6x10 START

[9.2/10] I think a decent amount about Dan Harmon’s story circle, his method for spinning narratives that have resonance. It’s more intricate than this, but it basically comes down to a character being someplace comfortable, having to leave it to get something they want, paying a heavy price to obtain it, and returning home, having changed. I don’t think the creators of The Americans had Harmon in mind when they penned any part of the series, but it’s hard not to think about that rubric when lingering on the final scene of the series.

After so long, the Jenningses are home. After decades away, they are back in Russia, After years and years of not being able to speak their native tongue or enjoy their favorite foods or give the slightest hint of their real history, they are back, able to be the people they were before they left.

But they’re not those people anymore. In twenty years, they have changed. Moscow has changed. As Philip says to Stan in the episode’s showpiece confrontation, he doesn't know why he lived the life he did, and he’s no good at being a cartoonish American businessman with flashy suits and catchphrase strategies. He’s this strange, different version of himself, not the beleaguered spy he was for so long, but also not the normal American he dreamed of being for almost as long.

Elizabeth is no longer the unyielding, dutiful spook she once was. She has taken a stand against her organization, on behalf of her people. She has, over the course of this season, opened herself up to feeling things in a way she never allowed herself before. She allows, works for, even sacrifices for, the possibility of detente between the place she was born and loves in a reflexive way, and the adoptive homeland that disgusted her for so long.

In brief, they are home, but they return as different people, so very much affected by all that they have seen and done in the time they were away.

But true to the story circle, they pay a heavy price for getting what they want, that chance for peace between peoples: their children. The perilous return to Moscow costs them Paige and Henry who, for different reasons, cannot go with them. It is the hardest thing in this episode, to couple the safety of escape, the catharsis of having averted disaster, with the tragedy of two parents who know they’ll never see their children again.

It’s hard to know which parting feels tougher: Henry or Paige. The subtext-laden goodbye to Henry is the one that got to me in the moment, because it has the sorrowful tenor of a small farewell that has to stand in for a much larger one. It is the sadness of knowing no one can say what they really want to, that they cannot explain what is happening, only convey those feelings without alarm, to leave him innocent of all of this.

It’s sad because we know that Henry wakes up one morning knowing that so much of his life was a lie, a lie with questions he’ll never be able to get answers to. He is blameless in all of this, someone who is about to have his life rocked, without ever knowing fully why. The one bit of solace is that, in their years of parental neglect, the Jenningses inadvertently pushed him toward Stan, who’s become a surrogate father to Henry, and will presumably be his support system, his shoulder to cry on, his bridge to the next phase of his life, with so much of it having been upended by this one day in his life.

But Paige’s might be harder because it is a rejection. As much as the “With or Without You” needle drop feels like an indulgence a bit too on the nose, even for a series finale, the montage it plays under carries the shock and surprise of Philip and Elizabeth seeing her standing on the platform at the last stop before crossing the border. She knows her mom and dad cannot risk turning around to get her and having to make it through another passport check; she knows she can’t explain it to them, she just gives them one last look as they’re forced to move on.

“START” never tells us explicitly why Paige leaves, but given the events of the past couple episodes, it’s fair to infer that she’s decided she does not want the life of a spy, that she doesn't trust her parents. While she’s come to accept so much, understand so much, about what her parents do, the line may very well be crossed after she learns the depths of their actions. She knows her parents slept with other people now. She knows that they’ve killed people now. Not very long ago, her mother told her that she needed to commit now and do it forever, or decide that this life wasn’t for her. Paige makes her decision here, after the revelations meant to keep an old friend from capturing them also reveal to her how far her parents have gone, and how far she might have to go, if she follows in their footsteps, wherever they mean to lead her.

That confession is the most tense moment of the hour though. While “START” suggests there will be somewhat of a cat and mouse game between the Jennings and the FBI team that is closing in on them, it mostly comes down to a stand off between the Jenningses and Stan. It’s a scene that the finale needed to have. I think I would have felt cheated if they’d gotten away without Stan having his epiphany, finding his proof, and confronting his would-be friends over what he’s learned.

It’s a devastating, angering moment for Stan. He describes his life as “a joke” when he starts to poke through Philip and Elizabeth’s lies. There is an understandable sense of betrayal, of disbelief that the people he cared about like family were also the people he was working against every day of his professional life in Washington. He is ready to make them pay for that, to answer for what they’ve done.

Instead, in the end, he lets them go, and it takes what may very well be the monologue of the series from Matthew Rhys to earn it. Instead of prevaricating, of misdirecting, of trying to find some way to wriggle out of the situation using all the skills of deception and persuasion that he learned as a spy, Philip tells his best friend the truth. He tells them that he did all this without wanting to, that he did the job he was told to do, that he did it for his country, that he was Stan’s best friend and vice versa, and that he didn’t want to lie to him. It is a revealing confessional moment, one where Philip lays his soul bare, as much to himself as to the man with a gun trained on him, that sums up his strange, raw journey over the course of the show.

In the end, it’s enough. Stan is clearly still mad, still shocked, still beside himself at what’s been done and how close he was to it, but he sits silently and lets it happen. With his complicitness, if not his blessing, the Jenningses escape into the night.

After that key moment, this last blow from The Americans delivers its messages with images more than words. No one comments on it, but we feel the pain as the camera pans down to see Henry’s passport buried in a dark hole, alongside Elizabeth’s suicide necklace and their American wedding rings, buoyed by their replacement with the Russian ones they put on in front of the priest who eventually sells them out. We see an impossibly black night brightened blindingly in the center of the frame by a gleaming red and yellow McDonalds, the site of the Jenningses’ last American meal, freighted with the symbolism of this bastion of capitalism and Americana.

And we experience Philip and Elizabeth’s long slow journey back home. These scenes, of the two of them on trains, on planes, in cars along gray sparkling city scapes and washed out tree-lined roadsides, have a Lynchian deliberateness to them. We share in this journey, with scene after scene where little happens beyond a pair of headlights peeking out through the darkness, forcing us to stop and process and contemplate what is to come at the same time Philip and Elizabeth are. There is no hurry, only the slow passage of images as she rests her head on his shoulder, and they awake to see their long-absent home.

It’s a home they return to, however, without their children. That may be the final theme The Americans imparts: that this life, however taxing it may be, really does allow you to do an incredible amount of good, to change the world even, but it costs you your family. Oleg is rotting in a jail cell, seemingly destined not to see his wife and son for decades due to his efforts to save his country for them. Stan lost himself in this life, and arguably lost his connection with both his wife and his son because of it. And while the episode still plays coy about it, he has to live with his possibility that the woman he loves now may be a part of the game, another blow that, as Pastor Tim once described it and he described to Henry, may make it impossible for him to trust anyone again.

Philip and Elizabeth, then, have to reassure themselves that their children will be okay without them, that Henry’s life is here, that Paige is capable and well-taught, that they’re not kids anymore. In a reverie on the way, Elizabeth processes her own guilt, her feelings for her kids, and maybe her feelings for her mom. Philip briefly deludes himself into thinking he could stay and explain things to Henry. But in the end, they have to accept that their children are roughly where they were when they began this life, that they will be safe and make their own choices now, except Paige and Henry have truly become Americans.

In the final frame, the Jennings return home having been irrevocably altered by twenty years of espionage and murders and close scrapes, but also by twenty years of parenthood, of marriage, of founding a family out in a strange land. They go back to Russia shaped by those things, by their efforts to save the world, to save their children, but they go back without them.