The Americans S5 E4: What's the Matter With Kansas?

Watching this episode, I got the sense of waves crashing on the shore, coming so fast that they overlapped each other. “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” was blackmail on top of blackmail, disguise on top of disguise, confidence on top of confidence.

Stan makes a major power move, blackmailing the FBI to ward off the blackmailing of Oleg. For a true believer like Stan, this may be as close as he will get to turning on his country. No doubt he was inspired by Aderholt’s earlier recollection of trapping an asset by threatening to reveal his affair: “We blackmailed the shit out of him and everybody wound up happy.” The FBI got the information and the asset and his family live comfortably under the witness protection program.

Far from winding up happy, Oleg seems like he’s headed for doom, which is ironic and unfair, given that his actions were the rare altruistic ones on The Americans. After burying one son, Mrs. Burov does not need the stress of worrying about another son, but she gathers her courage and tells her son to do whatever he has to to survive, as she did in prison.

Elizabeth is considering blackmailing Pastor Tim as insurance to prevent him from blackmailing the Jenningses. She and Paige share one confidence after another, with Paige telling her mother about the diary and Elizabeth telling her daughter some real specifics about the mission in Topeka. This openness seems like a parallel for the glasnost that is about to take root in the Soviet Union. It seems sweet for mother and daughter to share but I’m also thinking “grand jury testimony” when Paige gets these specific details.

It’s fascinating to see Paige turn into a spy almost by reflex. The copy of Das Kapital that Pastor Tim gave her may be the bridge that finally connects communism with the church’s social justice and may start turning some wheels in Paige’s mind. She seems affected by the grain crisis, telling Henry (or the post-pubescent actor who kidnapped Henry) that she would have eaten the sandwich he threw away.

Disguises also piled on top of disguises. The vacation is over and the boss wants Elizabeth and Philip to go back and forth to Topeka to work their sources on the grain/midge thing. (I loved how at the gym, Philip was positioned under the red star on the wall and the woman was positioned under the blue star.) This running back and forth seems like it would be exhausting and impractical. In addition to their Kansas mission, Philip maintains his pilot disguise with Alexei and he and Elizabeth return to their base disguises as American travel agents at dinner with Stan and Renee.

At this point, Philip, Stan and Oleg are triplets of doubt. They are all disillusioned with their missions and ideologies and maybe it’s only a matter of time before one or all of them breaks.

Things to Do While We're Waiting

Dust

Scrub the shower tiles

Throw out expired condiments

Clean the washer

Organize the garage

Shred any bills that are older than seven years

Read Infinite Jest again

Train the cats to respond to sign language

Dig up our lawn and reseed the entire thing

Paint each slat of the den paneling a different color

Stock up on 9-volt batteries so I will never be without working smoke detectors

Organize my coupons by what aisle the items are located in the supermarket

Color code every contact in my address book with a different color sticker for how long we’ve known each other

Iron and fold the towels, and then refold them

Put collar tabs in all my dress shirts

Knit everyone I know something that’s supposed to be a scarf

Update my dental floss journal

Binge watch all of Doctor Who

Synchronize all our clocks to an atomic clock

Learn Mandarin

Memorize the periodic table

Organize all my shirts by color

Finally get cracking on that book of haiku I’ve always wanted to write

Get a masters and a doctorate

Write down everything that ever happened to me in my childhood in chronological order

Scan every photograph I have and then enter each of them into an Excel spreadsheet organized by date, place and the people in them

Play Hungry Hungry Hippos

The Americans S5 E3: The Midges

If there’s a theme so far this season on The Americans, it seems to be that everyone is sliding into doubt and everything is sliding into decay.

Stan is disillusioned with the FBI and he and Aderholt are having no luck getting information from sources. Philip is starting to question why the USSR, with its vast lands, cannot produce enough grain for its people. Oleg is seeing the bare shelves at the supermarkets and the corruption that leads to it, as the employee tries to bribe the ethics officer with tangerines. Even babushka-wearing Martha is feeling the decay, unable to find an economy-size jar of peanut butter on the shel—

Wait a minute … MARTHA?!? What what what?!? I gasped so hard I almost swallowed my tongue. That was the show’s best-executed shock and nobody even died or got hurt for it. I’m guessing this cameo was just to tip us off that she’s relatively OK. I don’t know that she’d be back in any sustained role, but you never know. Still, you never know who you’re going to run into at the Moscow Piggly Wiggly.

