4x06 The Rat

[7.4/10] Most of us have experienced a life-changing event, for better or for worse. As staid as our day to day existence can be, for almost everyone, something comes along that shifts our way of being, for good or for bad, whether we want it to or not. The natural impulse is to resist that. Again, good or bad, the familiar is comfortable. Even when the world is shifting around us, it’s easy to close our eyes, cross our fingers, and wonder if things can just go back to the way there were.

But Martha has crossed that Rubicon already. Gabriel doesn't realize it until later in the episode, but Philip has crossed that Rubicon too. And even, in his own way, Agent Gad has too. His “this...this is weird” line has to be one of The Americans’s stealth funniest act breaks ever. It’s such a human moment, a reaction to this bizarre happening in a line of work that’s filled with the unusual and unexpected, that still makes a person reevaluate what they thought they knew about their normal lives and the people close to them.

Secretary’s are tools of foreign agents. Husbands are members of the KGB. And your deepest undercover agents are revealing their true selves, in bits and pieces, to the people they’re handling. The world of The Americans is being upset right now, and all anyone can do is slowly realize that it can’t easily be put back in order.

Martha, as usual, gets the worst of that. Her candle is burning at both ends. On the one hand, it turns out that her “husband” is a member of the KGB, and more and more of the life she thought she was building is falling apart. On the other hand, Stan and Aderholt have all but figured her out. She’s reached the point where her options are (1.) get caught by the FBI, (2.) get whisked away to a foreign country where she knows no one and doesn't speak the language or (3.) get killed.

It’s looking more and more like option #3 is what’s in store. The moment when she tells Gabriel that she knows he’s KGB, his face turns cold, colder than usual. It feels like Philip wanted to unburden himself, that he feels guilt and responsibility for bringing Martha into this, and that now that he’s forced the issue and she can’t go back to the FBI, he wants to be upfront with her about everything.

The irony is that it all just makes things worse. There’s a quiet theme this season that telling people the truth can just unmoor them if they’re not ready to handle it, especially if it’s too much too quickly. Elizabeth had that realization in the last episode when she saw Paige buckling under the pressure. Now Philip has showed Martha his true face, revealed that he works for the KGB, and admitted that she can never go home. Martha was already washing her valium down with red wine and felt like her world is coming apart. Now without Clark there when she wakes up, she’s ready to storm off with the sense that she can’t trust anyone, and it may be her downfall.

But Philip is likely to blame the Centre for it, which is only going to add to the rift he feels between himself and his handlers. He resisted Elizabeth’s urge to have him go away from Martha, but can’t help acquiescing to Gabriel’s request that he get the biological weapon sample. And yet it’s his absence that sets Martha off and, possibly, changes her situation from being moved to Moscow to being moved to a cemetery. He’ll blame the Centre for moving him away from the house. They’ll blame him for revealing too much, and the rift will grow.

The interesting thing is that Philip is right. The Centre wants to keep Martha in place as an asset, but he has the feeling that something’s off, and he’s right. I don’t know if it’s a sign that the show wants us to believe in EST, that Philip is listening to his instincts and not just his training or received wisdom and it’s working out. But his suspicions, well-founded or not, are correct.

What’s also interesting is that the Centre really means to help Martha. I’ll admit, I had assumed that Gabirle was getting Philip out of the house to take out Martha without Philip stopping him. But as the scene with Arkady tells us, there’s genuine efforts to exfiltrate her, something which makes it all the more tragic if she ends up dead or arrested by the FBI when there was a way out.

It’s Philip who really wants the way out though, to be able to direct his own life rather than having it passed down to him from his bosses overseas. That’s what makes his conversations with William so interesting. William is a “this could be your future” sort of guy, someone who made a life in America, who resents his bosses, but who never stood up to them. William has regrets, about his own wife and worth to the people who brought him here, and he’s a living warning to Philip.

Philip is taking those warnings to heart, as he’s eaten up inside. It seems to be part of why he revealed himself to Martha, which, in one of the episode’s better developments, rocks Elizabeth. It’s one thing for Philip to care about Martha. That’s natural. But it’s another for him to show her his true self, which makes it feel more like a violation, a betrayal to Elizabeth, in a world where betrayal and compartmentalizing is not only the name of the game, it’s her specialty. And yet this has clearly gotten to her, no matter how much she may wish it weren’t so.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, potentially to Moscow. Change is in the air on The Americans. We still have seven episodes to go, which suggests things won’t froth to a boil just yet, but the Martha situation is set to come to a head, the FBI is closer to sniffing our protagonists out, and Philip is bucking his handlers with the implicit encouragement of a grumpy new mentor. This is not business as usual, even for the typically shifting sands of The Americans, however much our heroes and villains might wish or want for things to go back to how they were.