Well, Paige did say she wanted to know the whole truth. She
knows her parents have been evasive and given half-answers when she’s asked
questions about whether or not they kill people and how her mother knew how to
stab the mugger in the neck without much emotion. “Do you trust me or not?”
Paige asks. Her parents have always asked their daughter to trust them but trust
is a two-way street.
So Philip lays it out for her, telling her about the
bioweapons. It’s not a game anymore, not just some petty cloak and dagger.
After seeing the total annihilation of The
Day After, Paige knows what her parents are messing with could affect the
whole world.
“Great,” is her perfect sarcastic reaction.
But Paige hasn’t run away from her family’s dirty business.
She seems to understand Elizabeth’s explanation of why she’s a fighter, with
her mother explaining her hardscrabble upbringing in Smolensk. Paige is also
working Matthew, even if she doesn’t realize it, reporting back information
about the FBI’s search for Martha unbidden. It’s disturbing to see the teenager
unconsciously engaging in this espionage. After all the Jenningses’ debates
over recruitment, Paige is her mother’s daughter. The kiss with Matthew was
sweet and made sense but it was almost a parallel of Elizabeth getting closer
to men for information.
Speaking of Martha, we get an emotional phone call from
Gabriel to the missing secretary’s worried mother, a nicely concise way of
keeping tabs on the absence that haunts The
Americans. They cut directly to Oleg calling his mother, assuring her of
his own safety as Gabriel assured Martha’s mother of her daughter’s.
Oleg is coming unglued, though, perhaps rattled by the narrowly
averted nuclear launch from the USSR and The
Day After. Despite all the saber-rattling from his country, he knows how
fragile the whole thing is. He wants out and his last act before a transfer to
Nairobi is tipping Stan off about the bioweapons program. This is a huge, huge
plot development and the FBI works quickly, narrowing it all down to William (after
discovering the bug on the Mail Robot, which again establishes that Aderholt is
pretty sharp).
William wants out, too. He’s understandably freaked out
about the lassa. “You basically dissolve inside and then squirt yourself out
your anus,” he says, and both he and Oleg know that’s not something you want in
the shaky hands of the Soviets, who have abundant knowledge but not a lot of infrastructure.
William just wants to go home. An equally weary Gabriel
promises him he will go back to the Soviet Union, after just one more job. We
know from the previews of next week’s episode this all this will go pear-shaped
pretty fast.
One more left.
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