2x08 New Car

[7.6/10] I’ve said before that I generally believe there’s one scene or two that more or less cements the theme for a given episode of The Americans. It’s an old trick the patron saint of T.V. reviewers, Alan Sepinwall, taught about The Wire, that there was usually a moment or two that was meant to work as a metonym for an episode or a season or a show as a whole, and that if you paid attention, you might just catch it.

But “New Car” seems like an episode where I thought I knew what it was about, where I figured I had the message the show was trying to send nailed down, until the very end, where everything seemed a lot murkier.

The essential question of whether or not you’re a good person, whether or not you can do a bad thing and still be good, is a thorny but interesting one. And I suppose I should have picked up on it sooner, what with Philip reckoning with the fact that the propellor info they pilfered turned out to be a ruse by the Americans that led to the deaths of 160 or so Russian soldiers, and Elizabeth trying to cope with having to let Lucia die in order for their Nicaragua-focused mission to move forward, but it didn’t really hit me until the final scene.

That scene sees Philip and Elizabeth come into Henry’s room to punish him and give him a stern talking to after he’s caught breaking into a neighbor’s home to play video games. But when they do so, he pleads with them. He says that he knows the difference between right and wrong, that he didn’t take anything, that he doesn't want his parents to see him differently or judge him harshly for something he didn’t imagine would hurt anybody. It’s a microcosm of the same thing his parents and, unbeknownst to him or them, his colleagues are going through.

It seems like the key to this episode, one where both Philip and Elizabeth have their choices kicked back at them, in ways that make them wonder about the same thing. For Philip in particular, it’s the news that the propellor info they pilfered earlier in the season was likely a dummy planted by U.S. intelligence, not the real deal. It resulted in 160 “boys” dying on a Russian submarine when the propellor made to those specifications malfunctioned and sunk it.

That weighs on Philip, makes him feel guilty about the spoils of war that he’s enjoying in his American posting. We learn later in the episode (from Oleg, of all people) that the Russian military skipped over the proper testing phase, condensing what should have been five months of testing into three weeks. That is as much responsible for those 160 souls perishing as any bad intel the Jennings were deceived by. But Philip doesn't know that, and I’m not sure it would make a different to him anyway.

After he buys a hot new car, and Elizabeth is understandably incredulous about it, the two of them get into one of their old arguments, about whether it’s okay to enjoy the American perks of their job, or whether Philip likes living here too much. Philip tries to bring Elizabeth onto his side, telling her it’s okay to like these things, things she considers capitalist excesses, and even brings up her shoe collection. (Oh yeah, good strategy there, Phil. That’ll never backfire.) But Elizabeth, as expected, demurs, telling him that they have to live this way, for their cover, not for their pleasure, with an implicit challenge that he should remember the difference.

Initially, he’s skeptical of Elizabeth’s rebuke, of her reminder that they both started from humble circumstances and that things in Falls Church are “nicer, not better.” When he goes to meet their new handler, he runs his hand along the car, reveling in his roadster. Then he learns about the sunken submarine, of the lives lost that were once like his, and suddenly the car becomes an albatross, a symbol of the luxury he gets to enjoy while his countrymen are dying due to something he did (even if it’s not exactly his fault). It’s enough to leave the question of whether or not he’s a good person weighing on Philip’s mind.

But Elizabeth gets a much starker reminder when Lucia goes rogue on Larek. It turns out that Larek trained the men responsible for torturing her family, and she wants revenge on him before he absconds to Nicaragua out of her reach. So she shows up at his house, tranqs him, and means to tie him up, torture and kill him, except that before he conks out, he turns the tranquilizer gun on her and gets the upper hand.

He calls Elizabeth to clean things up, making a deal for his exit from their service in exchange for Lucia’s life, but even that isn’t enough. When Lucia’s untied, she still goes after Larek, who gets her in a choke hold, and forces Elizabeth, who has a gun trained on him, to decide whether to save Lucia’s life and shoot him or let him die to save the mission.

It is, understandably, a hard choice. Lucia has quickly become a protege and surrogate daughter to Elizabeth. In the same way that the news of the “boys” on the submarine in Russia reminds Philip where he started, Lucia’s devotion and hotheadedness reminds Elizabeth of herself at that stage. She’s clearly taken a shine to the young woman, and is willing to give up an asset to save her life if he gives them what they want.

But they also need the password and hand signals to get into the base where the Contras are being trained. They need the intel Larek has, and can’t get by without it. So Elizabeth does what she always does -- she puts the mission first, knowing that it means a death sentence for Lucia. And Elizabeth has to watch the life drain out of Lucia’s eyes, knowing she could stop all of this, but choosing not to. That (again, quite understandably) weighs on Elizabeth even more. It’s hard to feel like what you do is good when you have to make those moral sacrifices in the name of your job.

Stan’s choices aren’t quite so Stark. Rather than dealing with the realization that he’s responsible, or at least culpable, in a death, he’s straining to get approval in order to kill. He wants to take out Oleg, in order to protect Nina, and starts working up the chain at the Department of Defense in order to make it possible. It feels more like setup or quietly advancing this part of the story than the rest of the episode, but it’s fine for what it is, in an episode where everyone from Stan to the Jennings to Martha to a briefly returning Vasili(!) is considering what the right thing to do is.

It’s a theme that’s been quietly threaded through this season. Much of The Americans thus far has dealt with issues of trust, whether you can believe your feelings or even have them given the line of work that the show’s main characters are in. But there’s also a question of how to hang onto one’s soul, how to hang onto the belief that you’re doing something right and good, when you have a hand in good people perishing, that makes your new car, your video game escapade, and even the simple fact that you’re here while they’re gone, feel like a injustice.