In Which Martha Hanson Strays From The Path

Clark?

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg

Who among us hasn't wanted to give Martha a tight little punch in the chest? On The Americans, everyone gets a receipt for what they've done.

The notion of karma was invented in 1938 by a Ukranian tailor who emigrated to Sand Hill, NJ. His given name was Terence Hordiyenko, and he came to this country seeking a brighter future for his two daughters, Enid and Caroline. Enid was a soft girl who did not really fit into her new country. The younger Caroline fit in well, and joined others in mocking her younger sister. But her sister invented a process for stitching dresses more quickly, and Caroline never married. Still her father, who was called T-Bone by his friends, loved Caroline more than Enid. On his death bed he turned his unwanted daughter away, and God made his first appearance in New Jersey. God said, "Because you did not love both of your daughters, I have decided not to call you T-Bone in the hereafter." T-Bone was saddened by this, but he understood.

If you sleep with another person's betrothed, who knows what they will call you in the afterlife.

It bothers me sometimes that we have forgotten what Stan Beeman did. He cheated on his wife with a KGB agent. Why is that never brought up? Agent Gaad should have simply explained that he was playing "the long game" with Martha. "Playing the long game" is a fantastic excuse that I use whenever I don't want to do laundry, make borscht for dinner, or watch whatever is left of Broad City.

Even the most disturbing partnerships are in fact partnerships. A weird sexual tension perverts every relationship of its kind: friendships are rarely so entwined. Without their parents it is only natural that Paige feels a closeness with Henry that goes beyond the strictures of traditional brother-sister behavior. Her metaphoric pouring into his cup made me think of Tijuana. It was there, also in 1938, that remorse was defined as a philosophical concept.

But now the year is 1983. Stan Beeman is maybe the worst FBI agent in the office besides his direct boss. They have Martha, I mean they really have her, and Stan is channeling visions of himself lying down with Martha and then torturing her in some flophouse on Martin Luther King Boulevard. You see, if Stan was in a similar situation, the only thing he could think to do was kill himself. And the irony is, of course, that he is in that exact situation.

Elizabeth shows up at Rock Creek Park. We never see the gun in her pocket, and why even bother? Maybe it's a needle filled with poison, or a picture of herself in coitus with Clark Westerfeld. Either would be just as effective in stopping the beating of Martha's heart. Clark knows his mark better than anyone, and even if she needed the story of him joining her in Moscow, she'd lose faith at another lie.

It seems clear Martha will not be making it to Moscow, which is a damn shame. The show was better off with her comic relief. I don't really see how she is useful to Russia anymore, and if she was smarter she probably could have got something by lying to the FBI and explaining she was blackmailed into cooperating.

She could have told them about Clark, and Frank Langella, and maybe the rat in the fridge would have bought her a house in the Hamptons. She could tell them phone numbers, places, dates, the particulars of the Kama Sutra. How Clark fucked her, loved her, and left her. Even if they didn't believe her, she would have still been an American.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

Previously on the Americans

Young and Foolish - Episode Six

It's Enough Paige - Episode Five

Birdwatching in Winter - Episode Four

Makeup - Episode Three

Church Garb - Episode Two

Son of a Preacher Man - Episode One

"Magnificent Time" - Travis (mp3)

In Which You Should Always Be Careful What You Tell Clark Westerfeld

So Young and Foolish

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg

You should always be careful what you tell anybody, but this goes double for a woman. There is a Clark Westerfeld living in Atlanta. He takes a flight from Atlanta, or sometimes he drives overnight if he really has to see his girlfriend. When he gets there, the two are both so overwhelmed with desire that he says, I love you Martha, I want to be with you forever Martha. He plays that Tom Waits song on the cassette deck and then he tells her who he works for. The United Nations.

That would have been a much finer move. Tom Waits' song "Martha" is about calling up someone you used to love and reminiscing about the past. It is an arrogant jam, because the misogynistic caller presumes that this woman remembers him in an identical fashion. He goes on to describe how completely old she is, and suggests subtly that she was probably wasting her time not being with him.

It is in the grand tradition of romanticizing a romance that seems better or more essential to self-preservation in retrospect. We want to believe that such people are key parts of our lives, simply because they were present for certain events or feelings. Clark's relationship with Martha has come to its end, and she has found that out in the most facile possible way. She should feel lucky that she never has to see the same places — her apartment, her job — as she did when Clark Westerfeld was in her life. It would only make the parting more difficult.

When Clark demanded that his hairless albino handler mind Martha while he was away having cute convos with traitorous chemists, he made an assumption based on the Martha he knew, not the one existing now. A woman needs to be gently reassured. (A man also needs to be gently reassured.) But I don't believe the idea that Clark would suddenly stop lying once it was clear Martha needed his lies the most, needed new lies which suited her life as a single woman on the run.

Elizabeth showing up to cockblock Clark never seemed like the greatest move. She is not really that appealing in her get up as Clark's sister, although she is a lot more attractive than whatever facial disfigurement is being accentuated on Agent Gad's visage.

