In Which She Was There For More Than A Few Years

Oh, Say. Can You See?

by ETHAN PETERSON

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg
FX

Keri Russell, 41, and Matthew Rhys, 42, changed everything through their love. At the beginning of The Americans, they fought a lot and never seemed to penetrate each othe's emotional defenses at key times. Their real-life marriage altered the deal. Now in the middle of this fifth, penultimate season, one addresses questions posed for the other. Their daughter Paige asks if they feel like their names actually are Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings. "Yes," Rhys answers for both of them. "But I miss my old name." He does not say it, or tell it to his daughter. But we know it well.

Finally these married spies are thinking about going home to Russia. A part of us knows that they will never make it there, or survive in that unforgiving place. For the first time in the show's history, this season has attempted to give us a taste of what life was like before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Before, during, and after the Cold War most Americans did not know what life was actually like in the Soviet Union. The Americans depicts Moscow as a sinister, unforgiving limbo. The mere idea of leaving Washington D.C. and its environs for this place fills us all with a deep and abject horror.

Life in D.C. has become sufficiently ridiculous for the only son of these two spies, a growing boy named Henry (Keidrich Sellati). Henry is at the age when he has no real use for his parents, and he has devised a plan to separate himself from them permanently. He has met a lovely young woman named Chris with whom he plans to abscond to a New Hampshire boarding school. "Senators went there!" he shakily announces to his parents, who are gobsmacked. I don't actually believe any parents would stifle their boy's dreams in this fashion.

Paralyzed by the fear of what their retirement might mean, every murder or act of sabotage takes on additional heft. So they hold Russia up, as their last impossible dream, and the American writers who shape their lives tear it down. In order to show us what would await them, The Americans has given us Oleg (the marvelous, pleasantly scrutable Australian actor Costa Ronin) was moved from his duties in the U.S. home to be near his family. He occupies a small room in his family's apartment. All the women he loved are dead or gone. His mother and father are even more devoted to him than ever, since his brother has perished in Afghanistan.

Oleg learns that his mother served more than a few years in a camp as penance for some non-crime. It was beyond his father's capabilities to help her then, and she explains that in return for fucking the camp doctor, she was given perks such as a blanket and extra food. His knowledge of what happened to his mother in the society he props up through his work in the KGB makes him deeply jaded. In one powerful scene he stares out at Moscow; the wish in his eyes is to burn it all down.

Some societies – now that I think of it, every society – comes to this burning point, where they feed on their own inefficiencies and collapse if they do not have certain basic operating principles that allow healing on a macro scale. True democracies always have the opportunity to take this positive step. The Americans does not really explore the various foibles of their own country, except when it comes to the fetid, cliquish FBI, the only mirror of the enemy which does not come across as a resounding win for the United States. It is not moral scruples which prevents Agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) from eclipsing the fervor of his enemy. He just has better things to do.

The best scene in the entire season featured a double date, KGB and FBI. It was the first time Keri Russell's "character" had met Renee (Laurie Holden), a woman Stan had begun dating after the collapse of his marriage. Team KGB openly wonders whether she is a plant to spy on Stan and keep him in check, and regretfully decide they will probably never know the answer.

The concept of having another person's happiness in your hands comes up again and again in The Americans. It is akin to a weird sort of godhood in a country whose main figure of worship is Ronald Reagan.

It took far too many episodes to resolve the subplot of Paige Jennings (Holly Taylor), who finds her priest's diary entries about her. All in all, Paige took this information in good stride, and she seems to finally understand how much her parents must trust her to make her complicit in their work lives. Taylor is a phenomenal actress who ably communicates a sterling range of emotions lurking beneath the surface. The writers of The Americans, knowing how little is actually required to make her scenes interesting, probably have lingered on her too long as a crutch.

Every possible dilemma the spies have faced in their personal life has now been explored. A subtlety of purpose and horror has replaced conventional twists and turns. The Americans has always been fairly short on action, but in the eleven episodes remaining in the show's run, we get to build to the ultimate moment: when Stan Beeman is informed of what a total oblivious, hot dog-eating chump he really is. If Phillip's son Mischa never gets to meet his father, I will take it very personally.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

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 On Some Level We Were Happy For Paige

If This Feeling Flows Both Ways

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Moving to Nairobi is the best thing that ever happened to Tatiana Evgenyevna.  Outside of the American embassy, she has the largest office in Kenya. Sure, the guys in her department are a bit weird, but who cares? There are plenty of more worldly men in the foreign service for her to prey upon. What she did to Oleg drove him straight into the arms of the father of the guy with first dibs on Paige Jennings.

Paige's first kiss remains an enjoyable succour. It had been a long time in coming, and the fact that it occurred with a fellow who can drive her around and who is about as unreliable as peanut butter and jelly made it all the sweeter. Her perception has always been that her mother was the stronger, more dominant partner in her parents' relationship. This guiding force marks every step of her relationships with men, for it is only the very strongest people who do not on some level mimic the person who gave them life.

I worry about the impact on Henry. Despite looking like he is in his early twenties, everyone treats Henry like he just got off the ship to America. "Henry, do you want a fucking popsicle!" Philip shouted at one point. It isn't nice to make fun of your son, unless he is more addicted to video games with some really horrid graphics than he should be.

There should be more to Matthew Beeman. He is just so devoid of any content. He seems depressed, honestly, and when you think about it there is only one other individual on the show so deeply unhappy with what fate has brought him. Frank Langella's morbid, historical Gabriel has no woman to warm his bed. He lives in a house that looks like it belongs in World War II era Smolensk and he can't even get decent borscht unless he makes the garish substance himself.

Such maudlin people generally come to a defining decision that their entire lives have been building towards. For Gabriel, it cannot be betraying his country. It can be taking the blame for the people he loves most: namely, Philip and Elizabeth. Now that their vacation is over, it is back to straight murdering. Reviewing all those past murders (Elizabeth doesn't even count her kills) is immaterial, because it would make us realize the hard truth that there is only one hero in the Jennings household, and it recently made out at length with Matthew Beeman.

Paige's invaluable reports on the guy she has been tonguing alarmed her parents, but I was more alarmed by the lack of detail. "His mouth felt like sandpaper and tasted like pop tarts," for example.

Stan's comment that they should tear down the entire FBI building was pretty apt. It appeared his previous conversation with Oleg was the best possible tact to get him to come back with actual, useful information. No word on whether Stan will start exchanging soft kisses with this new Russian turncoat. As Oleg, Costa Ronin is a captivating performer, and the gorgeous hallway scenes with him and Tatiana were delicate and reminiscent of period film.

It is time for something very bad to happen to Oleg. His conversation with gorgeous mother suggested as much, and we have never really seen him the slightest bit uncomfortable, except romantically. It will be fun to see him broken down or followed by Elizabeth and Phillip, and I would expect a new head of the Russian branch of the KGB in Washington as well after Oleg's leaks work their way back home. I guess it also possible this is his way of saving Tatiana from Africa.

Next week's season finale focuses on the capture of scientist William Crandal. Since we know he will never give Philip up since the man is his closest buddy and most intimate friend/father figure, I would expect him to give up Gabriel, who I am spnot sure he ever liked much anyway. The Americans has only two seasons left, and since it doesn't come back until next year, they will want something salacious to get people talking. We always knew Paige's first time would be special.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"How Wonderful" - Young Magic (mp3)