4x03 Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow

[7.7/10] My favorite scenes in The Americans are the ones where Claudia and Gabriel aren’t talking to Philip and Elizabeth. Sometimes you have to be the bad guy. Sometimes you have to be the good soldier. Seeing the two of them demand actions and provide stern warnings to the Jennings, while questioning those orders and worrying for their sanity and safety in private, adds a complexity and understanding to them.

We see them as Philip and Elizabeth see them -- loyal taskmasters who seem oblivious to the Jennings’ needs. But we also see them as they are in their hearts -- people just as apt to question the wisdom of their orders who have genuine concern for their charges, especially when they’re in a difficult situation.

It adds a nice parallel to the situation with Philip and Elizabeth and Paige. There too, the Jennings have to emphasize the importance of discretion, of loyalty, of self-control when they’re in front of their daughter. But at the same time, they’re having severe doubts, wrestling with whether to run away, and questioning whether this mission, these lives that they’ve built, can reasonably go on.

Amid all of the great emotional work that’s contained there, which is the bread and butter of the show, there’s also some strong plot-based problems. The most immediate of these things is the continuing issue of what to do about Pastor Tim, particularly now that they know he’s told his wife. On the one hand, the fact that two people know the Jennings’ secret -- one who is wrestling with his moral obligation not to let people come to harm, and another who is apparently the stereotypical gossipy pastor’s wife -- is an existential threat to the Jennings life as they know it.

On the other hand, if they or the Centre do the obvious thing and kill Pastor Tim and Alice, Paige will connect the dots. Maybe not right now, maybe not until years later, but she’s smart enough to piece things together and may never trust her parents again. That’s another “bad option” as Claudia and Gabriel put it, one that could not only wreck the Centre’s chances of bringing Paige into the fold, but that could wreck a daughter’s relationship with her parents.

Creating a plot like that, which has major plot-based and personal consequences is not easy, but The Americans pulls it off well here. The continued struggle that Philip is going through, Elizabeth’s unwillingness to throw away this life and his going along with it, the fear of their mission being destroyed versus their trust as parents being destroyed, all provide an engaging spine for the episode. There’s also a strange sort of irony to the fact that for such talented assassins sponsored by the seemingly endless funds of their state, the hardest guy for them to figure out how to kill is some meddlesome man of the cloth.

The latest plan is for the family to take a last minute trip to the recently opened EPCOT for the weekend. That way, the Jennings have plausible deniability with Paige when Pastor Tim and his wife end up having an “accident.” But even that plan runs into a major speedbump when Elizabeth and Philip walk in on Gabriel, seemingly having contracted Glanders from the container the Jennings stored with him.

It’s a hell of a cliffhanger to leave the episode off on. The immediate tension of the Jennings finding their handler bleeding on the floor and yelling at them to get out, while they realize they’ve touched him and his blood is palpable and effective. The chase with William, leading to a spit brothers moment, is both amusing and clever as a way to force him to be on their side. And the prospect of the four of them having to be stuck in a room together for thirty-six hours is not only a sharp way for the show to disrupt the EPCOT plan, but seems like an exciting way to let four great actors bounce of one another in the next installment.

The rest of the episode is solid, if not quite as propulsive or compelling. My favorite subplot in the episode is Elizabeth’s caper with Young Hee, a Mary Kay saleswoman from a Korean family. Young Hee has a really amusing and endearing manner about her, and maybe I’m just falling for Elizabeth’s usual professional agreeableness, but there seems to be a genuine friendship blossoming between them that I find myself unexpectedly rooting for. Elizabeth hasn’t really had an independent friend on this show, at least not a real one, but it seems like she and Young Hee are, given their respective lines of work, oddly on the same wavelength. (There’s an alternate version of The Americans where Elizabeth becomes the queen of Mary Kay with her excellent con man skills.) It’s an interesting new development and, as the kids say, I am here for it.

Otherwise, The Americans is mostly spooning us along. It makes it clear and official that Stan is suspicious of Martha as the real source of the pen drop, after he brings Aderholt in on his concerns. We also see Nina potentially facing death for her stunt with trying to get a message to Anton’s son. That culminates in a transfixing little dream sequences, that mixes her moments with Stan and her moments with Anton (though notably, without Oleg), as some kind of last rite or potential harbinger of her death. I’ll admit that Nina’s part of this show continues to be kind of mysterious to me, but I also kind of like that about it.

Sometimes it’s interesting to see someone be a different person in a different context. Nina has always operated differently in different spaces, telling people what they needed to hear and seemingly mixing truth with convenient falsehoods. The same ambiguity is at play when Elizabeth and Philip talk to their daughter, or when Gabriel and Claudia speak to their agents. There’s lies at play, and bits of massaging the truth, but also a greater, deeper, and more genuine feeling than the young people in their care seem to realize or acknowledge. There’s a sense of not truly knowing someone’s struggle, their internal life, that’s always been with The Americans, but it seems particularly potent here, where differences in generation, and authority, widen the gaps between what we see and what we know.