3x04 Dimebag

[7.3/10] There’s a strange call and response, a parallelism to “Dimebag”, where scenes of characters being dishonest, or distrusting one another, are juxtaposed with scenes where they let out their true feelings, where they break down walls and express what they really think or feel about a situation. That’s nothing all that new or that crazy for a spy show, but it’s not normally done this neatly, and I appreciate the show going for something a little extra in terms of form and structure to draw that notion out.

Sometimes it’s pretty simple contrasts. In an early scene, Tori, one of the people Stan encountered at his EST seminar, offers him her number, encouraging him to come to drinks with her and some others and clearly wanting to pursue something romantic. But Stan is in denial, claiming that he isn’t really single, and doesn't want to pursue it.

Just a little later in the episode, you have Philip deliberately creeping on Kimmy, the daughter of the head of the CIA’s Afghan group. He slips her his number, nominally in the guise of getting her a fake ID, but actually planting the seeds for her to be attracted to him and form a relationship of trust with him. The two scenes are funhouse mirrors of one another, twisted versions of the same idea, the same rhythms, in very different contexts.

It’s not the only time in the episode that the show pulls that off with Stan. As the “previously on” segment establishes, between telling Agent Aderholt that how he ingratiated himself to the white supremacists was repeatedly telling them what they wanted to hear, and hearing the defector seemingly do the same, Stan is now nursing a theory that she’s still working for the Russians, and while he’s publicly polite and friendly with her at the diner where they have dinner together, after hours, he goes tearing through the women’s restroom to try to find proof that his hunch is right, and she’s communicating with folks back home. It’s another call and response, a cause and effect, where someone is one way in a certain context, and acts differently in another.

Even that’s not the final juxtaposition with Stan. Early in the episode, at the same EST seminar, the facilitator challenges him to imagine being face-to-face with Sandra, telling her what he wants to tell her, being honest with her, and Stan isn’t up to it. He calls the facilitator and asshole and sits back down.

But later in the episode, he actually goes go face to face with Sandra and what he does is surprising. He confesses his affair to Sandra. He admits that he loved Nina, and that it was bad for her, bad for Sandra, bad for work. He calls himself the asshole. Stan’s trying to be honest, to answer the question she asked a long time ago truthfully and for better or for worse, it sends Sandra back into her home in tears.

I’m really liking what they’re doing with Stan so far this season. The idea that he’s on this probably doomed mission to get back his wife, which includes jumping into this self-help program that he thinks is bullshit, but which is, unbeknownst to him, actually making him someone more open and more honest and, in a way, healing him a bit after his experiences undercover, is a really compelling one. I doubt Stan makes it out of Season 3 with Sandra by his side, but there’s a good chance that he makes it out a little more human, a little more open to someone like Tori having a role in his life than he has at any time since we first met him.

But Nina isn’t just a thought or a memory; she’s a person who’s suffering both for her own decisions and for Stan’s. Oleg’s dad give her a chance to, perhaps, find a way out though. The Russians suspect that her cellmate is a spy, and if Nina can get her to talk, they might show her leniency. So at first, Nina tries spycraft, talking about being married, asking if her cellmate has a boyfriend, trying to inch around the subjects of importance and weasel her way into her cellmate’s good graces. The disingenuous effort falls flat, with the cellmate shutting down.

But then Nina is honest with the cellmate. She confesses what really happened to land her in this prison. She is open with this woman about her situation and about her regrets, and while it’s unclear the effect this honesty has at first, later, when Nina seems to be having a nightmare, the cellmate goes over to comfort her and it seems like the connection, one that may doom the cellmate but free Nina, has been established.

That’s the thing that’s always interesting about Nina. She has so many conflicting loyalties, both personal and professional, that you can never really sort out what’s real and what’s fake from her. The nightmare seems like a ploy, a little too over the top, but maybe it’s real. That’s what’s even more subtly disturbing about this. In an episode that cuts a line between truth and falsehood that look the same but feel different, Nina is the one using truth for dishonest purposes.

But she isn’t the only young woman in the episode capping off a successful ploy. In a well-written set of scenes, Paige says that what she wants for her birthday is to have Pastor Tim and his wife over for dinner, something the Jenningses are loathe to say no to, lest one or the other damage their relationship with their daughter whose heart and mind they’re warring over. Of course, once the birthday does happen, Paige springs her real birthday wish on her parents -- that she wants to be baptised, something that flabbergasts Philip and Elizabeth.

Honestly, it’s pretty damn clever from Paige, and in a crazy way, shows how she could be good at the spy game, about knowing how to manipulate people and put them in positions to do what they want, recognizing when they’re too uncomfortable or distracted to realize they’re being played until it’s too late. It adds an extra layer to this thought that what’s distracting Philip and Elizabeth is their tug of war over whether Paige should join the service, with each trying to ingratiate themselves to their daughter in the hopes of getting a leg up in the struggle.

That struggle leads to a great scene, where Elizabeth calls Philip out for giving Paige a Yazz record when they’d talked about a joint birthday present, and Philip gets Elizabeth to admit that she is, in fact, assessing Paige. Elizabeth is willing to accept the Centre’s decree in a way that Philip just isn’t, in keeping with her “that’s just how things are” mentality. I know I said I was a little tired of it in the last episode, but it’s rich material, especially now that the conflict is out in the open and the cards are on the table for the Jenningses.
But then comes the show’s last great contrast. One minute, Philip is deathly worried, even angry, about his daughter. He roars that she is too young, that this is too much, and blanches at her teenage rebellion, which takes the form of a baptism. In the next, Philip is on his mission, where he himself is trying to seduce a teenager and make her an asset for the mission, where he’s trying to contribute to her rebellion against her own father by a being an older confidante and giving her pot.

Philip is a decent family man in one scene, trying with everything in him to protect his daughter and give her the best, easiest, and safest life he can, and in the next scene, he’s the skeevy older friend, doing drugs and wrapping his arm around a young woman just a little older than his daughter, trying to be the catalyst for a downfall he hopes to avoid for his own kid.

From the beginning, The Americans has been about double lives, about the dichotomy of who the Jenningses (and Stan, and plenty of other people caught in that web) are when they’re at home, and who they are when they’re on the job. “Dimebag” plays with that idea, moving past and then retreating across the line between manipulation and truth so many times that it makes you dizzy, but creating a series of complimentary vignettes, that twist and distort their sister scenes in ways heartening and horrifying, throughout the episode.