Is there an over/under on when Tuan will flip out and do something stupid for the Motherland? His views are so extreme that even Elizabeth is taken aback, emphasizing that they actually don’t want their mission to end in mutually assured destruction. God, Alexei can’t even go bowling without bitching about the USSR. I am liking how Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are performing the scenes with the Morozovs, hiding the fact that they understand every word the family is saying in Russian.

The irony was thick in the conversation after bowling. Philip notes how Alexei takes his family for a big meal at Bennigan’s while the Soviets starve. Elizabeth can’t believe he’d defect without warning his family, but that’s what the Jenningses might very well have done to their kids.

The whole scene in the bug lab in Oklahoma was very stressful because of the bug noises in the background, plus Philip and Elizabeth seemed more intense than usual. And just when I was thinking, “We haven’t had a murder yet this season,” the entomologist bites it, with Philip dipping him over his arm in a lethal dance move.

I loved the juxtaposition between the vastness of Oklahoma and the vastness of the Soviet Union. Notice how whenever Philip is wavering in the mission or something stressful is happening, the queen of the rodeo can always rein him in with some sex.

The humanitarian mission may be the one thing that brings Paige around to the cause. It’s no longer abstract concepts like the Stealth bomber; this is people going hungry due to the Americans tampering with the grain supply. (Notice how Elizabeth pointedly refers to the Americans as “they,” when her daughter doesn’t think of them as anything else but “us.”)

There was a great subtle thing in the scene between mother and daughter: Paige overstates the importance of her conversation with Matthew. It really was an innocent conversation with him wondering why she’s so tense but Paige told her mother like it was a ticking time bomb, and Elizabeth reacted as such. Is Paige so paranoid now that even totally innocuous developments seem like doom on the horizon?

I loved the exchange when Elizabeth told Paige that everyone in a relationship holds something back. That’s what this show does best: Runs a truth about human relationships through the prism of spywork so it becomes something much more loaded and foreboding.

Ugly Time of Year

This is an ugly time of year, at least for now. The snow melts and reveals everything we left behind at the last change of seasons: The perennials you forgot to deadhead, the Christmas banner fallen off and sodden, the windchimes knocked down one blustery night.

This is not the mudluscious Just-spring of cummings. The snow lost any romance it had last week, abandoned on the side of the road like ancient jalopies not worth fixing because they’re just going to rust away. Snow goes gray on the shoulder like septic skin. The grass is matted down like hairspray defeated by a hat.

This is the world awakening like a fallen-asleep limb. It’s painful and uncomfortable but not for too long and then sensation returns. Then we will get the color back, every shade of red and violet and gold. It’s coming soon. It’s never not.

Green

Past a certain age and in a certain stage of life, how do you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day? I’m wearing green to work but I’m not going to a bar and certainly not going to a pub crawl. I might have a drink tonight but that’s about it.

But how do you mark this day and this heritage? I can think about my Grandmom and wish I’d asked her more questions about Ireland. I can wish I’d met Grandpop at all, since he died before I was born. I can think about the courage it must have taken them to leave their country for a new life. I can think about all the other immigrants who struck out for a new life in an America that didn’t always welcome them with open arms. I can think about my ancestors in Ireland in the 1840s who died in the famine and be grateful that some of them survived and I exist.

I can play some Irish music, traditional stuff like “The Unicorn” and "The Orange and the Green" and “Black Velvet Band.” My Dad liked that stuff, and we always heard it around the house, so it reminds me of him. Of course, I can eat some corned beef. I know it’s not really Irish, more Irish-American, but eating that on St. Patrick’s Day is what we always did, and “what we always did” has a lot of power.

