6x02 Tchaikovsky

[7.5/10] Does Elizabeth have a soul? Or, to put it more gently, has Elizabeth’s soul been so sanded down by all she’s been through, so buried underneath all the work she has to do, that it’s been practically smothered as we see her in 1987? I think it’s a fair question, and one that The Americans is implicitly asking in “Tchaikovsky”.

The litmus test for that seems to be Elizabeth’s appreciation for art, or lack thereof. The episode fixates to some degree on her inability to get why anyone would make it or spend time on it. We had hints in the season premiere that something in her terminal patient’s work was stirring something within her, something she couldn’t name or identify, buried deep down. But when asked her opinion on the sketches and paintings here, Elizabeth comes up empty. She’s similarly blank in her affect when Claudia plays Paige a piece from the eponymous Russian composer.

The suggestion is that there is something imaginative, something emotional, that typically meets the call and response of art that is missing in Elizabeth right now. We know that Elizabeth has a soul. We’ve seen how she loves her husband and her kids; how she feels deeply for her mom and other parental figures in her life, how she too has felt moved and wounded by schemes involving Young Hee and others. However much Elizabeth has been all about the mission, she’s also had her attachments and caring and hopes bubbling beneath it.

But it’s been three years since any of that (a timeframe that Aderholt confirms for us here). The Elizabeth we see now is worn down and exhausted, with the weight of the world on her shoulders as the all-important summit is on the horizon. She is taking bigger risks, having closer scrapes, and seeming more and more resigned to the end here, in a way that makes it hard for her to connect to anything beyond that.

At least it provides some of the most tense moments we’ve had on the show in a while! It’s a simple operation, but Elizabeth just going on a tour of the state department, changing into a different disguise, and then meeting with her contact at the CIA in the cafeteria while the security guards are after her is one of the stronger nailbiter moments the show’s pulled off in a while. It’s a nice way to add some spark to the information Elizabeth gets from her contact -- that in the USA just like in Russia, there are hardliners in the warhawk wing of the government who are leery of any form of reconciliation or deal-making with the other side, and who are questioning the fitness of their head of state to lead the people into the future.

But some folks from the intelligence services are just happy to be out of the game -- like Stan. One of the other tense moments is the episode is when Stan has to keep working his former Russian hockey hero contact, and we get to see the “diplomatic pouch” FBI plan in action. Apart from the perilous operations, there’s just the people management side of it. Stan has to reassure the guy that his wife will come around and their strife will dissipate in time. He has to tell Sofia that her husband is under pressure and that this op is important.

You can feel the stress of having to keep all these different personalities properly wrangled, of hoping that your connection with people will be enough to keep these vital operations going. It’s a trust business, one where you have to insinuate yourself in other people’s lives for a mercenary, if well-meaning, gain, and the strain of that makes you understand Stan’s pronouncement to the now Chief(!) Aderholt that he’s much happier dealing with criminals and corrupt politicians. But Oleg’s back in town, which suggests that Stan won’t be able to stay out of the game for long.

Philip, however, is finding life outside of the game harder than he thought. The Jenningses’ travel agency lost a big client despite Philip’s big “make a personal connection” speeches, and he’s disproportionately bothered by it. We’ve never really seen much of the Jenningses at the Travel Agency, or at least not doing Travel Agency work, and I always kind of assumed the KGB was subsidizing it all as a front anyway. After such a desire to throw himself into American life like this, it seems like Philip is learning that....he might not actually be good at business? American capitalism is hard? It’s not clear yet, but the show is definitely cooking something up there.

It’s also cooking something up with Paige, who’s still running counter surveillance missions for her mom’s meets, learning about Russian culture with Claudia, and asking her mom about the details. This season seems to be toying with the idea that however much Paige has transformed from a concerned and distraught teenager into a capable adult, she may not be ready for all this, too fraught with the emotional connections that make her an empathetic person but maybe not the best, cold-hearted spy.

That’s what makes it interesting to hear Elizabeth lie to her daughter about this work once again. When Paige asks her straight up whether spies ever have to sleep with their contacts for info, Elizabeth tells her no, and then hedges ever so slightly to say that sometimes agents cross lines. It’s a little funny for fans of the show, considering that Philip and Elizabeth have defaulted to honeypot schemes time and time again, but it’s also an interesting sign of how Elizabeth is both trying to slowplay the realities of the job, while also not wanting to subject her daughter to that sort of thing as a possibility.

But the alternatives aren’t great. Elizabeth tries to blackmail the same Air Force general Philip met with in season 1, and it goes much more poorly. He pulls a gun on her, and she begs for her life, pleads that she is a mother, only to use that as a distraction to pounce on him, struggle for the gun, and shoot him through the head. It’s a grisly and intense scene, one that again makes the audience question whether this is a genuine plea or show of emotion from Elizabeth, or just something calculating she uses to get out of a tight scrape. The way she barks at her daughter to stick to the mission points in both directions -- the concerned mother trying to protect her daughter, and the dutiful agent trying to tell a subordinate to stick to the plan.

The other side of the coin is that it’s a survival ploy from a character who may have questions about surviving at this point. There’s a strange, mordant air around Elizabeth this season. She has the suicide necklace given to her by the Russian general in the season premiere. She is talking to Claudia about what to do with Paige if she perishes on a mission. She is spending time with someone who’s terminally ill, and considering suicide as a way to escape and avoid the neverending strain and pain she’s subjected to. There’s the vacant, one-foot-in-the-grave look that Elizabeth takes on as she puffs away.

It all adds up to a human being who is reaching her limit on how much of this she can stand, but who doesn't have it in her to quit like Philip, especially not with so much at stake. It’s nice to get what amounts to a spotlight episode for Elizabeth, especially given where the series has moved in her emotionally in the time jump between seasons. But however exciting or welcome it is, it’s not a pretty picture, of a spy who’s breaking down, and maybe losing the spark within her, the flashes of humanity, that keep us tethered to this mortal coil, and the people we love within it.

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