A review of tonight’s The Americans coming up just as soon as I figure out this recipe for gorp…
“I don’t want to talk about it.” –Elizabeth
For the most part, the Jennings marriage morphing from a complete sham to something mostly real has been nothing but good for Philip and Elizabeth. They finally get to feel like their home life is real and true, they get to lean on each other for emotional support in a way they really couldn’t when they were partners only in a professional sense, and, oh yeah, they get to be with the one they love, and/or love the one they’re with.
But that greater emotional connection we’ve seen blossom over the series has a downside, too: It’s made certain parts of their job much harder to accept than they used to be. It’s one thing to send your spouse out to risk their lives in an assassination attempt, or have sex with another person as part of their job, when you’re not really spouses, and quite another when the marriage, and the feelings, are genuine.
We’ve seen this a few times in the past when Philip has gotten overly protective about putting Elizabeth into harm’s way and/or into a honeypot, but never as the primary subject of an episode the way it is in “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” a complicated hour where both of our protagonists seem to have had their fill of having sex outside the marriage, but for very different reasons.
On the one hand, there’s Philip, who should probably spend the episode wearing a t-shirt with “I’m getting too old for this shit” emblazoned across Danny Glover’s face. He’s talking back to Gabriel, in a conversation that’s a marvelously uncomfortable distillation of how the show uses the spy stories to cast traditional family conflicts in a new light: These are parents asking to ease back on their work schedule because of a problem with one of their kids, but in this case, it’s a problem caused by the work. (Gabriel, who at times can be a soft touch with his favorite operatives, here is unmoved by Philip’s attempt to engender sympathy.) He wants no part of traveling regularly to Kansas, doesn’t want to be in another long-term affair like the one he had with Martha that will consume his time and his emotional investment, and he sure as hell doesn’t want his wife off doing the same thing. There are parts of the job he still does willingly, even eagerly, but he has never liked using sex in this way, and between the closeness he now feels with Elizabeth and how awful it felt to turn Martha into a defector, he’s got no patience for this anymore for himself — and isn’t happy to constantly be aware of Elizabeth doing the same.
Because as much as this marriage was born in a lie, it’s always been more fundamentally honest than many real unions, because the job requires full and open communication at almost every turn. There are specific details that can stay off to the side — Philip really didn’t want to give Elizabeth full details of his sex life with Martha, with what turned out to be very good reason — but the big picture is there for both to see. In a normal marriage, Philip or Elizabeth would be having affairs in secret from one another, but here they not only know about each other’s partners, but often have to help one another seduce them. Philip doesn’t want his wife sleeping with another man, but it’s even worse that it’s such a matter-of-fact part of their conversations.
And on the other hand, there’s Elizabeth, whose reticence for the Kansas operation seems to be coming from the same place as Philip’s, but turns out to be quite different. She may not be crazy about honeypots anymore, but she believes in the cause, and the problem is revealed in the episode’s final scene not to be that she has to sleep with another man, but that she has to sleep with this man, whom she believes is helping to destroy Soviet crops and starve children. For her, the cause still comes above everything else, where Philip has long since prioritized family over country. And hearing Elizabeth confess the real reason she’s not comfortable around Ben only seems to drive a wedge between them. While Philip might agree that this operation (if it’s what it appears to be) is monstrous, his concerns are far more personal and about being away from his wife and kids, while her objections are still philosophical first and foremost.
It’s also notable to see Elizabeth’s evening in Kansas with Ben contrasted with Paige going beyond the scope of her duties as babysitter for Pastor Tim and Alice. Both “missions” take place on the same night, and we go back and forth between Elizabeth doing an advanced form of spycraft, while Paige does a more basic but essential kind by rifling through Tim’s drawers looking for anything that might point them to the lawyer who has Alice’s incriminating message in his possession. It’s a Like Mother, Like Daughter sequence that would be squirmy enough if it was just Paige snooping around the bedroom, but is far more because her mother is in the midst of seducing a bearded man who is very much not Paige’s father.
The work/home lines have been blurred everywhere, but Paige is turning out to be her mother’s daughter, standing up for her own spy instincts when Elizabeth suggests it was a terrible idea to play detective without orders or backup. And when she’s in bed with Philip in the final scene, she admits that she admires Paige for that, and for possibly being right about getting some leverage on Tim and Alice. Philip doesn’t love hearing this, either, because he still hates everything about Paige being drawn into their world. And there, again, is the big divide in their marriage — and one that I wonder could become insurmountable before the story’s done — where their priorities are so wildly different, even if they love each other, work well together, and care deeply about their kids. At the start of the episode, both are assigned to begin new sexual conquests for the sake of the job, and neither of them wants to do it. But their reasons are a lot more complicated than they seem at first.
Some other thoughts:
* Now, I know the show didn’t recast Keidrich Sellati as Henry in the offseason. But we’ve seen him so briefly this season, and Sellati has grown so much (and got a different haircut) that when Henry appears in a scene with multiple lines of dialogue, it’s startling both to have him be so relatively prominent and to realize this is the same kid who once had that hidden photo of Sandra Beeman in his room. This discussion of his grades and whom he’s always talking to on the phone is the closest thing we’ve had to a real Henry subplot in forever. It’s a tough spot the show is in, since he has to be marginalized in any scene dealing with spycraft, but at least Walter White Jr. got to eat breakfast with his dad a lot of the time, you know?
* It’s fascinating, and sad, to see how alike Stan and Oleg have become, and to get a sense of how well the two would get along if there weren’t thousands of miles of geographic and political difference between them. Back in DC, Stan puts his career and even his freedom at risk — confessing Vlad’s murder to the Deputy AG — in order to get the CIA to lay off of Oleg, and we’ll have to see if the message gets through in time, or if Oleg is doomed no matter what. And in Moscow, we see Oleg arguing for decency in favor of threatening families of soldiers in Afghanistan as a way to further their investigation — a suggestion greeted by withering disdain from both the Colonel and Oleg’s new partner Ruslan. Great work from Noah Emmerich in the confession scene, and from Costa Ronin in the later moment where Oleg’s mother tells him about the five years she spent in an internment camp, and the terrible things she had to do to survive.
* After worrying that it would take Mischa the entire season to make it to America, he arrives at the end of episode four. As commenters here have noted, once defectors made it through Yugoslavia — which Mischa does with the help of a football match on the radio and some sound tradecraft by his two smugglers — they were more or less clear of Soviet reach. Now the question becomes how long it takes him to find Philip, and what happens when he does.
* Last week, I was so turned around by Poor Martha’s cameo in The World’s Saddest Grocery Store In The World to point out that the store’s manager, Ekaterina, was played by Alla Kliouka, best known as the one-legged Svetlana from The Sopranos. Bad job by me as the alleged Sopranos expert.
* Brett Tucker, who plays Elizabeth’s new pal Ben, is an Australian actor who’s previously appeared on American(ish) shows like Mistresses and Spartacus: War of the Damned. As Philip’s target Deirdre, Clea Lewis is probably best known for playing Ellen DeGeneres’ frenemy Audrey on her ’90s sitcom Ellen.
* Last week, Philip asked Elizabeth why the USSR can’t grow abundant crops like the US, given the size of their farmland. Here, Alexei offers the explanation, pointing out how primitive and dysfunctional all Soviet infrastructure is. And where Elizabeth would likely shrug off such commentary on the broken system as the ramblings of a traitor, Philip seems troubled to hear it.
What did everybody else think?
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com