4x04 Chloramphenicol

[7.8/10] Death on television is usually explored through a personal lens. A show will focus on one person, on their projects that will go unfulfilled, on the nobility of their sacrifice or the tragedy of them being taken too soon. Television shows are, as Roger Ebert once put it, “empathy machines,” so storytellers are apt to put the viewer in an individual person’s shoes, and evoke the pain or glory of their ends through that perspective.

What’s noteworthy about “Chloraphenicol”, though, is that it takes an almost opposite approach for the most part. It is about death, but it’s about the effect that death has on others, the way its threat or possibility affects those closest to us. The viewer is still apt to feel for Elizabeth or Nina or Gabriel when it seems like death is imminent, but until its final, brutal scene, the characters, and the episode, are more concerned with how someone’s demise will affect those around them than the cessation of one character’s personal story.

The most obvious point there comes from Elizabeth’s reaction to the antibiotic, which makes her worried that she’s on death’s door. What’s interesting about that moment is that for someone who’s so devoted to the mission, who is so loyal to her country and her cause, Elizabeth isn’t worried about what will happen to Russia or Directorate S or the Cold War in general. She’s worried about her family.

She tells Philip to let her take the fall for Pastor Tim and Alice’s deaths. She tells him to take Paige and Henry and become “Americans” since it’s what he always wanted. Maybe it’s the illness talking, but if she’s not around to carry the torch, she wants Philip to be happy, for Paige to be safe, for Henry to remain blissfully unaware of who his mother really was. When the end is a real prospect, she’s not worried about her own life, she’s worried about her children, her husband, and their joy and satisfaction, even obtaining it means the opposite of what she believes in.

It is a pseudo-deathbed acknowledgment that, as seems to be a theme for this season, she is the thing between the Jennings giving up this life and their continuing on with it. Philip admits to William that unlike Elizabeth, he could be “normal.” And it’s only a look, only a brief reminder, but there’s a hint that he’s starting to wonder if his love for Elizabeth is enough to balance his growing abhorrence and visceral pain at this life. And yet, William states as much that however hard it is to balance Elizabeth and Philip’s views on whether to go on, or how to raise their children, that there’s a solace in having someone to talk to about these things, about their work and struggles. It is a blessing that William would kill to have, and a thought and reminder that, maybe, helps keep Philip from taking drastic action.

But the thing that unites the Jennings, even when they disagree, is that they both love their children. As much as this episode is about Elizabeth’s worry for what the world, and her family, looks like without her, it’s as much about Paige now having to both keep up her parents’ lies to the outside world and to be frightened that they next time they walk out the door, they might not come back. We see the toll that takes on her, the discomfort that weighs on her when she has to interact with Stan, and the anxiousness at a problem that, like William, she can’t talk to anyone about right now.

It creates an interesting parallel, once again, between Paige and Martha, who have both been brought into the tent recently. To be frank, Martha’s story is the one element of this episode that doesn't really fit with the rest of the proceedings thematically. But it’s still independently compelling to see her nervous dinner with Agent Aderholt, intercut with Stan rummaging through her apartment looking for evidence. From a pure plot standpoint, there’s an inevitable sense of tension that emerges when the show bends Stan and Martha’s worlds back toward one another, merging one part of Philip’s world with another in a way that threatens to blow both of them up.

But Martha seems, for the moment, too good at her task to let that happen. Her speech to Aderholt about seeing a married man is superb. There’s a supreme irony to that lie, because on the one hand, it’s meant to be a bit of coyness at her part. From her perspective, “Clark” is a married man -- to her, and it’s a convenient excuse to Aderholt for why she might be gone from her apartment at odd hours and keeping secrets. But at the same time, obviously, it’s a deeper truth than she realizes, one that would and presumably will mollify Stan if he ever finds out who she’s seeing, while creating a new ethical dilemma for him.

Then there’s the fact that, as is always so interesting in The Americans, there is truth in her lies. Martha isn’t having an affair (or at least doesn't realize she’s having an affair). But when she speaks about the honesty of the relationship, about the understanding and lack of illusion in the relationship, that it’s the most mature and frank one she’s ever had, it’s a genuine reflection of her feelings, of the reason she stays in it despite all the crap that Clark’s life and lies and have put her through. Still, there’s the added irony that it is, in fact, anything but a frank and honest relationship, with only one layer peeled back between her and her “husband”, and so much more below the surface than she realizes. It doesn't fit with the rest of the episode, but the layers there are compelling enough on their own to justify its inclusion.

The same layers of truth applies to Paige, and by extension, to Elizabeth. Elizabeth is still smarting from the death of her own mother, and in an on the nose flashback, recalls an episode from her childhood when her mom was sick and gave her instructions on what to do if she died. The implication is that Elizabeth remembers that feeling, understands how frightening the prospect of being without your mother is, and wants to reassure her daughter before it’s too late. The problem is that using the phone lines in a no-go, that the risks of Paige saying something are too great, another suggestion that maybe, just maybe, Elizabeth is, through her loved ones, starting to see the downside of this life she’s devoted herself to, and maybe the possibility of escaping it.

There is, however, barely a thought for Henry. I appreciate that thread through this season and the last. Henry has grown closer to Stan, and admits that he can’t talk about these sorts of teenage boy things with his father, because Philip is never around. There’s a tendency for the younger child to be a forgotten element in a lot of prestige dramas: the endless stream of Bobbys in Mad Men, Chris Brody on Homeland, even A.J. for much of The Sopranos. The Americans is using the benign neglect of Henry, while Paige is understandably the focus right now, as a both a plot point and emotional touchstone for Stan. It’s a welcome story arc that uses and comments on the child forgotten in all this excitement, who gets only the barest of mentions when Elizabeth worries about her own death.

There’s other commentary on death in the episode. When he recovers, Gabriel recounts his time after the war, worrying about what fate might befall him in the uncertainty of the broken down place he occupied. William reflects that he didn’t expect to go like this. And most notably, Oleg’s father talks about the death of Oleg’s brother, and the effect it had on his parents, leading them to want their son to come back home and be closer, the way it changed their lives.

Plotwise, however, the most important part of that conversation is the way Oleg’s father says that in exchange for Oleg returning home, he will use his influence to help Nina. It creates a false hope and expectation in the audience, that despite breaking the rules to help someone she cares about in an already tenuous situation, she may yet get out of this. The episode feeds this false hope, giving us a dream sequence of escape with impossibly bright, golden lights that beam down on her amid images of her an Anton’s unfathomable chance for freedom.

“Chloramphenicol” contrasts those golden hues with the ugly, washed out green tint of reality. There is a frankness, and ugliness to the scenes that ensue, where Nina is walked to an stark linolium hallway, sentenced to death, and shot just as quickly. There is a contrast there, between people who had time to worry about what will happen to those who survive them, to reflect and share in the bonds of those close to them, and the spartan, mechanical way in which Nina’s life is ended. She goes in tragedy, not just because the vindication of her good heart is what does her in, but because her death is treated by her own people as just another number on a form, the act of the unfeeling arm of the state without memory or resonance.

The episode presents death as a communal act, one informed by connections, by expectations, by anxieties. And yet, for the only actual death of one of the show’s major characters, it strips away those things, and once again makes it a solitary, soulless act. In a setting where so many people worry about what will happen to their loved ones, who fear saying goodbye and the effect a perishing will have on those who live after, Nina is done away with alone, robbed of the bonds and the connections that make those anxieties have such force, for the characters, and for us.