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Mary

“I’m sorry to drop by unannounced. It’s so hard to talk around the office these days.”

Good Lord, what a terrifying reveal! After several expository installments, this penultimate episode of season 3 of The Americans was a live-wire of action as some of the slow-build machinations of The Center came to fruition and a few loose-cannon actions threatened to upend everything.

The sentence above is spoken by Noah Emmerich’s Agent Stan Beeman, lately an avuncular presence on the show as he bonds with the Jennings’ outcast son Henry, but as he utters that line he is the Sword of Damocles, dangling over that family’s head.

Matthew Rhys’ Philip is heading over to Martha’s house for the night, and he’s still so nervous about how she’s absorbing the news that her husband has been manipulating her for information that they send Hans the KGB intern to scout her place in advance. As Philip, disguised as “Clark,” approaches her home, Hans drives by and gives him a signal.

Then we cut to Martha, the indispensable Alison Wright, musing about changes to her apartment. “I keep thinking I want to paint, blue or something bolder. Then you have to live with it. And the smell, it lingers you know. Much longer than they say.”

The camera pans to reveal who is sitting at her kitchen table, and it isn’t “Clark.”

“Hmm. It’s a nice place,” Beeman says. Continue reading ‘I Am Abassin Zadran’ TV Recaps

“My mother raised me. You should have seen the way I grew up. It was just me and her and three other families in a single apartment. If the families were too loud when I was trying to go to sleep, she would go scream at them. They would scream back. She would always win. … She had a real spirit. Like yours.”

“How can I believe anything you say?”

This week’s episode of The Americans is a relatively mellow affair, but this scene between a mother and daughter sitting in a parked car in their garage is one of the more gutting exchanges on the series this season. What Keri Russell’s Elizabeth has discovered, now that her daughter knows that she is an undercover Soviet operative, is that she has pretended so much that even her truths taste like lies.

Opening up to Paige, played by Holly Taylor as someone vibrating with anger and uncertainty within her still exterior, isn’t easy for Elizabeth. It has never been easy for her with anyone. But here, sharing something about her real past, something both painful and nostalgic, she finds the memory brutally thrown back at her by a child who now considers her a stranger.

This episode, number 11 with only two more to go, is “One Day in the Life of Anton Baklanov,” the kidnapped scientist forced to work on stealth technology for the Soviets. The title is a reference to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the 1962 novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which shocked Russian readers by acknowledging the horrors of life in a gulag under Stalin. Continue reading ‘One Day in the Life of Anton Baklanov’ TV Recaps

“Paige, your father and I … We …”

“We were born in a … different country.”

And just like that, one of the biggest pressure valves on The Americans bursts open. After a season of Philip trying to protect their daughter, Paige, from being drawn into the control of the KGB and Elizabeth trying to gradually introduce her to the idea, the girl has called them out on their mysterious behavior at the behest of Pastor Tim and learned the truth about what her mother and father.

Now she knows. And, to quote another pop culture touchstone from the 1980s, knowing is half the battle. Except whatever fight Paige is being pulled into is probably just beginning.

After last week’s heart-crushing episode opened a moral chasm for Keri Russell’s Elizabeth, tonight’s installment of The Americans, titled simply “Stingers,” was mostly setting the chessboard for the end of the season and clearing way for this showdown between Holly Taylor’s Paige and her secretive mother and father to play out unencumbered.

The episode begins at the travel agency, which always makes me wonder: Do Philip and Elizabeth actually have to do this job on top of everything else? I’m sure the Soviet Union underwrites their business in some way, and they also have employees who must do something. Can you imagine what happens when Barb really does forget to file the agency sales report with the ATC? I digress… Continue reading ‘Stingers’ TV Recaps