5x12 The World Council of Churches

[7.3/10] How many innocent people have to suffer before the various institutions that control the world’s two biggest powers in 1984 get what they want? That’s the question The Americans seems to be asking in the run-up to the season finale. Being in the KGB, or the FBI, are jobs that require sacrifices and hardships, but they also require imposing them on other people, and increasingly everyone in the orbit of this show seems to have a problem with that.

Oleg has a problem with it over the grocery store manager he promised leniency to when he was trying to get to get to the bottom (er, the top) of the food shortage conspiracy. He lobbies successfully for her to be let off, but it takes a connected agent with the right interest and sway to convince the machinery of the party to not just grind her up like anything else that gets in his way. It does no good for the others caught in the path.

He has a problem with it for his mother, someone who he views as taken advantage of and damaged by a corrupt system. She had five years of her life taken away. She was the sexual plaything of a KGB officer who traded basic care for sexual favors. She had to lose her son to the needs of the party. And he’s increasingly convinced that the common people, the starving people, are sold out by the people on top who want to make their fortunes. Even as the noose of the KGB’s investigation into his involvement with William getting caught tightens, he’s grown disillusioned with his country and how it operates.

Stan has a problem with it for his informant. The famous hockey player who she’s dating shows up to their latest meeting, telling them that he’s a friend, that they’re getting married, that he can help them and that they should pay her more. Stan and Aderholt immediately sniff it out as a play from the KGB, but they’re worried for Sofia. The unspoken elephant in the room is that he doesn't want what happened to Nina happening to her. But Agent Wolfe tells him not to jump the gun, and that they need to let things play out, something that Stan is already smarting over.

And last but not least, the Jennings, Philip in particular, have a problem with it when it comes to Pasha. The plan to get the defectors to head back to Russia has been to make Pasha’s like as miserable as possible so that his parents go back to Moscow for his sake. Only things have gotten just about as bad as they can be -- Pasha getting beaten up at school, his mom pleading with his dad to go back home, but nothing seems to be moving. Even Elizabeth, who is far less sentimental than her husband, recognizes the fact that whether the suffering is for a good cause or not, the plan isn’t working, and they can’t keep going down that path.

So Tuan ups the ante. He tells Pasha to make a suicide attempt (albeit one not intended to succeed), in order to really shake up his parents. It shakes up Philip and Elizabeth instead, who race to try to stop it despite an FBI car parked outside Pasha’s house. I’ll admit, I find that tease super cheesy, as the kind of manipulative cliffhanger that The Americans doesn't go in for. But I do like it as an indicator that Tuan (who now knows Elizabeth has kids thanks to an ill-timed slip) has moral limits that are too much even for the Jennings.

But the other big question in this episode has to do with other innocent lives, and how they’ll fare when rolled up into the Soviet machine: Paige and Henry. Elizabeth and Philip are making good on the declaration at the end of the last episode, and bring up ending their tour and going back to Russia to Claudia. It’s the most serious we’ve seen the two discuss and act on this idea, where even Gabriel’s offer to let them go home seemed to pass without much consideration or discussion.

Much of that discussion, though, centers on how Paige and Henry will do there. The Jennings have an odd heart-to-heart with Pastor Tim about it, potentially just to reassure him that they care deeply about their kids and are considering getting out of the game. Philip and Elizabeth wonder who their kids would talk to, what names they would take, how quickly they’d learn Russian and adapt, and all the other little practical things that pick away at the grandiose dream of running away and everything being fine.

They might have someone to talk to, some family to go back to, after all as we’re not only reintroduced to Philip’s son with Irina, but also Philip’s brother and his family back in Russia. I’m not sure what the point of the scene is, beyond setting things up for later, but it does suggest to the audience that there’s a home life and a community for the Jennings (all four of them) to come back to if they do make it to Russia.

And yet it seems like Henry and Paige are trending in opposing directions. Henry makes dinner for his parents (with the help of his current quasi-girlfriend, Chris) as a thank you to them for giving him their permission to go to the boarding school if he gets in. It’s still a bit out of nowhere, but the indication is that Henry is thriving here, having found a young woman he likes spending time with, doing well in school, having a path he wants to follow, and being guided by Stan into more of American way of life than his parents ever even realized. It’s not vocalized, but it would be the biggest shock, the biggest transition for him.

Paige, on the other hand, seems ready for it. She seems relieved, improved, by the news that Pastor Tim is going away. She tries to throw her cross necklace in the trash (something that Elizabeth stops due to appearance). She’s slept through the night for the first time. In a well shot and blocked scene, she spars with a makeshift training bag in the garage. There’s the sense that things are falling into place for her, that she could handle it, and as Elizabeth suggests, might even thrive on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

And yet, she is just as much an innocent poised to suffer in all of this. Whether Pastor Tim is right or wrong, Paige’s parents, and essentially everyone else who’s signed up has been hurt in some way by their association with these spy agencies. Paige may have gotten through, or be getting through, the adjustment period, but that just leaves her primed to enter a service that’s ripped her parents’ hearts and souls up. I don’t know if going to Russia would fix that, or if it would just make her one more piece of kindling thrown on the fire of the Soviet and American intelligence apparatuses in this show, that care more about this week’s grand purpose than about the suffering men and women tapped to carry it out.