In Which We Dig Up All Our Colleagues

The Way to Slovenia

by HEATHER MCROBIE

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg
FX

Digging a hole and getting stuck in it isn’t a subtle metaphor. The last season of The Americans saw our favourite spies contemplating their escape – being offered the chance to return to Russia – but here we meet them, stuck in repetition compulsion, still in America and still trying to dig up. Between the end of the show's fourth season and this week's premiere, increasing evidence has piled up of Russian involvement in the presidential election, and allegations of wiretapping fill our 2017 headlines, so our fictional Soviet spies are not the only ones trying to dig themselves out of a mess.

Elizabeth and Philip, aka Nadezhda and Mischa, are excavating the body of a colleague who was caught, infected with the disease he’d been tasked with taking back to the USSR, and died in the hands of the CIA. So there is unfinished work here, and when their colleague cuts himself as they try to retrieve a tissue sample from the corpse’s body, Elizabeth tells him in reassuring tones that it’s okay, don’t worry – and then shoots him.

There is new work too, as Elizabeth and Philip play at happy families under new identities with their new Vietnamese ‘adopted son’, Tuan. Elizabeth and Philip work for an airline under this identity, presumably because the show refused to finish without having a character wear a quasi-nautical Duran Duran-style double-breasted suit.

Tuan makes awkward conversation at school with the new kid who has just arrived from the Soviet Union. The details of the school cafeteria makes us think for a moment that we are watching another 80s coming-of-age drama. Then we are back in Moscow, where Oleg, just returned from his posting in America, has given the new assignment of sniffing out corruption amongst the nomenklatura, the Soviet elite in which he was raised. It might make for awkward conversations with his family, but his boss tells good jokes.

In a hint, finally, to all the therapy that teenage daughter Paige will one day require, she tells her mother she has been having nightmares since she saw her mother kill a mugger at the end of the last season. Her mother takes her down to the garage and starts pushing her around to teach her self-defence. Meanwhile, the blossoming romance between Paige and Matthew, the teenage son of the friendly neighbourhood FBI agent, is concerning her parents. But who knows, maybe they would be concerned anyway – it’s always hard to map over what would be problems in some parallel universe in which they are a normal family.

Playing at being another normal family, with their son Tuan and under their new guise as airline employees, Elizabeth/Nadezhda and Philip/ Mischa have dinner with the family of Russians who have defected to the west. The father of Tuan’s awkward new Soviet classmate speaks like a stock character out of the Robin Williams’ 1994 film Moscow on the Hudson, of how full the supermarkets are in America. He isn’t wrong, of course, but his wife looks embarrassed, and he doesn’t seem to notice or care that his wife looks embarrassed.

In the kitchen, where the knives are kept, Elizabeth/ Nadezhda and the wife of the family of defectors make small talk about learning English and recipes, and Nadezhda, as Elizabeth, gives advice to the other woman about how to make a home here. But we hate to meet those who have come to a place for the opposite reasons to the reasons that brought us there, and in the car home afterwards Elizabeth/ Nadezhda expresses her frustration at their new ‘friends’ and their seduction by the west.

The sexiest new cast member of The Americans this season is 80s Yugoslavia, the kind of edgy new high-school kid of twentieth century ideology shown here as Mischa’s son – released from a psychiatric institution at the end of last season – makes his way to Slovenia. Yugoslavia, having split from the Soviets some thirty years earlier, is reminder of the ambiguities and alternatives that exist to the show’s usual Washington DC versus Moscow binary.

A decade later and the hills you can see in the Yugoslav bus ride would be covered in soldiers, as Tito’s state ripped to pieces. For now, Mischa’s son is in this liminal place, slowly making his way west, away from home but towards his father.

Heather McRobie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about the Mecca Mall.

In Which They Consider Themselves The Awkward Stepchildren Of The Nuclear Age

Pleasures of the Open Air

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg

Next to a nude man in a queen-sized bed, Elizabeth Jennings slightly uncovers herself so that her asshole can experience the routine pleasures of the open air. It is always pleasant to wake up next to someone before they do. Their lives are in your hands, or at least remain perilously close to your hands, for those fleeting moments.

When I was a kid I had a friend who never liked to leave his bed. He did all his homework there. Sometimes he convinced me to sit on it and play the game of Life; other times I requested we do so on a table like human beings. If there is no safe place, then a place must be made safe. I have developed plans to place this sentiment on a bumper sticker and merchandise it on several platforms.

Nothing really changed on the family's vacation except Paige is now working people like a pro and Elizabeth feels moral compunction over some simple blackmail. It was honestly his fault for going up to her apartment in the first place and drinking wine. Then, he demurred at the slightest touch of her hand to his leg - bullshit. He knew why he was up there, he just wanted to seem somewhat reluctant to make them both feel better.

Pastor Fucking Tim can't leave well enough alone. When someone goes out of their way to secure you a great deal on international travel, you do not tell him that his daughter is sad. Tim will likely never come back from this African country, panicking his wife. Then he will show up suddenly with an African bride. Tim's ill-advised trip to Africa reminded me of how little an impact racism or sexism plays in the Cold War.

