Philip and Stan each
had an out from either side of the spy world. They were beaten down and ready
to move on. Then a spouse and a girlfriend (who has to be a spy, right?) pulled
each one back in.
Philip almost made
it, too, nearly chucking that tape into the water. But he couldn’t quite divest
himself of his duty and couldn’t ignore that Isaac Breeland is getting a
promotion to the head of the CIA’s Soviet Division. It’s too tempting a target.
So the Jennings family will forgo their (unworkable) plan to move the kids to
the USSR and remain as fake Americans, with Philip handling the Breeland
mission while Elizabeth takes on everything else.
After an ugly scene,
Henry will actually get to go to the boarding school instead of ending up in a
strange country. Paige will get to continue her work at the food pantry,
without religion, which pleases her mother. With Pastor Tim gone, she may be
free to follow in her parents’ footsteps. I think Elizabeth might be happy to
be staying, too, although she’d never admit it. In a montage set to “Goodbye
Yellow Brick Road,” she stares at her closet full of clothes, her TV and her
dishwasher, maybe realizing that she might miss the conveniences of America if
she had to start over. Or was she realizing that maybe Tuan was right and that
she was too wrapped up in “petty bourgeois concerns”?
What a nasty piece of
work Tuan is, chalking up the near-suicide of a troubled teen as something
petty and bourgeois. What a nasty scene Pasha’s wrist-slitting was, with the
bed soaked in his blood, like the sad remnants of everything Philip and
Elizabeth have done for their country thus far. Evgheniya and Pasha will return
to the Soviet Union, while Alexei will stay in America.
Surely Philip sees
something of himself and his family in that. “Do we have to tear this family
apart, too?” Philip asks Claudia. They are realizing that some prices are too
much to pay.
After the darkness of
the Pasha scene, Martha’s scene in the playground was overwhelming. She’s in a
strange country and can’t return home to her parents or husband. But now she’ll
have this adorable young daughter, Olya. Children were all she wanted back in
America, and she was so lonely even with Clark. Martha’s face registers her
joy. Maybe she’ll be OK. After the show put her through hell, what a beautiful
grace moment for the character.
When Elizabeth took
Tuan aside, I thought she might have another “You’re not in the mood? Well, you
get in the mood!” dressing down like
she did with Paige last season. Instead, her speech had fewer fireworks but was
just as cutting. “You’re not going to make it,” she tells him. “It’s too hard,
the work we do, to do it alone.”
Bingo!
That’s the point of the season, and maybe the series. So many fellow spies,
like William and Kate, ended up dead or emotional basketcases, with nobody
having their backs. Philip and Elizabeth have each other and they have a life,
unlike people like Claudia or Gabriel. They’ve never been closer or more
unified than they have this season.
“I’m
making you stay. I don't want to see you like this anymore,” Elizabeth tells a
broken Philip. They’ve come a long way from season three, when he was breaking
down right in front of her and she shushed him because Reagan was on TV. They
couldn’t have gotten to this point, with each spouse wanting to sacrifice so
much for the other, and not for the mission, without the past season.
Season
five of The Americans didn’t have the
crazy spy missions of past years or the dizzying heights of season four, but I
appreciated the slow burn and focus on character. I’ll have to judge it after seeing
season six, since so much of it was set-up for the final season. But it’s still
television at the very height of its potential.
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