The Americans S5 E2: Pests

Bennigan’s! What a perfect place for a family dinner in the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day 1984. The Eckert and Morozov families feast on buffalo wings, Monte Cristos, baked potato soup, Roscommon chicken and, I assume, a Death by Chocolate.

Alexei complains non-stop again about his former homeland. If the defection … is to the Soviet Union, he … WILL NOT GO! He speaks Russian and apologizes for doing so in front of the ostensible Americans at the table. “We understand,” deadpans Elizabeth.

Tuan seems pretty amped up for the cause and I’m wondering if it will lead to trouble as it has many times before for the Jenningses. Still, Captain Commie seemed very excited to take home two doggie bags of capitalist Bennigan’s leftovers.

That scene with Elizabeth in the pest-infested greenhouse was creepy and claustrophobic. It was shot like a paranoid ‘70s horror movie, where the magnitude of the problem slowly dawns on the investigator. Will this newest bridge-too-far by the Americans strengthen Elizabeth’s resolve?

Stan may be starting to doubt. Things are going his way in his personal life, since he’s dating Andrea from The Walking Dead, but he’s been clashing more and more with the CIA. He vehemently opposes the CIA’s plan to get more out of Oleg, seeing Oleg’s tip about William as the Russian having done his duty. My question: Was the person who gave Oleg the note really sent by Stan as a warning or was this a CIA officer unfairly using Stan’s name?

The bloom is coming off the rose for the FBI career man. Stan’s career isn’t as seductive anymore, and he tells his Soviet spy neighbor, “Women loved the FBI when we were chasing Capone or Dillinger but it’s 1984.” Will Stan become disillusioned enough to turn? He seems rock-solid but I keep thinking of the CIA agent in the season 3 premier who nearly betrayed her country to Elizabeth. That agent probably thought she was rock-solid, too, but look what disillusionment made her do.

Stan is definitely right that something is wrong in Paige Land. She’s sleeping in the closet and it’s kind of funny but not really. Elizabeth doesn’t care if Paige has sex with Matthew but does care if her daughter loses control with him. “It gets confusing when you care about someone,” Elizabeth says. In a twisted version of The Talk, Elizabeth and Philip teach Paige that when she loses control, she should picture her parents watching over her and remember that they would do anything for her. On a sitcom, it would be funny to see the parents tell her daughter to picture their faces during sex, but here it’s quietly disturbing. Paige’s parents will always watch over her but they will also always be watching her. She can’t have a normal relationship with a boy. No matter how much they tell her she can date somebody else, just not Matthew, she will always have that in the back of her mind.

This talk of compartmentalization is especially disturbing when you remember Philip’s flashback to his sex training, when he had to keep his emotional feelings separate from his physical body when seducing an asset. This training makes more sense when instructing a spy but these are parents telling their daughter to compartmentalize her real feelings about the boy next door, and that can only be damaging. All this advice may protect Paige in the short term but in the long term, she’s really going to be messed up, and I’m not sure her parents are really aware of that.

Martin Scorsese Disapproves

Exile on Main St. plays out of order on my iPod. My first clue is the slur and smear of “Tumbling Dice” too early at track 3. Somewhere Martin Scorsese shakes his head and mutters his disapproval.

I picture Marty (we call him Marty to imply we’re friends, having charmed him with some incisive, witty comment on film at some rarified salon) in the passenger seat, incredulous at my sloppy Rolling Stones curation. He raises a bushy eyebrow when I cannot tell if “Torn and Frayed” or “Sweet Virginia” is playing. What a disgrace that in front of the man who scored Goodfellas with “Gimme Shelter” and who directed the Shine a Light concert documentary (the song just now playing out of order) that I cannot properly play the Stones in sequence.

Marty and I reach our destination. He storms out of the car, slams the door right on the downbeat, but not before spitting, “I didn’t wait 30 years for my Best Director Oscar just to put up with this shit.”

