4x11 Dinner for Seven

[7.7/10] Elizabeth Jennings is having a crisis of faith. That seems tough when, as her bemused reaction to Pastor Tim using the term suggests, she doesn't really cotton to faith or religion or even spirituality. And yet, as trite as it may sound, the mission is Elizabeth’s religion. More so than Philip or William or even, unbeknownst to her, Gabriel and Claudia, Elizabeth has been unquestionably devoted to the cause for a long time. It’s the thing that provided the undercurrent of her life, the thing that gave her a sense of direction and purpose, the thing that she believed in.

Now she’s wavering in that. She is seeing the prospect of bringing her daughter into their work -- something that she bought because she thought it would channel Paige’s similar need for a cause to believe in -- turn into something that is immensely more challenging for Paige and for their family than she thought. She is experiencing the empathetic pain of the harm her work causes on innocent people even if it’s in service of something she believes in. She is haunted by what the need to get “Level 4 codes” to help prevent (or maybe cause) biological warfare costs, in the form of a true friend and good person who now has to suffer due to forces beyond her control.

It has, if not exactly unmoored Elizabeth, then certainly shaken her. Elizabeth is not easily shaken, but when she’s finding solace in a man of the cloth, one who knows her secret no less, you can tell that she is out of her usual comfort zone. Something must be really affecting her to get to that point. There’s a lot of her and Pastor Tim in this episode which is, to say the least, unusual.

What I appreciate about it is that it has a “lies blending into the truth” vibe to it. Part of this excursion is just the usual spy relationship maintenance. As Pastor Tim himself puts it, Elizabeth is on a limb, and he has a saw. That means that the Jennings have to bend over backwards to present themselves as normal, to endear themselves to Tim and Alice, to ingratiate them in the lives of the Pastor and his wife. But at certain points, the professional leads to the personal, and Elizabeth seems to be genuinely looking for comfort and advice in a situation, and a mental state, she hasn’t really had to confront in this way before.

Thankfully, the episode isn’t all deep introspective scenes between a pastor and an atheist (though I’m not complaining!); it’s also about hilarious dinner scenes! The sequence where Stan joins the Jennings’ little dinner party for Tim and Alice was uproariously funny. I don’t know if it approached Breaking Bad’s “tableside guacamole” levels of awkwardness, but just the look that Pastor Tim gets when he realizes that Stan is an FBI agent was outstanding.

Even better, as funny as the scene is, the show underplays a good amount of the humor. In a way, these scenes feel like something out of a very down to earth sitcom -- mom and dad trying to impressive some business associates when the awkward neighbor next door shows up and throws a monkey wrench into their plans! The polite awkwardness and mild disdain from Tim when he realizes that Stan is a mid-divorce fed, and Stan realizes that Tim is a social justice activist/agitator, and the way it low key spoils the Jennings’ attempt to make nice with Tim and Alice is utterly perfect.

As amusing as those little domestic scenes are, the episode nicely balance it out with some of the best spycraft we’ve had on the show in a while. I have to admit, when Elizabeth pulled her initial scam on Paul, I thought to myself “how many times are the Jennings going to resort to a honeypot scheme?” But what I appreciate about the story here is that they get much more complicated with it.

Whereas I assumed that “Patty” would just blackmail Paul for the level 4 codes, instead she claims to be pregnant and angrily agrees to “get rid of it.” That too, I assumed, would just up the blackmail ante. Instead, it’s an excuse for Philip, Gabriel, and the woman that Tatiana asked Oleg for a few episodes back to pose as Patty’s family, come in peddling a story of suicide, and come up with an excuse to get Paul out of his office while the senior citizens are able to case the joint and copy all the files on his computer.

It’s the sort of clever, multi-layered scheme we haven’t gotten in a while on The Americans. This season and to a certain extent last season have been about things breaking apart more than they’ve been about the Jennings and company executing their plans to perfection. As much as the show wants to interrogate the consequences of these sorts of actions, on global politics and on the people who carry them out, it is exciting to just see them pulling off a data heist to perfection now and then.

But “Dinner for Seven” still explores the effect that all of this has on Elizabeth. The voicemail from Young-Hee, clearly in distress over her best friend disappearing, is riddled with pathos on both sides of the receiver. And yet, Elizabeth forebears, for now, and starts trying to explain the social engineering she has to do every day to her daughter. Despite her concerns, Elizabeth has tried to keep the faith with Paige, to pass down her lessons and principles to her daughter, slowly but surely, so that she’ll understand.

It gets a lot quicker in the end though. Granted, it comes off as a little convenient, cheap, and cliché that Elizabeth and Paige run into a pair of muggers and some would-be rapists. At the same time, it is, again, thrilling to see Elizabeth get to be a badass and take down some attackers. And it is a deeper initiation for Paige, something that exposes the fact that whatever Philip and Elizabeth have told their daughter, they’re not just propagators of peace. This is something big that Paige is stepping into, and her parents are, well, scarier than she realized.

It’s another link in the chain, something to potentially make Elizabeth’s daughter look at her differently, that may lead her to question whether this plan is right, and waiver in what she’s doing. It’s an unusual look from Elizabeth, but that’s what makes it fascinating, and intriguing to see where these new feelings will take her next.