3x07 Walter Taffet

oh god... the whole sequence with martha and the bug. i feel like i'm finally getting the pay off and plot movement that i've been waiting for since season 1 ended. things are happening. i know the two main characters can't ever die or get in trouble, but anyone else definitely can since side characters basically show up, appear in 3-4 episodes, and then die. i don't want martha to die.

it's hitting me sort of the same way nina hit me last episode that i actually like martha. we've gotten so used to her and her role in the story, but man, poor woman. she really does not deserve this.

she didn't realize how much danger she was in with phil, but she did her best. he could've literally put a bullet in her head the moment he sensed something was wrong. i thought he might. he still might. i think it'd be sort of tragic, but fitting, if after everything, the moment he realized martha's no longer his pawn, he just snaps her necks and unceremoniously offs her. because she means nothing to him.

but she survived the episode and honestly i hope she survives a lot longer and helps take phillip down, because she kind of deserves it...

[8.1/10] [Programing Note: For reasons that are a little odd, it’s been ten months between this episode and the last one for me, so apologies if I’m a little shaky on names and finer details.]

One of the things I always liked about The Sopranos is that, as cheesy as the “two kinds of family” taglines were, the show really did compare and contrast its protagonist’s oddly relatable home life and his anything but ordinary “day job” as a mobster. The Americans has the same bent in a lot of ways, finding thrills and tense moments from Philip and Elizabeth’s jobs as spies, but also finding these very human, understandable moments for them as parents and as a married couple.

It’s the latter that takes the main stage in “Walter Taffet.” The episode still has its “will someone in the Jennings’ orbit be exposed?” tension, and its high stakes operation to remind you that this isn’t just a kitchen sink drama. But more than that stuff, the episode is about raising your children and what you want for them, being to connect with them, the sort of life you’re trying to make for them.

The question of whether to bring your children into being double agents against the only country they’ve known isn’t normal, but deep disagreements about how to bring up your kids definitely are. It’s part and parcel how this show walks the line between the larger than life and the achingly down to earth.

That’s the chief point of contention in “Walter Taffet”. Philip realizes that Elizabeth has stepped things up in her efforts to prime Paige to learn who they really are and what they do. The episode places the emotional distance with them well, with confrontations and bits of bitterness that are both direct and indirect. One of the interesting things about the show is how it brought Philip and Elizabeth together after so long of nominally being close but really being apart. Now it’s centered on the thing that they both care about deeply, but which threatens to drive them apart.

At the same time, it makes space to account for why they feel differently about what they want for the next generation. For Elizabeth, it comes in the form of her conversation with a black South African freedom fighter, who disciplines his kids roughly, but shares her disdain for 1980s American materialism, and dreams of his four sons becoming fighters. Elizabeth herself is a fighter, someone who believes in a cause greater than herself that’s worth sacrificing for. She sees the same spark in Paige -- who waxes pseudo-wistful about the time that her parents believed in something enough to be activists -- and Elizabeth wants to nurture that flame.

But Philip has always been a little more sensitive to the rigors and the risks of the job. He loves his kids, but he sees them as vulnerable, more innocent, in a way that makes him fear what could happen to them, how they could be corrupted, or worse, if they stepped into this life. That’s bolstered by his confession to Elizabeth that he has a son from his old flame, one who is a literal fighter in Afghanistan, someone who carries his blood if not his name who is at risk in another proxy war between the United States and Russia.

That adds weight and understanding to their disagreement. This isn’t a mere philosophical divergence point. It’s something informed by the different experiences, different prompts that Philip and Elizabeth are facing, that makes things cold and laden with tension even when they’re supposed to be playing a happy couple as part of one of their operations.

At the same time Philip’s real marriage is having trouble, his fake marriage is hitting a rough patch too. Agent Aderholt finds the bug in Gaad’s office here. Martha sees it, and it sets of a series of panicked moments where she has to deconstruct and douse her receiver before the titular investigator and his team find her out. It puts her on edge, and makes her rethink her life and who she’s sacrificing for.

What’s as striking as those moments of sheer anxiety (which Alison Wright sells like a champ) is the similar moments of emotional distance between Martha and her “husband.” Martha never comes out and says that something’s wrong, that she has concerns about what “Clark” is asking her to do and why, that she’s beginning to think there’s something more deeply wrong and maybe hidden from her in this life. But it’s palpable from her, a ticking time bomb between the two of them, that Philip ascribes to an aftershock as his being unwilling to raise a child with her.

That child would represent a bond between the two of them. It’s something that united Philip and Elizabeth before they were even together in their hearts. And when Martha asks if she and Clark will ever have the life of a normal married couple, in some sense she’s asking if that sort of bond really exists between the two of them. The harm’s way she’s in starts to make her realize that it isn’t there.

And yet, as the bond between Martha and Clark starts to dissolve, the bond between Stan and his son starts to rematerialize. That too provides a connection between Stan and Sandra that keeps them in one another’s lives even as Sandra is ready to “do something about” the fact that she’s still legally Stan’s wife. Still, that connection is strained, and Stan finds himself with few confidantes, few people he can be real with. But when his son asks about the memorial in Chicago Stan asked Sandra to go to, he starts to open up about the difficulty of being undercover, or what he had to do and witness.

There’s an openness between the two of them that seems to be a solace to Stan, that points the way toward something closer and more on the level between the two of them. It’s what Elizabeth wants for her and Paige. And yet, in the end, she apologizes to Philip for not keeping him in the loop, and there’s a moment of reconciliation.

This is an episode where The Americans cuts off the end of conversations, and leaves us to wonder. But it’s also one that suggests there’s a common goal between the Jennings. They want the best for their kids, even if they disagree about what that is. There is a bond, a deeper love, there that holds them as one, even when they’re of two minds. The struggle between that care for one another, their differing hopes for their kids, and the rough and tumble life that complicates both, makes this show one of the more compelling portraits of the American family on television.