The Americans S5 E1: Amber Waves

To get psyched for season five of The Americans, we spent awhile re-watching the previous four seasons. I found that as great as the first three seasons were, the fourth season topped them handily in quality. With so many plotlines guillotined off last year, will the show be able to tell new stories and introduce new characters to get the audience intrigued? Could this be a show that keeps getting better and better?

“Amber Waves” showed that the answers are that the show can come up with intriguing new plots and characters, and judging by this penultimate premier, there’s no reason to think The Americans can’t be even better in season five. It opened in what seemed like an ‘80s John Hughes high school movie and a parody of domesticity until Elizabeth and Philip greeted us disguised as an airline pilot and flight attendant, and I wondered what the hell had happened. Did the show follow through on its promise to relocate the Jenningses so as not to blow their cover?

It would have defied logic for them to start a new family, because Paige and Henry would not go quietly, but that great pre-credit scene disoriented me for a second. What a clever idea to have the Eckerts work on an airline, which would explain their frequent absences from the home. Tuan, a young illegal and their fake son, works Soviet defector Alexei for information. It irks Tuan and the Jenningses that Alexei is so unpatriotic that he would complain about bread lines when during the war, there was no bread to be had.

I get that Elizabeth and Philip would be annoyed that this guy doesn’t know how well he has it but do they know how good they have it? They do dangerous work, sure, but they still have that nice house and a full fridge. If the point of the exchange was “there’s always someone worse off than you,” then there are spies much worse off than the Jenningses who have met horrible fates (like the guy 12 feet under at the end of the episode).

The talk of bread lines is our lead-in to that weird video of wasted grain fields in Russia. It seems a new theme this season will be the scandal that the USSR cannot feed all its people. Will Oleg have to turn on his well-off family in investigating all this? I’m not sure how this will play out but it is an interesting look at how the Soviet Union is starting to show signs of failure.

I liked the exchange between Claudia and Gabriel that shows their differing perspectives on Philip and Elizabeth. “Nothing scares those two,” Claudia says, having been waterboarded by Elizabeth and seen them at their most vicious. “Everything scares those two,” counters Gabriel, having seen them at their most fragile and frayed.

Philip, Elizabeth and Gabriel take a moment to mourn William, with Gabriel musing that he envisioned William back in the USSR with a wife and children running around his feet. Instead, he self-inflicts the lassa virus and dies.

But William can’t even rest in peace. After a wordless digging scene, the spies exhume his body and take a sample of the virus from him. Even after sacrificing his happiness and giving his life, William still has to give the KGB a literal pound of flesh.

Then Hans falls onto the body and accidentally gets the lassa virus. We know what has to happen now: Elizabeth shoots him with barely a regret. Hans was kind of a goofball but I’ll miss him since I was liking the subtle way the show worked him into the background as a lookout. What’s implied by his death is that anybody else could have fallen into the coffin and gotten the virus; it was just bad luck that it was Hans. If Philip or Elizabeth got infected, would one of them have executed the other?

I don’t have much to say yet on any resonance of The Americans in the age of the Trump administration’s possible connection with the Russians. I’ll have to see how the season plays out to have any commentary on that. One of the main themes of the show is that beyond nationalism, people are still people, with very complicated emotional ties and loyalties. That will always be a relevant idea, no matter what’s happening in politics.  

The Walking Dead S7 E11/12: Hostilities and Calamities/Say Yes

You and your partner are having a lovely day at the carnival. You’re mowing down zombies, having hilarious pratfalls, feasting on ready-to-eat chili combined with mac and cheese, and taking frequent sex breaks.

Then it all goes wrong. You think he’s been killed by zombies when it was really just that cheap-looking CGI deer. You freeze, unable to deal with a future without him. He gives you a pep talk, telling you you’ll survive if you lose him. You spend the ride home in silence. In another world, the silence would have come from a bad sunburn or fight with the kids or a ruined picnic.

I guess that was an amusing distraction to see Rick and Michonne enjoying themselves in a new setting of a military carnival but The Walking Dead does seem to be killing time these days.

