A lot happened on this week’s episode of The Americans. Stan and Aderholdt trolled bathrooms for sources. Paige learned more about the family business. Philip and Elizabeth had a Midwest adventure that started with cowboy hats and love songs and ended with them using what appeared to be a WWE tag-team maneuver on a bug expert named Randy. But you can read our review if you want to talk about that. We are here to talk about the other thing. We are here to talk about…
… and I’m going to pause here so any spoilerphobes can bail in a hurry…
… Martha.
Yup, we got a Martha sighting, people. In a supermarket. In Russia. For the first time since Philip put her on a plane in season four with the FBI closing in on the both of them. And Martha is doing okay! Uh, ish!
The reveal was really something, too. Oleg marched into a market to interrogate a store owner about her produce — where she got it, how, whose palms had to be greased in the process, NAMES, OLEG WANTS NAMES — and as he was leaving the camera lingered on a woman in one of the aisles. Really lingered. She turned around and heeeeyyyyy…
It was nice to see her, right? Even for a second. Even in silence. Just as confirmation she’s okay, and didn’t end up getting Nina’d in some dim basement for knowing too much about too many things. If we’re being honest, that probably had little chance of being the case both because Martha was too important for too long to kill offscreen and because Americans executive producer Graham Yost was the showrunner on Justified, about which he famously said, “unless you see someone zipped up in a body bag, they’re probably okay” (although I suppose “mangled and stuffed in a suitcase” also counts, if we want to be technical and Americans-specific here), but still, nice.
It’s strange. Martha is very much a traitor to her country, even if it all started unwittingly. She recorded conversations in the FBI and didn’t turn Philip in even after he de-wigged himself in front of her. She fled the country with the help of her Russian spy lover and was set up by the KGB once she landed on the soil of America’s stated enemy. If you wrote up her arc on this show as a cold, facts-only newspaper story (front page, as high-level Cold War treason merits), you’d have a hard time rooting for her. She could have caused a nuclear war, for Pete’s sake.
And yet, there I was, more than a little excited to see her perusing those mostly barren shelves, grabbing various canned goods and Russian brand foodstuffs, scarf on her head like she’s adapting a bit. She didn’t look lost or overwhelmed, either. Not really. She was just a single lady shopping for one in a grocery store, like she was in America. It’s kind of a sad story with a sad ending (if it is really the ending?), but it was still nice to check-in.
Now we just need an update on Mail Robot.
