The ghosts of the recent
past came out this week on The Americans.
Kimmy, glanders, Gabriel, Oleg’s brother and the woman his mother was, Gaad,
and Martha (!!!) made return appearances in one form or another to haunt the
cast.
Oh God, poor Martha. She’s
in a very depressing apartment, with laundry hanging to dry over her bed,
cooking some onions or something for dinner (she says it’s a snack but that
seems like a way to save some dignity). Gabriel shows up just to check on her. “Your
life will get better when your Russian improves,” he tells her.
Really? Will Martha somehow
be able to magically transcend the hunger and dire economic straits that so
many Russians found themselves in? Will she make some friends? Will she finally
get the one thing she really wants: Contact with her family?
Martha is buying none of
it. She kicks Gabriel out and tells him she understands everything now. I don’t
know if these two are done on the show or not but this was a terribly sad coda
for both.
On the other end of the
class spectrum is the Burov household, which is just as tied to the past. Oleg’s
father reflects on how his wife changed after she came back from the camp,
offering the haunting observation, “I never saw her again, the girl I knew.”
Oleg goes to prison to
confront the guy arrested from the food distribution scam, seeming to tell him
to surrender and that everything is expendable. His brother “was an officer. Now he’s a picture on
the wall.” I think something inside Oleg broke this episode. In the prison, he
had the strangest expression of a man who has sadly surrendered to the
inevitable.
Oleg is probably going to
be targeted by a second attempt at blackmail, as Stan tells Linh Gaad the FBI
wants him to get Oleg as revenge for Frank’s murder. He tells the widow some
meant-to-be-comforting thing about Gaad not wanting revenge but she isn’t
having it. Her husband would want revenge, she says, and she’s absolutely
right. Did Stan meet Gaad? If he was
so pissed off about the Russians recruiting his secretary, imagine how pissed
he be about his pointless death.
All that skeevy fraternizing
with Kimmy finally pays off. Philip bakes her a cake for her 17th
(eww) birthday and gets information that the glanders may have turned up in
Afghanistan. This will further disillusion the Jenningses, since the USSR was
not honest with them about what they’re using the biological weapon for.
While his parents were off
pretending to be flight attendants and having weekly dates with high school
kids, Henry is making something of himself in a very American way: getting into
a boarding school via scholarship. Elizabeth and Philip may as well let him go;
it’s not like they’ve been having too many family dinners with him anyway. With
Henry gone, this would remove the last impediment toward just talking at full
volume about their missions at home. (This was the first episode in a long time
not to feature Paige.) I think this Henry thing could go several ways. It could
be a way for the show to write him out completely or The Americans could be winding up to do something big and poignant
with his alienation.
Elizabeth and Philip are
also having a dilemma with their fake son Tuan, who has been hanging out in an
IHOP in Harrisburg (it’s OK but it’s no Benningan’s). The scenes with Elizabeth
searching his house and then the confrontation were tense and scary. Does Tuan’s
brother really have leukemia or is there something more nefarious going on?
“Maybe Tuan wants to be
pulled out of this shit and start over,” Phillip says.
“That’s not who he is,”
Elizabeth says, with the camera lingering just long enough on Philip’s face to
show their conversation could easily apply to him.
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