1x03 Gregory

[7.7/10] It’s hard to know what trust and loyalty mean in the world of espionage. Your entire job is to deceive people, to forge connections with them and then use those connections when it’s convenient and discard them when they’re no longer useful. What can things like love, friendship, or even professional courtesy even mean in that world?

At a minimum, it would leave everyone involved pretty fucked up, it would leave all of those relationships on shaky ground, and the chance for things to go wrong, for people to get hurt, exceedingly high.

The most compelling part of “Gregory” is the wedge driven by its title character. When signs emerge that implicate the Jennings’ old partner, Robert (the one who died of a stab wound in the pilot), they decide to enlist the title character, an African American man from Philadelphia who’s been an ally to them for years, to help ferret out what’s going on.

But Gregory isn’t just an ally. He has been, up until now, Elizabeth’s lover and paramour. They initially have a playful, knowing air about one another, until Elizabeth tries to end things with Gregory, telling him that things are changing between her and Phillip. It’s a confirmation that the Jennings’ marriage has been a loveless one until this point, and it sends Gregory smarting, feeling as though Elizabeth is chasing a lie and leaving their shared truth behind.

It’s something Gregory goes so far as to confront Phillip with. It’s the weakest stretch of the episode, but despite the writerly monologue used to convey the idea, Gregory forces Phillip to confront whether what he has with Elizabeth is real, whether it’s love, and tries to push Phillip away from his wife to make room for Gregory, little realizing that he’s revealing this secret relationship that Elizabeth had otherwise kept under wraps to her husband.

Gregory could have picked a better time though. It turns out that the signals the Jennings had been picking up were from Robert’s secret wife, another major relationship that had been hidden from those who claimed to partners with one another. This woman, Joyce, had a child with Robert, a little baby named Oscar, but knew nothing, or at least very little about his job.

That presents a dilemma for the Jennings, and for Gregory. On the one hand, Robert told Joyce to reach out to them in the event he didn’t come home. He clearly trusted them, wanted them to look after her and put her in touch with the right people. This is something he kept from them, and yet he believed, or at least hoped, that he and the Jennings were close enough that they wouldl help his wife and child even if they were unknown to one another up until this point.

But Joyce is also a threat to them. She is not a part of their world, though quickly puts two and two together. She can’t be trusted to keep their secret at all costs. Every breath she takes puts not only the Jennings, but the Directorate S program at risk.

It doesn't help that the FBI is hot on her trail. Stan’s part of this episode is in using his detective skills to put the bead on Joyce and hopefully find the deep cover KGB agents who, unbeknownst to him, include the same guy he’s both lobbing racquetballs and ham-fisted metaphors with down at the local gym.

The cat-and-mouse part of the episode is intriguing, both because it once again puts the Jennings and Stan on opposite sides of the same case without knowing it, but also because it shows Stan being good at his job. After Gregory uses his team to help Joyce lose her FBI tails, most of the feds think that Joyce is herself some sort of high-ranking agent, to be able to disappear like that. Stan’s the only one who harbors his doubts, who manages to put the pieces together and realize that, at a minimum, Joyce had some serious help, and there’s more to the story than his partners realize. It’s interesting to see the FBI chasing their own tails, while Stan is piecing things together.

As the FBI moves closer, the Jennings and Gregory have to decide what to do about Joyce. Gregory, pretty callously but pragmatically says that they should kill her and Oscar and move on, something that Phillip emphatically rejects, none too willing to accept the slightest bit of advice from Gregory after what he just heard.

That choice is also complicated by the appearance of a new handler, Claudia, played by Character Actress Margo Martindale. In an episode about people being close to one another still keeping major secrets, her interactions with Phillip center on the idea that they were much more open with their last handler, Gabriel, and that more cloak and dagger stuff is going on, even within their own organization. Claudia sends Phillip out to pick up where Robert left off, getting into a skirmish over more Star Wars missile defense plans to advance the overarching plot of the season.

But she’s also a metonym for the theme of the episode, coming off warm and motherly, welcoming Joyce and her baby into her arms, promising them an extraction to sunny Cuba, even going so far as to say that her family might even be able to visit after a time. Instead, little Oscar is taken back to Mother Russia, to Robert’s parents, and Joyce herself is made to look like she overdosed, a dead end for the FBI rather than a lead into their organization. It is the Goodfellas-esque double-edged sword of this life, where people play nice and gesture toward ideas of fraternity, but when you pose a threat or outlive your usefulness, you and yours will not be protected or taken care of.

That same idea tortures Phillip, that after fifteen years of playing man and wife, of building this family together, under whatever circumstances, Elizabeth would keep her relationship with Gregory from him. It is an emotional betrayal, the kind that seems to come cheap in their world, but which nevertheless stings from someone that Phillip believed himself to be close to.

And yet, Elizabeth explains herself. She explains that the life of Elizabeth Jennings is one she was deposited into. She didn’t have the chance at a normal life, to form normal relationships. Her relationship with Gregory was unlike any other in her life -- because it happened organically, because they shared passions, because it was a choice freely made by both of them, which allowed her to be open, to be known and seen and free in a way that no KGB-mandated marriage could afford.

But she also acknowledges that that’s changing, that through their work, through their shared lives, through that invariably rocky path from Russia to Washington D.C., she and Phillip are developing just as meaningful a connection, one that isn’t forced but comes because of what they’ll do for one another, how they feel about one another.

That sort of truth is hard to find when you’re a spy, when every person you meet could be a turncoat or an ally-of-convenience or someone you thought was a partner who’s nevertheless keeping something major from you. It’s no wonder that healthy relationships are hard to come by in that life, but The Americans is also hopeful that something precious, something real, can still emerge out of that unreal state.