It was always a pretty thin
fiction that running a travel agency would keep the Jennings parents at work in
the middle of the night, or running off at the spur of the moment to solve some
never-ending hotel booking emergency. What could possibly be so important to
have these travel agents act like doctors on call? Paige saw through it years
ago, but most other people bought the excuses, including Stan.
It’s just too much of a
coincidence that Philip is following Elizabeth to another city on Thanksgiving
Day to solve another vague emergency, so after all these years of seeing them
get home at 3 or 4 a.m. from work, Stan has begun to doubt. Nothing Philip
tells him is a lie—he really is helping his wife with a difficult client and
the business really is going under—but it’s still a huge lie of omission, and I
don’t think Philip’s sadness is an act. He really does hate lying to his best
friend.
After all these years of
mostly being sidelined, Henry is the impetus for Stan suspecting that his
neighbors are something more nefarious than harried travel agents. Showing his
memory is powerful, Stan gently works the teenager about ancient show history like
the time when the Jennings family went to take care of a sick aunt and then
Elizabeth was gone.
Stan gets so close. He
knows where to look in the basement, and pokes around the electrical panel, but
doesn’t find the opening to discover the cache of fake passports. I loved the
way his eyes moved over the happy Jennings photographs, a detail this drama has
never really shown us before. In FBI meetings, other ancient strands come
together in Stan’s mind, like the wife of the guy abducted from the street way
back when. If someone can produce sketches that look like his neighbors, he’ll
believe what he doesn’t want to believe.
I love the way they’re
playing Stan’s slow revelation. The
Americans doesn’t need a Breaking Bad
Hank-on-the-toilet epiphany, because it’s a different type of show. This isn’t
a traditional spy drama as much as a drama about relationships that look at
those relationships through the prism of spying. The way Stan can barely stand
to put the pieces together mirrors how someone would put together, piece by
piece, the long-term betrayal of a loved one—or a best friend who has shared
countless six packs with you. He doesn’t want it to be true, and knows it will
ruin his career, so his mind is only handling the truth bit by bit. This is
great work from Noah Emmerich.
I looooooved the flashback to William’s deathbed words: “Couple of
kids. The American dream. Never suspect them. She’s pretty. He’s lucky.” I’ve
always thought that summed up the heart of The
Americans in a few minimalist lines of poetry. Those words from William (one
of the best things I think the show has ever done) have haunted me a little
since he said them in season four and I guess they’ve haunted Stan, too.
Not that there wasn’t
plenty of traditional spying to go along with the emotional content. The
mission in Chicago goes pear-shaped. Harvest dies, Marilyn dies, two FBI agents
die, and everybody loses, with only Elizabeth and Philip skating away for now. The
Soviets outsmarted the Americans but I liked how the FBI agents were on top of
things enough to track the cars in the convoy and salvage something of the
mission. And now there will be absolute hell to pay with the FBI because yet
more agents are dead.
Philip knows beheading the
corpse of his coworker and cutting off her hands was necessary to prevent discovery
but it’s one more awful thing that chips away at their souls. It’s also one
more cautionary example in this show, since the two know one may have to behead
the other someday, or do some other terrible thing to preserve secrecy. That
sentiment haunts every time Philip or Elizabeth has watched the horrible fate
of a fellow agent, like shooting Hans after his accidental infection, or
packing Annelise into a suitcase, or Gregory’s suicide by cop. That could be
them someday. One of them could be swallowing a cyanide pill and dictating
dying words to their parents.
They could also end up
older and grayer, with war stories but finally out of danger, like the couple
they were disguised as on the flight home, but that doesn’t seem likely with
three episodes to go. I am really loving this season so far.
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