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“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

Well, there you have it—the cat is out of the bag in the Jennings family, and neither Philip nor Elizabeth could have anticipated that this is how Paige would finally find out that her parents are Russian spies.

After Pastor Tim encouraged Paige to confront her parents about their secrets, the invigorated teen finally cornered Philip and Elizabeth and demanded the answers she’s been desperately seeking. Paige ended her parents’ “Who’s going to tell her first?” tennis match by throwing a curve ball into the court that caught them both off guard, causing Philip and Elizabeth to finally reveal their true nature to their daughter…although just barely, as they could scarcely even manage to get words out.

How did Paige handle it? Well, the jury is still out, which is why EW quickly called up The Americans executive producers Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg to ask them all of our burning questions about what could possibly be the series’ defining moment…so far. Continue reading The Americans bosses on Paige’s reaction, her future, and the show’s endgame

USA! USA!

FX has renewed The Americans for a fourth season. The Cold War thriller will get another 13 episodes next year, EW has learned.

FX is enthusiastic about the show’s critical acclaim, noting The Americans currently has the top spot on critic aggregation site Metacritic, with a 92 out of 100 average (including EW’s review). “Remarkably, this season of The Americans has achieved even greater acclaim than that of its first two seasons,” said Nick Grad, programming president at FX. “The series has cemented it status with critics as television’s best current drama and arguably the best show on TV, and we couldn’t agree more.”

Ratings are another matter. The show has continued to struggle to find a big audience. Last week’s episode had only about 1 million viewers and a 0.3 rating among adults 18-49 in the overnight returns, ranking below repeats on other basic cable networks of King of the Hill and Full House. Yet FX points out that after you add in repeats, DVR playback and video on demand, the show improves to 4.2 million weekly viewers.

Source: http://www.ew.com/

Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, the lead actors on FX’s slow-burning spy series The Americans are gorgeous, sexy individuals with undeniable chemistry. I know it, you know it, and the FX marketing team certainly knows it. But in this most recent season, FX has turned down the sex on their leading lady, Russell’s Elizabeth Jennings, and it all paid off in last night’s devastating episode.

Especially in its first season, The Americans leaned in somewhat to certain gender stereotypes of the spy genre, with Elizabeth far more likely than her partner, Philip, to put her body into service for Mother Russia. (Comedian Amy Schumer recently said that watching the first season of The Americans inspired her to create her popular “Operation Enduring Mouth” sketch.)

In Season 2, when comely satellite assets like Aimee Carrero’s Lucia (R.I.P.) and Gillian Alexy’s Annelise (R.I.P.) stepped in to shoulder the sexual burden in their spy games, Elizabeth’s body was often on display for a different person. Elizabeth used sexuality as an olive branch as she and Philip transformed their marriage of convenience into a true and loving relationship. Continue reading How The Americans Subverted Worn-Out Sexist Spy Tropes to Bring Us Its Most Disturbing Episode Yet

“You think doing this to me will make the world a better place?”
“I’m sorry. But it will.”

“That’s what evil people tell themselves … when they do … evil things.”

These are the dying words of a stranger, but they have wounded Elizabeth Jennings like no bullet, knife, or punch has yet. Tonight’s episode of The Americans, “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” steals its title from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Philip K. Dick novel that inspired Blade Runner—another story that questioned what it means to be both human… and inhuman.

The old woman who utters these words (played by a charming and riveting Lois Smith) punctures a hole in Elizabeth’s otherwise impenetrable devotion to her grim life’s work for the KGB. Until now, Elizabeth has seen herself as a spy, a saboteur, a soldier—but overall an agent of equality. In this moment, forcing an innocent elderly woman to commit suicide for the crime of catching up on warehouse paperwork when she and Philip break in to bug the FBI’s mail robot, opens her eyes to a different reality: Maybe she’s just a murderer, a thug, an oppressor. Maybe she is the enemy.