Despite the fact that Oleg seems to sleep with every single one of his gendered colleagues, nothing is made of this and the elegant, hardscrabble Tatiana seems to be using him for intel. It is still kind of messed up that they are so willing to be with this whimpering sod of a KGB officer. When Oleg finds out, defects to the United States and begins to feed her false intel, this will make Tatiana even more ridiculous. Unless this has already occurred?

Sleeping with other people, or pretending to, is the main intelligence-gathering function for women in the KGB. Just once I would love to see Elizabeth get what she needs by friendzoning some poor security guard. Presumably things are the same on the American side – we will never know since the closest thing to a woman operative is Agent Gaad's wife, who has taken him to Thailand for debriefing. For some, The Day After came and went a long time ago.

Paige's slow descent in agentdom is going better than ever, but it would be fun to see Hans get more screentime on the show as a boy she casually meets at church and brings home to her parents. They could sit on the edge of her bed and listen to records. I doubt she is wanting to talk much about God, but she could tell him all about her parents, and how all their friends are as straight and white as the day is long.

While Elizabeth was babysitting three Korean-American children, she taught them all the ways of her people. Pizza, racquetball and Chevrolets. It is impossible not to become addicted on some level to what is on offer, precisely because of the availability. We get good at everything we do repeatedly, finding all the shortcuts. If Elizabeth were to disappear to another part of the country, leaving all this behind, we sense she could do it without a second thought. Masks become habits.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

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In Which Anger Is A Concept Purely Developed By The Americans

Son of a Preacher Man

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg

"Anger is a concept," Philip's therapist explains to him on this fourth season of The Americans. He follows up an energetic session with a bald man who is a subtle parody of Walter White by taking Stan Beeman's ex-wife Sandra (Susan Misner) out to dinner. For a certain type of man anything is more gratifying than being with his wife, no matter how silly.

The Americans is now the Philip show. We see the world through his flashbacks, which revolve around smashing a little boy in the head with a rock. (The boy in question suggested that dating your co-star was maybe not the best career move.) To suggest that he regrets this one, first murder above all the other deaths he has caused describes an invigorating softness that has begun encroaching on all of his life. 

Philip infects everything around him with this sentimentality. It is not kindness, because he rarely does good things for anyone he meets. When Beeman violently explains that Phillip was seen laughing at a restaurant with Sandra, he does little to assuage the FBI man's concerns. He uses an innocent moment as a excuse for something else, a way to push things in the direction that most benefits his own interests. Such a morality could never suit a loving father.

This suggests a calculated, sociopathic nature from which Philip can never quite free himself. Whatever closeness on The Americans brought Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys together in real life is being shied away from now. He is at peace in his relationship with Elizabeth, but it is no longer his prime relationship. Watching them walk down a block together was the creepiest part of this first episode. They looked like they had done it a million times.

The Americans thrived on an illicit intimacy. The show feels strangely cold without there being someone desperately in love with someone else, since wasn't that the entire point of international espionage to being with? Even Nina Krilova (Annet Mahendru) has been reduced to a cold fish who can't even get a Jewish scientist sexually involved with her. Is no one attracted to anyone else since Reagan termed their country the evil empire?

Philip has unwittingly passed although this cold, dangerous naivete to his daughter Paige. Never look up Holly Taylor's Instagram — you will suddenly come to the conclusion that there is no Paige, and there has not been one for years, maybe even thousands of years.

But it is not just Paige, a patriot so devout she cannot stand to make the Pledge of Allegiance under these trying circumstances. One lie gets so out of control it ruins the lives of other, peripheral people, who are engaged by the deception on a subconscious level. Stan Beeman takes this falsehood with him wherever he goes, like a picture in his wallet.

Stan is flipping through the newspaper while his new squeeze, Tori (Callie Thorne),is getting dressed. Her makeup and clothes take over an hour to prepare, so he must kill the time before she is ready to emerge with him into the world.

It is not quite accurate to say that Stan loathes her, he just senses she is passing through, and maybe he is managing a similar transparency. He hasn't been the same since he met Philip Jennings; no one has.

Philip's relationship with Martha (Alison Wright) has come to a natural end, but I guess they still wanted to keep her on the show. It is believable that she has grown so accustomed to the idea of Clark (Claaaaark) as her husband that she would forgive the death of a colleague. After all, she knew what she was getting into when she married him. But the fact that he committed the murder himself and told her about it, even describing the circumstances, makes him a monster so complete that it would appall virtually any person's inner sense.

If she was going to accept him as she is, The Americans should have made a bigger deal of that, since it would made his faux relationship more honest and engaging than his marriage.

In past seasons, we have fully exorcised the demons which haunted Keri Russell's sleeper agent; her rape at the hands of a colleague, the development of love for a husband thrust upon her. The Americans struggles to find a dilemma of the same importance in her adopted country. Elizabeth is not a natural mother, and her scenes with Paige seem strange and disconnected, so there is no precarious line of trust or love with which to balance the ongoing reveal of information about the Jennings' life as spies. It just seems like two people talking to the air.

This leaves a real emotional gap on the program. There is no new villain, as of yet, nothing for Philip and Elizabeth to overcome. All their enemies have been reduced through innuendo and murder to mere shreds of what they once were. At this point I am really wondering how Russia did not manage to win the Cold War.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. You can follow him on Instagram here.

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