5x04 What's the Matter with Kansas?

[8.0/10] One thing the show has drifted away from a bit is Philip/Elizabeth relationship drama. There’s pros and cons to that, but independent of them, the show has turned more toward differences between them over how they feel about the mission, or how they feel about bringing Paige into it, then about how they feel about each other. Don’t get me wrong, there’s always some of that sentiment baked into all of their marital disagreements, but their life as partners who love one another hasn’t been explored as deeply as it was earlier in the season given the external challenges they’ve had to face.

That’s what I like about this episode. It still moves along plenty of the external stories. Oleg finds himself in a bind. Paige takes a big chance. Mischa is put at risk. And Stan makes on hell of a bold stand. But the meatiest thing in the episode is Philip and Elizabeth being uncomfortable at having to court someone, at having to be away from one another, at the sense that even if they both know it’s the job, they’re betraying one another in a way.

“What’s the Matter with Kansas?” continues this season’s theme of agents being uncomfortable with what their bosses tell them to do or not to do, and the powers that be telling them to do it anyway, for the greater good. The biggest place that comes down is with Philip and Elizabeth being told to run a pair of honey pot schemes on a couple of employees for Agricorp, the company that’s processing the wheat-eating bugs the duo uncovered in the last episode.

Philip and Elizabeth come up with excuses about why they don’t want to do it: the amount on their plate already the defector mission, the struggle of traveling to and from Topeka so often, the challenges with Paige. But their real reason is that it makes them uncomfortable, to have to be so much apart, to have to open themselves up emotionally that way again. Gabriel, despite his past indulgences, seems unsympathetic, and says he knows they’ll work it out. You do what you have to do.

That’s what Oleg’s mother tells him. I’ll admit, I find it odd that even when Oleg moved back to Moscow because he felt for his mother still mourning his brother’s loss, he saddles her with the risk of him getting imprisoned or even killed by the Soviet government. Still, it gives her the opportunity to admit that she did what she had to do to survive her own prison camp experience, and tells him to do the same.

It comes after he raises objections to how his bosses want to go after the man suspected of accepting bribes to give the best food to certain grocery stores. They want to use the fact that his son is at war in Afghanistan and Oleg, having scene the hardship of parents whose children are at war, questions whether it’s right. His boss and would-be partner tell him that what’s right is whatever serves the country’s interests.

It is, oddly enough, the same thing that Stan was told when he raises moral objections to blackmailing Oleg after he tipped the FBI off to the biological weapons operation. It’s another instance in which people on both sides of the Cold War are trying to recognize the people at the center of these missions, and view them as individuals who deserve to be treated fairly and according to their actions and character, while their governments and superiors tell them to put that aside for what both groups view as the greater good.

The difference is that Stan takes one hell of a ballsy stand about it. He tells his boss’s boss that if they blackmail Oleg with that tape, Stan will go public with the fact that he shot a KGB agent in cold blood. It’s another potentially career-shredding bit of chutzpah from Stan, but it’s another instance of him having a big, if at times misguided heart, to where he can’t abide the people he cares about, the people who, in his view at least, acted honorably being punished rather than rewarded for that.

What’s interesting is that Paige kind of pulls a similar move. When she goes to babysit for Pastor Tim and Alice, she snoops around and finds the good pastor’s journal. Her hope was to figure out which lawyer he sent the supposed blackmail tape to. When she tells her mom about it, Elizabeth appreciates the wit and bravery of that move, but tells her to stop, because it’s dangerous, because Paige’s demeanor could expose them, and because there’s little margin for error. And yet, Paige refuses to listen, refuses to do anything but trust her own gut and her own assessment of how best to help. She is not the good solider; she’s the solider who follows her own impulses, and maybe all that time with the Beemans is rubbing off on her.

But for now at least, Philip and Elizabeth still are the good soldiers. Philip makes his advances on the “logistics” representative, to diminishing returns, but feels decidedly half-hearted about it. Elizabeth does a better job at luring her prey, and yet admits her disgust at how the man whose jokes she has to laugh at is working to starve people. She stops things before sleeping with him, even makes clear to Philip that she stopped the advances of a guy who tried to buy her a drink on the airplane. This is a job where the Jennings constantly have to build rapport with people, but each tries to spare the other’s feelings about it, to reassure the other, in their own subtle ways, that it’s just work.

And when they’re together, curling up on the couch, laying down beside one another, there’s a different form of intimacy. Sometimes it’s lost in all the moral weight of killing people, the strain of these jobs, the difficulty in raising two children, but these are two people who still love one another, who would still be happy together, at least now, if they were no longer forced together by the mission. A bond has been built over the years, and over these seasons, and it’s nice to see The Americans taking an episode to vindicate it as something that lasts, that’s apart from everything else, even when the world tells people to ignore those bonds and just do what they’re ordered to.