The Americans is back for its fifth season, and I have a review of the premiere coming up just as soon as I do the old water cup move…
“What’s the right time?” –Elizabeth
Season four concluded with the Philip and Elizabeth’s American adventure seemingly on the verge of imploding. William’s arrest had Gabriel suggesting the time had come for them to return to Mother Russia (with Paige and an oblivious Henry in tow), and Philip’s discovery that Paige and Matthew Beeman were getting involved romantically seemed to be the last straw for keeping their current arrangement viable.
As season five begins, it appears briefly that the entire status quo has been reset. We’re now following a new teenager, Vietnamese refugee Tuan (Ivan Mok), working a potential new asset. And when Tuan’s parents come home from work, they are none other than our favorite couple, sporting new wigs and airline uniforms. It’s as if, rather than flee back to Moscow, Philip and Elizabeth simply assumed new identities, with a new family, while we weren’t looking.
In time, of course, we’ll see that this is just another temporary cover, and that they’re still mainly living in the house in Falls Church with Paige and a now power forward-sized Henry. But opening the season like this is a clever way for Fields and Weisberg to deke to the left of that blatantly fake cliffhanger they set up last year.
Obviously, Philip and Elizabeth weren’t going to abandon their identities and move back to the Soviet Union, not with two seasons of the show still to go, not with Stan nowhere near finding out who his neighbors really are. It worked as a way to convey just how precarious things had gotten for the Jenningses, even after their seven-month break from action, and it gave us the chance to have fun speculating about a Gift of the Magi situation where Philip is heading home at the exact moment Mischa is coming to America in search of his long-lost father. But purely as a “What on Earth is going to happen next?” cliffhanger, it didn’t have much juice, and “Amber Waves” pretty much just shrugs it off as something suggested in the heat of a dire moment, and abandoned once it became clear that William hadn’t given them up. I’m glad the series didn’t try to double down on the fake suspense of it all by teasing out the idea throughout the premiere, but the end result is an hour that’s a bit flatter and more expository than some of the show’s better season-openers.
Still, the family that Tuan is helping Philip and Elizabeth get next to work as a smart and unsettling parallel to their own home situation. Pasha, like Paige, is a child of Soviets who had no say in his current American circumstance. The difference is that Pasha’s father Alexei has nothing but awful things to say about the USSR, and Philip and Elizabeth have to sit there and listen to him speak ill of the Motherland — from a much more informed perspective than when they hear an American do it — as part of their assignment, and just smile.
Alexei’s complaints aren’t going to sway them off their mission, but his comments about the skimpy food supply back home are confirmed by our first glimpse of Oleg in his new role with the food ministry, where his job will involve ferreting out the people and organizations responsible for disrupting the food supply. This feels different from Nina’s time in the USSR, because she was always a prisoner on some level, where Oleg is not only free but a KGB officer who’s the son of an influential family. He can go anywhere and see anything, which offers us a more thorough and candid view of the cause Philip and Elizabeth are fighting for than we’ve ever gotten in the past. Couple that with Mischa’s travels out of the Soviet Union and through other Eastern Bloc countries like Yugoslavia, and the show is giving us the glimpse of the crumbling Soviet empire that the Jennings clan isn’t getting while they stay on mission.
Philip’s anger over the Matthew/Paige situation has simmered down to something more manageable, and we see parents and daughter waging a cold war of their own, with Philip and Elizabeth letting the relationship stand for now because they have no other choice, even as Paige seems to be continuing it as much out of rebellion as because she likes Matthew. Her parents’ double lives continue to sit on her like an oppressive weight that barely allows her to breathe, and when she complains of nightmares from Elizabeth’s killing of the mugger, Philip tells her that it will get better in time.
“I don’t want it to get better!” she objects, still not fully comprehending exactly what her parents do and what they’re capable of letting go.
The episode climaxes with a lengthy bit of old business, as Gabriel sends the spy couple, Hans, and a small army of other local assets to break into Fort Detrick to exhume William’s body and obtain a biological sample that contains the virus that killed him. This mission takes up nearly 15 minutes of screen time, most of it dialogue-free as we simply watch people dig up a grave. That’s an eternity of screen time, even for a show that moves as deliberately as this one, and while the length both captures just how difficult this work can be and the sense of impending doom — which claims Hans after a cut hand exposes him to the virus, after which Elizabeth shoots him in the head — it probably could have been tightened up and still delivered the same overall effect.
But watching Elizabeth execute a young man she had recruited into this line of work, had spent months training and nurturing, it was hard not to think of Paige — not only because she’s now undergoing a modified version of the same process Hans once did, but because we know that for Elizabeth, this will get better. And God help Paige if she’s in this business long enough to learn to compartmentalize like that.
Some other thoughts:
* Hans’ death would have hit a little harder if he hadn’t been so marginalized for most of season four, where he barely had any dialogue at all, and was mainly used as a glorified extra to show that Philip and Elizabeth had someone running counter-surveillance for them.
* Season 4 ended on the day of the 1984 Super Bowl, which was on January 22, and the Jennings clan is preparing to watch the Olympics, which FX clarified was meant to be the Winter Games in Sarajevo, that ran from February 9-19 of that year. So a little under a month at most has passed in between, which fits the show’s usual between-season M.O., but which means Philip and Elizabeth either got the Tuan operation up very quickly, or it’s been going on for a while but never mentioned before.
* Character Actress Margo Martindale’s schedule is a bit more flexible these days — and her latest regular series role is on a show run by Americans producer Graham Yost — which perhaps helped lead to Claudia popping up all the way at the start of a season, where she and Gabriel can discuss all things Jennings. The two handlers still view our couple differently, with Claudia suggesting, “Nothing scares those two,” And Gabriel retorting, “Everything scares those two.”
* When Mischa is going through the airport, we briefly see a man behind him who resembles Gabriel, but turns out to be not him, since the man himself is of course back in America.
* We mostly see Stan here in the context of his friendship with Philip, and as the father of Paige’s boyfriend, but when he’s at work, we see that he feels guilty at the thought that the Soviets might have figured out that Oleg helped him take down William. Once, they were the bitterest of enemies, but Oleg’s decision to give up a major operation like that for the greater good really changed Stan’s opinion of him.
* Not a ton of ’80s music this week, but we hear “That’s Good” by Devo when Tuan and Pasha talk in the cafeteria, in addition to the Russian language cover of “America the Beautiful” playing over the farmland footage.
* A fair amount of ’80s pop culture on display, though: Tuan watches The A-Team, Paige reads John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire (whose film adaptation, starring Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe, will be released about a month after the events of this episode), and Paige wears an Esprit sweatshirt.
What did everybody else think?
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com