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This episode is all about the way we project a future for ourselves, existing in possibilities, imagining destinations, and then slamming face-first into the inescapable present.

Titled “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow,” it involves a plan to visit Walt Disney World’s futuristic EPCOT Center near Orlando, Fla., but you know what happens to best-laid plans, right?

The hour opens with “Clark” waking up beside Martha on his fold-out sofa. She’s staring at him, and it’s easy to read her eyes: This is not my beautiful house; this is not my beautiful spouse. “Still not used to it,” she says when Philip wakes up and catches her staring.

Elsewhere, Elizabeth is undercover, apparently infiltrating a Mary Kay makeup sales meeting. A Korean-American woman named Young Hee (Ruthie Ann Miles) is talking about how most store makeup counters don’t know how to apply foundation that matches Asian skin tone, making them appear green. But, ah, Mary Kay has the personal touch that solves that!

“I tell my friends they don’t have to look like Martians,” Young Hee says. “We are all Americans now.” Continue reading The Americans recap: ‘Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow’

This episodes picks up moments after the last, with Philip coming back into the house after Stan roughs him up in the garage (with a vial of deadly pathogen in his front pocket).

Elizabeth (Keri Russell), naturally, wants to know what’s up, so Philip (Matthew Rhys) explains that Stan is angry because he was hanging around with Stan’s ex-wife at a meeting of the new-age-y EST self-help group.

These two regularly sleep with informants and subjects to discern information, but suddenly Elizabeth feels…betrayed. What was bothering Philip so much that he needed the therapeutic embrace of this group?

In the next scene, Gabriel (Frank Langella) discusses ways to smuggle the pathogen back to Mother Russia while suggesting that Philip and Elizabeth need to find a contact at the Fort Detrick bio-weapons lab who has higher security clearance than their current contact, William (Dylan Baker).

Gabriel also offers the Jennings family a personal computer. Their first. Welcome to the mid-1980s!

Back home, Elizabeth is listening to recordings from Pastor Tim’s telephone line and discovers their daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) has told him all about her secret agent Soviet parents.

Mom’s first reaction: kill the pastor. Dad suggests they wait. Killing Pastor Tim will send Paige fleeing from them.

He breaks into Pastor Tim’s home and figures out that he goes to a cabin to write his sermons. Elizabeth thinks it’s the perfect place for a hit. “If you’re going to pull her into this job, and she gets even a whiff of what we really do…she’ll figure out we killed him,” Philip protests.
Continue reading The Americans recap: ‘Pastor Tim’