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.
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