Philip has always been the
wavering soldier for the cause but now he seems closer than ever to breaking
down completely. He’s already clearly disillusioned by his overall mission and
now the Centre’s intelligence fails significantly: The Agricorp employees are
not trying to destroy Soviet crops but developing the technology to feed
everyone.
It hits Philip immediately
that he killed the man in the lab for no reason, and in fact killed someone who
could have helped the food crisis in his homeland. The lab worker is just the
latest in a long line of innocents he’s killed: Gene the IT guy, the soldiers
in the training camp, the busboy, the guy who walked into the computer lab at
the wrong time, and God knows who else.
Elizabeth tries to comfort
him, saying they didn’t know when they killed the guy in the lab, but they
still killed him. They still killed a lot of people who weren’t actively trying
to harm them, who were just cogs in a machine. I had been wondering why season
five has been relatively free of murder. Maybe it’s because they want the one
murder so far to stand out and really haunt Philip.
“This has been hard for me
for a long time,” Philip tells Elizabeth. “You know that, right?” She knows and
she has enough empathy now to follow him to the fake house to talk to him. It’s
a turnaround from the end of season three when he was breaking down right in
front of her and she shushed him to watch Reagan on TV. The Jennings marriage
has never seemed stronger, but how sad and ironic that she had to go in
disguise to console her husband. “It’s us, Elizabeth. It’s us,” Philip says
after she offers to do the dirty work from now on. The Americans has a knack for ending episodes with seemingly simple
but heavily weighted dialogue.
Everything seems to be
falling apart but Philip does have his love for Elizabeth to lean on. That
phone call from her to the travel agency just to say she misses him was very
sweet and given that most phone calls in that situation would discuss business on
this show, it was almost startling to see her call just to say hi. (I loved her
matching chevron earrings and dress as Brenda Neill.)
Over in the USSR, Oleg
comes home to a buffet and food and potential wives that his parents have
arranged. The staging of this, with people sitting on one side of the table, is
common in sitcoms to accommodate the camera but in this case, it emphasized
that these women were having some kind of creepy audition for his affection. It
must be tearing Oleg apart to watch his comrades threaten the grocery store
employee by implying they could send his son into deeper trouble in
Afghanistan. That’s really, really low.
Anyway, Philip’s
relationships with his kids seem to be strained. When he needs an escape,
rather than play hockey with his real son, he plays football with his fake son.
Paige is wondering if she’s just meant to be alone, way too young to feel that
way. Henry is disgusted that his parents never realized he was so good at math.
It’s a combination of people in the early ‘80s not realizing that computers
require a lot of math skills and the Jenningses not knowing their own son. This
is a great payoff for Henry being left to his own devices for several seasons.
I loved how the parents’ lack of recognition paralleled the viewers’ lack of
recognition at this kid who was suddenly all grown up. Nobody had been looking
at him for years.
Then there is Mischa, the
son Philip will probably never meet. I understand Gabriel’s reasoning for
sending the kid away: If he went to Philip’s house, there would be no way to
explain a Russian son without the pieces immediately and finally falling into
place for Stan. Still, how heartbreaking that this kid will never meet his
father and the father doesn’t even know it.
It’s episode five and the
two big plotlines of the season, the grain threat and Mischa, are seemingly
dead. What new horrors await?
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