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Warning: The following interview contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “The Americans” titled “March 8, 1983.”

How much longer can Philip and Elizabeth Jennings hide the truth? The carefully crafted lies of the undercover Soviet spies played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell are slowly leaking out. In the final four episodes of the season, their daughter Paige (Holly Taylor), Philip’s “second wife” Martha (Alison Wright), and now, it appears, Paige’s confidante Pastor Tim (Kelly AuCoin) all learned the couple’s true identities. During the FX drama’s eventful finale, Philip almost even came clean to Sandra Beeman (Susan Misner), the soon-to-be ex-wife of his FBI agent neighbor, Stan (Noah Emmerich).

Meanwhile, Stan saw his own covert plan to reunite with exiled lover Nina (Annet Mahendru) go up in flames when he finally revealed the details to horrified boss Agent Gaad (Richard Thomas). But even as Stan lost a friend in Gaad, he gained a powerful supporter in the form of Deputy Attorney General Warren (Cotter Smith), who was impressed by the way Stan played romantic rival Oleg Burov (Costa Ronin). Continue reading ‘The Americans’ Season 3 Finale Postmortem: Joel Fields On the Martha Mystery, Reagan Speech

[WARNING: The following story contains spoilers from Wednesday’s Season 3 finale of The Americans. Read at your own risk.]

Paige couldn’t handle the truth.

On The Americans’ Season 3 finale Wednesday, Paige (Holly Taylor) made the trip abroad with Elizabeth (Keri Russell) to see Elizabeth’s ailing mother. While the visit went off without a hitch, the troubled teen still couldn’t deal with the weight of her parents’ KGB identities and endless lies, placing a desperate call to Pastor Tim in her room upon their return. “They’re liars and they’re trying to turn me into one. … They’re not who they say they are. They’re not Americans,” she whispers. “You can’t tell anyone. They’re… they’re Russians.”

The scene was wonderfully intercut with footage of President Reagan’s infamous speech on March 8, 1983 (the episode title), in which he dubbed the Soviet Union an “evil empire” — which Elizabeth made Philip (Matthew Rhys) watch just as he was about to divulge his own inner turmoil about the mounting burden of their job. Earlier in the episode, while Elizabeth and Paige were away, Philip had taken care of the “Martha thing” by killing Gene (Luke Robertson) and framing him for Gaad’s bugged pen. He also began attending EST sessions solo, where he bumped into Stan’s ex-wife Sandra (Susan Misner), who suggested that they tell each other everything. Continue reading The Americans Boss Breaks Down Paige’s “Big Move,” Martha’s Fate and What’s Next

After a certifiably nail-biting string of episodes on FX’s The Americans, season 3 has finally come to an end—and lo, the finale managed to raise more questions than it answered.

Has Paige (Holly Taylor) truly picked a side in her battle between faith and family? Is Philip (Matthew Rhys) struggling under the weight of his mission at the same time that Elizabeth (Keri Russell) is reaffirming devotion to hers? Stan (Noah Emmerich) is finally on the rise, but will he ever get the chips to trade Nina (Annet Mahendru) back? And what does Martha (Alison Wright) think about it all!?! (No, seriously, what does Martha think? We have no idea.) Continue reading The Americans season finale: The showrunners break down Paige’s decision and what it means for season 4

“I’m sure the next time mom and dad have … ‘business’ out of the country, and they have an extra ticket, it’ll go to … you.”

Bravo to actress Holly Taylor for nailing that line from a number of directions as the season finale for The Americans begins. Paige says that to her little brother as she walks through the airport with her family, on her way to West Germany with her mother (Keri Russell) to pay a farewell visit to the dying Russian grandmother she never knew existed.

“I’m sorry I never got to meet her,” Matthew Rhys’ Philip whispers in his wife’s ear.

“You wouldn’t have liked her,” Elizabeth replies.

I have to admit, this episode—titled “March 8, 1983” for reasons that will become clear later—frustrated me as a season finale. It felt more like an incredibly good penultimate episode, and ending on such a stark cliffhanger with many other plot threads dangling, feels like a mistake. The creators of The Americans have manufactured some savage tension, but that will only dissipate as we await season 4, rather than leaving us with a completed story line, as they did last year.

As Paige and Elizabeth head toward the Berlin Wall, Yousaf (Rahul Khanna) informs Philip that their plot to trick one visiting Mujahideen visitor to slaughter his fellow emissaries successfully scared the House Armed Services Committee away from giving them Stinger missiles.

The Pakistani ISI operative Yousaf is only cooperating because Philip helped him cover up his cold-blooded murder of Annelise earlier in the season. (Who can forget the crack-and-pack luggage scene as they smuggled her corpse out of the hotel?) Of course, Philip also is responsible for putting the two of them together, and Yousaf hasn’t forgotten that—even if he is crying crocodile tears now over the poor lover he murdered.

“Annelise finally paid off for you,” he says. “The weapons stay out of your enemy hands. Was it worth it?”

Way to get judge-y, Mr. Strangler.

“I don’t think like that,” Philip says. But he totally thinks like that. “I know a lot of young men who won’t be blown out of the sky because of what I did. Because of what Annelise did. Because of what we did. A lot of young men who …”

Philip stops. He’s done lying. “Yousaf, I feel like shit all the time,” he confesses.

Over at the Rezidentura, the staff is warned against carrying out threats or assassinations without appropriate departments from The Center signing off. This is a dog-whistle to the ear of Oleg Burov (Costa Ronin) who previously threatened the defector Zinaida Preobrazhenskaya for speaking out against the Soviet Union and its incursion into Afghanistan as part of a ploy to determine if she was actually a double agent.

Now he knows—she is. And he and FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) plan to use this information to get her arrested and trade her for their shared love, Nina, (Annet Mahendru) whom they both betrayed and got sent to a Siberian work camp. Continue reading ‘March 8, 1983’ TV Recaps

This ain’t your average mother-daughter trip.

On The Americans last week, Philip (Matthew Rhys) insisted that Elizabeth (Keri Russell) go see her dying mother in Russia and take Paige (Holly Taylor) with her. On Wednesday’s Season 3 finale (10/9c, FX), we’ll see that entering Mother Russia is easier said than done.

Yes, they will visit with Elizabeth’s mother, but the trip will do more damage than good in currying favor with a still-angry Paige. (Related: The episode is called “March 8, 1983,” the date of Reagan’s infamous speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”)

Will Paige — or Elizabeth — do something rash?

Source: http://www.tvguide.com

“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