will
know how he feels if he ever realizes those KGB agents are his next-door
neighbors.
And to think all of this started with a pen and some
photocopies.
This episode made everybody unguardedly emotional. Philip
actually tells Martha his real name is Mischa, a secret Elizabeth had to wait
20 years of marriage to hear. He knows he’ll never see Martha again so he might
as well tell her. I’m guessing he ignores Elizabeth’s advice to pretend he is
coming to the USSR because he thinks it would be less cruel to be honest.
Elizabeth is increasingly vulnerable, too. In a stunning
exchange, she asks if Philip would run away with Martha if the kids were grown.
“I’d understand” if he did, she says.
It was a mild shock to see him react not with opaque
declarations of faithfulness but with an honest “Get out of town”-type
response. That “I love you” was probably a first between the two on this show
and Elizabeth’s tears were her response. This is the culmination of the entire
series to this point and I wonder if it will finally cement the two together in
their battle against the Americans and the Soviet bureaucracy.
Martha finally realizes Philip will not be coming with her.
He tells her the Soviets will know of her sacrifice and greet her as a hero but
of course, she never wanted any of that. She believed the lie that the
sacrifices she were making were for her own country. As all the illusions fall
away, her face goes from turmoil to a horrifying resignation. She will go to a
strange country and be alone again, just as she was before she met Clark. For
her, that fate might be worse than death.
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