We’ll get into the mother-issues that allow this particular victim to strike such a nerve with Kerry Russell’s usually stoic character, but let’s dive into how the episode starts: With Elizabeth breaking some unfortunate news to Hans, her young South African KGB recruit. She says that he may have been spotted by Todd, the pro-apartheid college student and would-be bomber she spared in the previous episode. After the fiery death of his terrorist handler, Todd confessed everything Elizabeth, Philip, and their South African revolutionary Reuben Ncgobo wanted to know.

Given what Elizabeth has to do to poor, heartsick Betty, the purely innocent bystander, later in this episode, the mercy she showed to potential mass-murderer Todd seems out of place, no? When she tells Hans that his, um, KGB internship is being scrapped because this Todd guy caught a glimpse of him… something else rang false, at least for me. I actually went back to the previous week’s episode to see if this really happened, if Todd really did see Hans, and sure enough, yes, he did. But, but—remember that Todd spent a lot of time not only looking at her, Philip, and Reuben, but talking with them and begging them for mercy. Surely those are some faces he’ll never forget. The kid he saw briefly at a distance, scurrying away—so what? How is that a threat?

Still, she tells him: “Hans, it’s over. Us. This.”

I’m no mail robot, but … this does not compute. Especially for a woman who is eager to draw her own daughter into this life. It’s never stated explicitly, but my theory is: This is a test.

The next scene has Matthew Rhys’ Philip delivering Elizabeth a one-two hit of more troubling news:

1. The FBI found the bug they embedded in the desk pen of Special Agent Frank Gaad (Richard Thomas.)

2. Gaad’s secretary, and Philip’s “other” wife, Martha Hanson (Alison Wright) knows he’s not the internal affairs investigator he claimed to be.

“The person they brought in to investigate isn’t me,” he explains.

But there’s a silver lining: Martha hasn’t ratted him out, and he doesn’t think she will. Elizabeth is incredulous. “How can you know?”

I loved Rhys’s hesitation here, and thought he was going to say: “Because she’s my wife.” I think that’s what the character was actually thinking, although what he tells Elizabeth, his “real” wife, was somewhat softer.

“Because I trust her.” Continue reading ‘Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?’ TV Recaps

It feels strange to call an episode where so many things happen “slow,” especially on a show like The Americans, where slow is very much the point. But that’s how “Divestment” feels, mostly because it spends its time moving a number of this season’s plots forward just the slightest bit, without much in the way of that fraught tension the show is known for. Nonetheless, the moves made tonight are important ones—all things to add to the powder keg at the end of a very long fuse.

The episode picks up immediately after the end of “Walter Taffet,” with Elizabeth, Phillip, and Reuben taking Eugene Venter and his student accomplice Todd to an abandoned warehouse for interrogation. At first, they’re kind to Venter–Phillip offers him cash and a chance at a new life if he talks. Venter refuses. So he resorts to pain.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth goes to work on Todd—all he does is tell her that Venter had him monitoring campus anti-aparthied groups. She then takes him outside, and sits him in front of Venter. They’re going to make him watch Venter die. But Reuben stops Elizabeth, and refuses to take her gun when he expresses that he wants to do it himself.

“You already have your country,” he says. “You can’t understand.” Continue reading ‘Divestment’ TV Recaps

As we cross the halfway marker in this season of The Americans, the show puts a few of its storylines on hold to spend some time with a few plot threads it has left largely unattended thus far: namely, Martha, and the student that trainee Hans has been suspicious of. But mostly Martha.

The man who this week’s episode of The Americans is named after is barely in it. In fact, if you’re not listening closely (The Americans is not kind about this—it demands that you always listen closely) you might even miss his name entirely. But Walter Taffet’s presence tugs at the thread named Martha, and it could potentially put the Jennings one step closer to being caught.

The trouble starts with Agent Dennis Aderholt. Stan doesn’t like him—over beer and pizza with Phillip, Stan says it might be that he asks too many questions, like he’s trying to show off or something. So when he spots Aderholt in Gaad’s office the next day, he comes up with a bullshit excuse (grabbing a random paper that he says needs Gaad’s signature) to get inside and see what they’re talking about. However, the pen that Gaad uses is out of ink, and after a good shake the cap falls off—with a much heavier thud than a pen cap should have. Continue reading ‘Walter Taffet’ TV Recaps