6x03 Urban Transport Planning

[7.3/10] Enjoying The Americans has always meant learning to appreciate a fair amount of table-setting. It’s not just The Ameircans -- a number of prestige dramas aren’t designed to keep the viewer on the edge of their seats for each episode, but rather to build gradually to crescendos and take the time to explore the prelude and the aftershocks of them. That’s a feature, not a bug, and something I yearn for from less adept shows that blow through plot points without taking the time to examine how things reached that point or the implications of each development.

So I’m interested in a number of things that “Urban Transport Planning” is setting up. I continue to be intrigued by the quiet estrangement between Philip and Elizabeth, where they still care about one another (as the interlude with the Russian stew warmly suggests), but no that Philip is out of the spy game, they just live different lives. The strongest parts of this episode, and the strongest parts of this season, have been focused on squaring away both the personal differences between Elzabeth and Philip being exposed right now with Philip having left the spy biz behind, but also the professional/philosophical divide between them, as the relationship between Russia and the United States seems to be on the verge of a change they have very different feelings about.

But you know what I’m not particularly invested in? The relationship drama, or even the defections, of Sofia and Gennadi, characters we just met last season, and even then, only glancingly. I know I should care about the various operations to try to infiltrate the big, uber-important summit taking place, but they’re all so scattered and disconnected at the moment, that it’s hard to be too invested in them. And I can definitely tell you that I’m not particularly invested in the Jenningses’ money troubles.

Is that what anyone’s asking for from The Americans? I had naturally assumed that the KGB was subsidizing the Jennings family and their business for a long time anyway. After all, it’s a regional travel agency whose two owners are constantly having to be away so that they can go kill/sleep with/deceive people across the country. It’s not really plausible that that Philip would have to ask the headmaster of Henry’s school for an extension on tuition payments.

I guess they need something for Philip to do when he’s not out doing spy stuff, and this is what they came up with. I like the idea at the core of all of this -- that for all his appreciation for the country he’s lived in over the past 20 years, Philip isn’t especially good at being a civilian. He’s not great a business; he’s not great at his EST-inspired self help group employee pep talks (a scene which went on way too long), and he’s not great at keeping the business solvent. Maybe the idea is that that’s why he went back to talk to Oleg? Because he feels useful and talented doing the espionage thing in a way he doesn't being a “schnook” to borrow a phrase from another work.

At the same time, Stan is still anxious to be a schnook, even if everything in his life seems to be pushing him back toward counter intelligence. The aforementioned spat between Soifa and Gennadi culminates in Sofia telling her confidante Bodgon what she does, and he and Aderholt bring the both of them in from the cold, along with Ilia (who turns out to be the same kid from the “Wells for Boys” SNL skit of all things!). He has to rebuff Renee who suspiciously wants to become an FBI agent (and seems really obvious to the audience as a spy at this point).

And he has a disappointing reunion with Oleg, which is more tease than substance. Stan’s assurance that he’s the one who called off the CIA from harassing Oleg falls on deaf ears, but he still warns Oleg not to try pulling any spy stuff while he’s in America, despite some pointed Nina-based undertones to the whole interaction. Again, it feels like the show is setting up something hee, but we’re still very much in the reintroduction stage rather than the ignition stage, which is a little concerning given that there are only seven episodes of the series left.

The meat of the episode, and the season, continues to rest in the relationship between Philip and Elizabeth, as spouses, parents, and partners. It’s particularly interesting with respect to Paige. There’s a good cop/bad cop vibe to their contradictory interactions, where Philip tells Paige that her mistake in the prior episode is OK, and that part of how you get through this job is being able to talk to your fellow spies like he and Elizabeth did. But as soon as Elizabeth returns, she starts chewing Paige out, making sure that she knows how badly she screwed up rather than offering any reassurances. It’s a nice version of the show’s characteristically outsized take on different parenting styles, that helps underscore the difficulty for Paige in all of this.

It’s also a great moment when the two of them share that warm remembrance over Russian stew, which slowly curdles into grand disagreements about the direction of the motherland and their adoptive homeland. Philip has always had a fondness for the USA, and that appreciation leads him to welcome perestroika and the various ways in which Russia is starting to accept certain Western reforms and influences. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is aghast at it, seeing it as a betrayal of her country's purity, and blaming these moves on what she views as a biased Western media feeding people what it thinks they want to hear. Both claim to know what “the real people” want, despite each having no contact with the Soviet Union beyond their handlers.

And we continue to have a sort of fatalistic air around Elizabeth. When she finally does talk to Paige in more warm and accepting tones, she tells her daughter that she’s not afraid to die, so long as it’s in service of a cause she believes in. At the end of the episode, she has to off her third victim in as many episodes and, as the “previouslies” note, that’s wearing on her too. It may all be one big swerve, but the show is leaning hard into a version of Elizabeth who is cracking up on the inside despite her stoicness, who sees death as her only way out, and seems to be mentally preparing for it whether she admits that to herself or not.

I am curious to see where that leads. I am curious to see if Stan and Oleg have to confront one another in less oblique ways. I am curious to see how the divergence between Philip and Elizabeth affects Paige and their marriage and their place in this country. I’m just hoping that we don’t have to keep spending this much time on setup before we get there.