Elizabeth's disappointment that Clark showed himself to Martha without his disguise was hilarious, considering his blonde highlights mask his true self about as well as her glasses. Weisberg and his writing team of sociopaths already disposed of one treasonous woman, and I don't believe they intend to make it two. Martha's fate isn't in Moscow, either. I believe she would have been an ideal double agent, a storyline The Americans has almost never explored. Plus we could have teased Clark possibly turning on his own country, in favor of the greatest nation since ancient Mesopotamia.

Clark misunderstood completely the woman he married. As a native Russian, he can never fully fathom what is in the heart of a warm-blooded American woman. When her gun is taken away from her, or anyone, they start to feel a lot less safe. When her pills are taken away or even slightly reshuffled in her purse, she begins to pull her hair out at intervals.

The lyrics to Martha, which Tom Waits wrote in order to stick to a woman who had dumped him for a man with a paying job, are incredibly passive-aggressive:

How's your husband? and how's the kids? you know that I got married too?
Lucky that you found someone to make you feel secure.

It is like, wow, Tom, this woman must feel really lucky that she has someone in her life that doesn't make her feel as shitty as you are doing in this song at this time. Moreover, the idea that you are also married is bullshit. And even if you did get married, things did not work out. The misanthropy in these lyrics is enough to make you call out for Clark in the night, and have unprotected sex with him after his arrival.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"The Glow" - Big Data ft. Kimbra (mp3)

"Snowed In" - Big Data ft. Rivers Cuomo (mp3)

In Which All Our Inner Thoughts Resemble Pamphlets Of Questionable Origin

It's Enough Paige

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Americans
creator Joe Weisberg

We no longer have to suffer through Nina's reincarnation as Mother Teresa as a stranger in a strange land. It nearly drove me crazy to watch people talk about how moving it was. If they ever have Martha chewed up by a wood chipper on The Americans, then I will cry genuine tears. Until then they will be of the crocodile variety.

Then again, it probably affected me on some level, since I have spent the last day and a half placidly responding, "Paige, it's too much," to every single question I am asked, including "What kind of toast do you want with that?" and "Who will you be voting for in New York's Democratic primary?"

It was a little mean when Elizabeth (Keri Russell) started ragging on Ronald Reagan's rosy cheeks, especially since she has not had color in her face since the days of Felicity. Watching her and Philip having real life sex turned The Americans into a stag film. I kept waiting for a dramatic pan to Paige watching her mother humping her father, but it never came. Philip would probably just have made eye contact with her and said, "Good," while Paige's mother informed her daughter that it was too much.

Paige sure knew how to work over Pastor Tim. He stared at her like she was a piece of candy, and after having to spend mere minutes with Pastor Tim's gossipy malingering wife Alice we all understood why. She talked to him with all the dignity of a guest on Howard Stern. The ringer they brought in to vouch for their heroic actions in El Salvador probably would not have been wasted on Paige either.

Even less believable was our Moscow friend whining about how he lost his brother in a war that he is not permitted to name. I mean, one woman gets executed and it's enough to throw the entire idea of the Soviet Union in question?

Stan Beeman should have informed him that traitors in America share much the same fate. Well I guess some do, others are honored as respected neighbors and FBI agents have best friend type relationships with their son. When it comes to getting weird amounts of praise about your Trivial Pursuit acumen, nothing – I repeat nothing – beats your neighbor's ignored teenager.

Stan's desultory son Matthew scares the shit out of all thinking people. Just looking at his face is enough to make you insecure about the future of America. This is the kind of child Martha probably would have emitted from her secretarial loins, so it is probably a damn good thing that her childbearing years were spent in a hot cuddle with Clarke's wig. Matthew is probably in solitary confinement somewhere in Indiana as we speak.

The Americans would be a lot more entertaining if Philip's affection for Martha were a little more believable. I can buy that he is concerned about her welfare, but even the idea that he ignored calls from her for two days while she was having a romantic dinner with a colleague seems to prove that he sees her as just another Paige, albeit a Paige whose body he explores in the many arcane ways the wizened men of the Asian continent prescribed that people could pleasure one another.

It is time to bring the Martha storyline to its inexorable conclusion, since watching Clarke violently take her from behind cannot possibly approach the intimacy we witness between a real couple. Love ideally would ravish the world of The Americans — how does Frank Langella get his rocks off, for example? What about Agent Gad, or the head of the Rezidentura?

One of the great things about The Americans is the depth it gives to these smaller characters, like the Mary Kay saleswoman Elizabeth seems intent on romancing for some reason. The people Russia preys upon seem completely innocent, although we must know in our hearts that they are not. In the end, Philip and Elizabeth are more loyal and virtuous than Pastor Tim, whose criticisms of U.S. foreign policy resemble a deranged Noam Chomsky pamphlet.

But Paige just won't understand her destiny to become the Jason Bourne of the George Herbert Walker Bush era, which basically seems like the good old days. Also, WTF was that t-shirt she was wearing? Her mother does not understand that all Paige requires is one carrot enticing her to a more appealing life than her status as an absent daughter in the D.C. suburbs.  Has she thought about maybe being executed abroad?

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Be Anything" - Brass Bed (mp3)