It’s all setup, setup, setup. Last week it was Dwight and Eugene maybe looking to rebel against Negan (although it would be an interesting twist to see Eugene get seduced by Negan’s cult of personality and end up working for him). Great work, Negan, killing your town’s doctor. He does believe Eugene’s lie that he’s a scientist but working on the Human Genome Project does not mean he has any medical expertise; there are different types of “smart.”

Tara spells out her internal conflict over telling everyone about Oceanside and its armory by giving a monologue to Judith. Why show when you can tell? Why have the writers dramatize this conflict via action when you can just write a few paragraphs of expository dialogue and spill it all out?

Rosita turns her nose up at Rick and the gang making actual plans for the rebellion, instead wanting to kill Negan right away. Given what happened the many times people have tried to kill Negan before, she might realize that taking time to make plans is a feature, not a bug.

I don’t even know what to say about this show anymore. I just don’t feel like putting a ton of effort into these reviews.

Unplanned Endings

It seems like this past year has been the era of the unexpected ending. So many sports championships and other events have had unforeseen results. It’s the trendy thing to do, I guess.

In sports, first the Cleveland Cavaliers come back from being down 3-1 to win the NBA Finals over the Golden State Warriors. This gives Cleveland its first championship in decades. Then the Cubs win their first World Series in over 100 years over another starved team, the Indians.

Then the Patriots come back from being down 28-3 to win the Super Bowl over the Falcons in overtime. Of course I missed the comeback. I figured out that I went to bed immediately before the miracle catch that extended the drive. The next day, I was annoyed that I missed the first overtime in Super Bowl history but then realized that I didn’t feel like missing sleep to watch New England win. (By the way, now that the Patriots have won two more Super Bowls in three years, can the anger and self-pity at Roger Goodell’s pursuit of Tom Brady please end? Sure, your team won “vengeance” after being so put upon. The whole “They hate us because they ain’t us” thing I’m seeing is idiotic. What’s really going on is that people are just bored and annoyed with some of the Patriots fans who have zero self-awareness and come off like one percenters going apoplectic about getting a traffic ticket.)

Then the UK votes to Brexit the EU, which nobody thought would happen. I guess everybody was so sure “Remain” would win that there were some people who registered a vote for “Leave” as some vague protest against the system. Many people apparently had no idea what Brexit was as Google searches for the term spiked after the vote, when it was too late for people to educate themselves. Ahem.

Then Donald Trump got elected president, another thing nobody thought could happen.

The latest unexpected ending was during the Best Picture award at the Oscars, which went to La La … er, Moonlight. I actually saw the wacky mix-up live because I had just arrived in Las Vegas for a business trip and it was only 9 p.m. there; at home, I would have long been in bed. I was just about to turn off the TV when the La La Land producer said Moonlight actually won and it was not a joke. (You had one job, PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants!) It was surreal to see so many celebrities slowly register what had happened, and I was as shocked as them.

But what does all this mean? Why are these comebacks and weird things happening? I think it’s a conspiracy. I blame the Bilderberg Group, the Rand Corporation, the Illuminati and the company that manufactures those chemtrails that cause autism in kids. Wake up, sheeple!

The New Snowblower's Lament

Nobody loves me, it seems. The whole universe is conspiring to keep me here, a prisoner. Entire weather patterns have rearranged themselves so the snow flies to far-flung New England while our mid-Atlantic stays balmy and dry.

I am all dressed up with nowhere to go, stuck in this garage with all the other crap my new owners didn’t know what to do with. They took me out of my box, put me together and charged me up, but I still sit idle. It was looking pretty good a few weeks ago as the wind whipped the snow through rush hour. But by mid-morning, the veil of white lifted and the sun came out. I remained unstained by salt and unused, and everybody forgot about the snow soon enough.

What is the point of me? Why did they buy me? As the world gets hotter, would my owners have been better off putting that money toward designer bathing suits or fancy pool toys?

Barring a late winter fury from Mother Nature, it is here that I will remain. I will collect dust in this garage while my owners trip over me on their way to grab bags of garden soil or lawn equipment. I will hibernate through spring and summer, hoping that next year I will be of some use to somebody.