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.
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