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Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys and exec producers Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields reflect on the episode’s three biggest twists and lightly tease what’s to come.

ARE WE IN MAYBERRY? | After several months away “visiting her aunt,” a fully recovered Elizabeth returned home with a surprising new accessory: a smile. The entire Jennings clan seemed to be enjoying a rare moment of bliss. “Everything was great,” shares Rhys. “There was a real sense of, ‘Possibly, this could be fine. We can all be happy spies ever after.’” Adds Weisberg: “This is the first time that Phillip and Elizabeth are able to be happy as a couple after that year of struggling with their marriage. It’s their time to be married.”

THE OTHER SHOE | Their temporary respite from doom-and-gloom was shattered in the hour’s final act when Phillip and Elizabeth found the bodies of their spy doppelgangers — Emmett and Leanne Connors — lying in a pool of blood in a hotel room. The Conners’ daughter also was killed; only the son managed to survive. “They lost these people who are really like them,” points out Weisberg. “It sets this undercurrent of, “Are we next?” Before, their primary fear was, “We might be on an operation and get killed or arrested. The kids could be orphaned, or sent to a state orphanage because we’re in prison.” But now that’s different. Now their family could get killed. It’s a whole different thing. It’s an emotional punch that you struggle with.” The bloodbath affects Elizabeth “in a massive way,” previews Russell. “She hasn’t been worried about her children in that physical way, but now the danger is encroaching on her family. This whole season is about protecting her family.”

KITCHEN NIGHTMARES | Phillip is now murdering innocent people — in this case, a busboy who just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Once his wig comes off and [the busboy] could see him and recognize him in a line-up, he made the snap decision to shoot him,” explains Rhys. “And it starts to weigh heavily on him this season. Not specifically this death, but the consequences of what they do.” Fields admits he wasn’t worried that the brazen incident would make Phillip irredeemable in viewers’ eyes. “We really don’t think that way,” he shares. “We think about being true to where the characters are. What choice did he have once he was in that situation? He had been seen. Was that busboy not going to go to the police and do a composite sketch? Had [Phillip] not ripped off his wig, he probably would’ve walked straight out.”

Source: http://tvline.com

“I’m just going to lay down here because I’m so fucking tired,” said Keri Russell, flopping down on a bed covered in paper and plastic. It was a 20-something-degree polar-vortex-ed February afternoon in Brooklyn; she still had several hours to go filming an episode of her FX Cold War Russian-spy drama The Americans on set; and she’d already been up for hours at the beck and call of her other bosses, her 6-year-old son and 14-month-old daughter. “It started at 6 a.m. with two children,” she said. “With a baby going, ‘Mo-om. Mo-om!’ She can’t even talk, but she can bark ‘mom’ at me.” Now, as if the car service that takes her to work were also a time machine, this season focuses on her character Elizabeth’s exhausting relationship with a newly rebelling teenage daughter. She finds their scenes even more tiring than the life-or-death, sex-and-bullet-filled missions that are de rigueur for Elizabeth, who, unbeknownst to her kid, is an undercover KGB operative. Russell nestled further into the uncomfy set bed. “I just like to lay amongst the bubble wrap,” she said, her voice trailing off.

The mother-daughter tension is a major through line of The Americans’ second season (which kicks off tonight at 10 p.m.). Last season, teenage Paige seemed an innocent, her biggest worry (well, other than pervy guys picking her and her brother up on the side of the road) was that her parents might be splitting up for good. But while the first season ended with Elizabeth and arranged husband/spy partner Phillip Jennings reconciling and nurturing true feelings for each other, Paige’s adolescence is made more complicated by her suspicions about her parents’ secret laundry room meetings and her newfound interest in organized religion, which, to a pair of devoted Communists, is a truly objectionable wholesome passion. Executive producer Joe Weisberg, who studied Soviet history at Yale, explained later that this was the equivalent of a drug addiction. “It would be like joining a cult,” he said. “It would make them insane.” Continue reading Sex, Murder, and Parenting on the Set of The Americans