2x11 Stealth

[6.8/10] This is another episode of Season 2 that feels more like a bunch of stuff happening that a cohesive or coherent episode. That can work for a show, but it means that the episode is rarely going to be more than the sum of its parts, and that’s especially mild some place here where few of the parts are all that compelling.

Honestly, it’s a larger problem with Season 2 as a whole. I went on a bit about this in the last episode, so I don’t want to belabor the point too strongly. But “Stealth” is another table setting episode, one that seems to exist more to slowly position things for the grand finale, without much incident or thematic juice to keep things interesting, and the show has started to try my patience with how much it’s spinning its wheels between here and the endgame and how little intrigue it’s injected in the proceedings in the interim.

The one thing that does move the ball is, frankly, the part of this season that I’m the least interested in. Larrick continues on the war parth, tracking down the Jennings’ handler Kate to her home torturing her for information, and then killing her.

The one good thing you can say about this interlude is that the show does a nice job of using direction, editing, and score to create a foreboding atmosphere in the scenes where Kate inuits that someone else is in the house and tried to surreptitiously prepare to defend herself. There’s a slasher flick vibe to the sequence, and it makes things much more tense than they have any right to be.

But Larrick continues to be a drag. For one thing, he’s just so Snidely Whiplash-esque as a villain that it’s hard to take him seriously. Theoretically, this guy should be understandable and even rootable for an American audience. He’s using his Navy Seal skills to track down Russian spies who killed American soldiers. But he’s framed as such a generic evil prick, who wouldn’t be out of place in some Stallone/Schwarzenegger actioner, that you can’t help but yawn at him being deposited into The Americans’s world.

Nevermind the fact that some of his choices are odd. He’s pretty quick to kill Kate before trying in earnest to get any valuable information out of her. And his whole torture routine seems to corny and theatrical. Larrick is just an action movie reject who doesn't belong here.

But his part of the episode at least advances the thing that seems to be the lynchpin of the season’s endgame, which is Jared, a.k.a. Emmett and Liane’s son.

It’s the thing that roughly unites the different sides of the show. On the one hand you have Stan, who has figured out that Emmett and Liane were illegals and so is trying to use Jared as a tool to figure out what else and more importantly who else they might have been connected to. You have Kate’s hidden warning to the Jennings to “get Jared out” which suggests that the kid is at risk from Larrick, which presumably implicates him as the guy who killed Emmett and Liane, despite his protests to the contrary. And finally you have the human connection between the Jennings and their dearly departed comrades, that makes Philip and Elizabeth want to protect Jared in honor of their fallen friends, and as a way for them to work out their concerns about their own children, who are straining to break free of the leash, little knowing the risks.

The other thing that connects the disparate part of this episode is the search to steal and/or defend stealth technology. The opening scene sees Baklanov in Russia telling Vasili that to make the project work, he needs both the radar-resistant materials that the USA is using, and the computer program that it uses to test the plans.

The former is a job for Philip, who dons the garb of a Vietnam burnout and befriends a cancer-stricken former Lockheed scientist who knows the secret about the materials that can throw off radar. It’s the most compelling part of the episode, featuring the closest thing to a more traditional mission in the episode.

It gives us a chance to see Philip act again, as he brings a lived in, recognizable feel to his ‘Nam veteran persona and affect. The disorientation and scatter-brained qualities of the scientist he sidles up to are heartbreaking, when you see the toll that his disease has taken on him, and his sad laments that he’ll have nothing to leave for his children. The hints that it’s not just a crackpot theory that the microscopic iron balls he used on the project caused his illness, that he was cast aside and left to die, are heartbreaking, and the whole scene, where a debilitated man is paid off for the last useful thing he has in him -- the thing that’s killing him -- is harrowing.

The latter is a job for Nina, who somewhat confusingly must obtain the appropriate Stealth software from Stan (because he has code word clearance at the DOD now) or she will be shipped back to Russia to stand trial for treason (or so Arkady says). At first blush, this scenario seems odd. The depiction of the Centre on The Americans has suggested that the Russian spy apparatus can be somewhat arbitrary and fickle, so it’s not necessarily out of character for this type of decision to be handed down. But it does seem strange that someone who’s cultivated an asset in the FBI, and has passed a polygraph, would be pulled out of service when, whether she can get this software or not, she’s still useful as someone who can pass on information from Stan.

But my suspicion is that this arrangement is some sort of ploy from Arkady, who tells Oleg, not Nina, that these are the stakes of her mission. Oleg, naturally, tells her to run, and perhaps Arkady hopes he’ll use his family connections to spring or help or motivate Nina in some way. Nina, for her part, is more object than subject of this story, with her only real action at this point being to tell Stan that she’s at risk (right when he’s vulnerable from him and Sandra talking about the end of their marriage) and asking him for help.

The one genuinely intriguing part of this is which side Nina will ultimately fall on, as her personal and professional loyalties have been jumbled up time and time again, and how they’ll be straightened out, or severed, remains to be seen.

But this is all largely the preface to action rather than action itself. We get Larrick advancing. We get Jared seemingly in danger (and in danger of exposing the Jennings). We get Philip securing one piece of the stealth puzzle while the cast of the Rezidentura is trying to secure the other. We even get incremental progress in the Paige vs. parents plot, as Elizabeth lets Paige go to a church-sponsored protest against nuclear armament, seeing her own sense idealism grow in her daughter.

It’s all fine (save for the Larrick stuff), just not very immediate or compelling in the moment (save for the Phillip stuff). Instead, you can feel the show positioning itself for the climax of the season, putting the story in place rather than actually advancing it, and that tack has grown tiresome over the last batch of episodes. Here’s hoping the last two outings of the season will make good on all that table-setting.