5x01 Amber Waves

[7.7/10] The contrasts between the United States and Russia on The Americans have been pretty superficial. We’ve gotten brief scenes in Russia, and remarks from the Jennings and their handlers about how things are there. But for the most part, we’ve gotten very few indications of what day-to-day life is like in Russia in the 1980s compared to what life is like in the AMerican suburbs.

“Amber Waves”, then, is the first episode to suggest that it’s really pretty crappy, even if you’re not stuck in some lightless prison like Nina was. There’s food lines, and broken down technology, and rampant corruption at all sorts of levels. With contrasts of fancy looking harvesters roving through the American plains, a weird google maps transition deposits us in Russia where we see barren fields with severe looking Russian citizens helping along worn out machinery. We see recent transplants complaining about what it was like there. We see local KGB officials wrly noting the sad realities behind the local jokes about food pantries being barren.

And yet, the people still loyal to the country defend it. The Jennings young Vietnamese ally thinks the Russian transplants they are working, or at least the father, should be shot in the head of such seditious talk. Philip and Elizabeth can only remember the time after the war, when there was nothing to eat at all. Things can always be worse, and it evinces a mentality that no matter how bad things are in Moscow and elsewhere, the people who live at a distance from it can resent the folks who’d criticize it or, worse yet, leave it behind, even if secretly Philip might be one of those people.

His son is definitely one of those people. As with last season’s finale, there is more teasing than actual substance to Misha’s effort to find his father in America at this juncture. Sure, we see a mildly suspenseful moment when he has to use his fake passport to get past the guards at a Moscow airport (replete with dirty/crashing airplanes, according to the Russian transplant), and we get to hear the contents of a letter from Irina as Misha stares out vacantly at the Yugoslavian countryside. But for the most part, this is just another instance of the show reminding us that he’s still here, still headed toward Philip, and a potential fly in the ointment for everything that’s going on, even if we know very little about him right now. (Though I’ll admit to being intrigued by the fact that Gabriel and Claudia and the Centre know about him too.)

“Amber Waves” also reminds us that Oleg is here and, for some reason, we are following him on his misadventures back in Moscow. I’ll admit, I have been hoping for a while that the show would move on from the character, and so seeing him not only appear here, but get so much real estate in the episode, was a disappointment. He was only mildly interesting as a foil to Stan on the other side of the Nina situation, and now that’s long been put to bed. Still, as dull as the character is in and of himself, there’s promise here that maybe he can at least be a window into the inequality and corruption of modern Russia, giving us hints as to cracks in the foundation in the government, in society, and likely within his family. It’s the sort of perspective we’ve only gotten glimpses of previously, so there’s promise in it, even if we have to have Oleg as our point of view for it all.

Otherwise the domestic drama continues back in Washington D.C. Paige is still having trouble dealing with the fact that her parents are spies, particularly when it means she’s not allowed to pursue a relationship with Matthew. That’s complicated by the fact that Stan is still gung ho and charmed by the fact that their kids like each other. And Elizabeth is trying to soothe Paige by teaching her self-defense, given that Paige reports having nightmares about their incident with the muggers last season.

Most of this is, like the Misha story, a recapitulation of details we established at the end of the last season. Paige and Matthew like one another. Paige is leery about her parents’ work and what they’re called upon to do. And there’s complications with the fact that their neighbor and, if they’re honest with themselves, best friend, is an FBI agent. None of these beats are new, or especially advance the ball on any particular storyline, but after a gap between seasons, the show uses these scenes to remind the audience where it left everyone.

Unfortunately, Philip, Elizabeth, and their compatriots have to pick up where the U.S. Government left William. In one of the show’s longest and most disturbing scenes, the Jennings and their crew sneak into an FBI graveyard, dig up William, and carve out a piece of his skin to send back to Russia for more bioweapon testing. When Hans trips and falls into the grave, he pierces his hand, suggesting he’s infected, to where Elizabeth tells him reassuringly to crawl out of the grave and then shoots him in the back of the head.

That is a stark call and response to Paige asking her mom if she ever thinks of the mugger she killed. Elizabeth is long past that, long past those sorts of regrets, the sorts of concerns of people who have food to eat, who didn’t live in the worse times. She is, as she tells Paige, tough enough to be hit and hit back, in a way that she barely even processes anymore.

But that in and of itself as a critique of Russia, of their operations in this war, by The Ameircans. Even in the grave, you are still a soldier, still fodder to be defaced and chipped away at and tossed away when the Centre no longer needs you. Elizabeth calls William a hero. She has been training Hans for years now as a loyal ally. In the end, both are crammed into a markerless coffin together, the grim afterbirth of necessity, left to rot away forever.

Maybe that’s the real contrast here. The Americans doesn't show us equal and opposite actions on the US side. While we can trust that there’s American spies in Russia too, we don’t get to see them. We just get to see Stan, screwing up and being selfish or sentimental sometimes, but rarely stooping to the levels that Philip and Elizabeth do on a regular basis. What we see from the Jennings, time and again, is violation, of families, of marriages, of lives, and even of graves.

This is the difference born of hard times, the difference between East and West that The Americans wants to cement, and it does so with our protagonists painstakingly defacing a corpse and sending a new one to an ignoble, anonymous end.