Almost everyone has a “where were you when” moment: where were you when Kennedy was assassinated, or when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, or when the twin towers fell? That moment for Philip and Elizabeth is when an unidentified gunman attempts to kill President Reagan. They’re just leaving the hotel where they were spending some time alone getting to know each other when their world is turned instantly upside down – but not for the same reasons as everyone around them. For the Jenningses, it’s not concern about the President, it’s the concern that they might be on the brink of personal involvement in the next world war.
This episode was almost a reverse of last week’s in terms of pacing, and for good reason – when a president gets shot, things tend to spiral out of control a little. All the events of the episode raced by, ramping up the tension to a nerve-wracking level that did a nice job of reflecting Elizabeth and Phil’s (not to mention the FBI’s) increasing panic over just what the hell exactly is happening. There is a lot of mirroring going on here, with everyone doing their own thing on parallel wavelengths that ultimately lead to the same place.
To start things off, both sides need to find out who was responsible for the attempted assassination. While Stan’s boss at the FBI is positive the Russians are behind everything and pressures Stan to set up a meeting with his Soviet Embassy mole without getting her killed, the Jenningses are scrambling to get in touch with their own contacts. One of these is a journalist who has publicly abandoned the USSR but is still privately committed to the cause, which at first seemed like a bit much – I mean, was every single Russian person in America in the ‘80s a KGB spy and/or fervent Communist? – but which I think ultimately works as an effective demonstration of just how far-reaching Phil and Elizabeth’s network is and ties in well with the whole idea of the constant, pervasive paranoia that our characters are living in.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth meets with “Granny,” otherwise known as Claudia, the new boss. Claudia claims the Russians weren’t responsible for the attempt on Reagan’s life; in fact, they’re actually afraid that the U.S. Secretary of State, General Haig, who is proclaiming himself in control of the White House, has engineered a coup and may now have access to nuclear launch codes that could obliterate the USSR. I was hoping for some more shady deception from Claudia in the same vein as her Cuba story last week, but I’m happy with a sincere Claudia for now, since she acts as the catalyst for Elizabeth’s panic. Despite the way her worldview has been shaken up lately, Elizabeth is still obviously not as comfortable around Americans as her husband is, and she still doesn’t trust them. To her, they’re capable of anything, even nuclear war, and Claudia reinforces this sense of impending doom.
The sense of being under the pressure of a ticking clock (to find out who’s really in charge at the White House, who was responsible for the shooting, and how much General Haig knows about those codes) affects Phil and Elizabeth differently, of course. He backs off from the breakneck action, telling his wife flat out that Moscow is overreacting, she’s rushing into things, and they need more evidence before they do something that could escalate the Cold War. Elizabeth, however, gets to pull off some old-school, badass spy moves like digging up a crate of high-powered weapons that she’s hidden in the woods and rigged to blow up, then shooting a security guard who threatens to look inside her van full of guns. After some more finagling, she gets hold of a bad recording of General Haig mentioning something nuclear, which leads to the defining moment of the episode: she decides to trust Philip when he insists that they should do things his way and wait until they know more.
This is an especially tough decision for Mrs. Jennings, as we see from the show’s first-ever flashback that she’s spent her whole life carrying around the idea that you can’t depend on anyone except yourself. Letting go of her distrust of the Americans, even if it’s just this once, is a big deal for her, and serves to bring her yet another step closer to Phil, especially since now they’re depending on each other to not spill the beans to Moscow about what they heard from the General. It’s a powerful moment when she realizes what could have happened if she had just rushed into things: Stan tells the Jenningses that if the Russians had been the ones behind the shooting or if the situation had escalated, it would have started World War III. Unfortunately, it’s undercut by the fact that the show is in danger of veering into “Philip is always right about everything” territory, which I’m not a huge fan of; I get that Elizabeth’s past has made her prickly and damaged in many ways, but why doesn’t Phil have any of those issues? The characters lose complexity if they’re pigeonholed into being “the sensible one” and the “risk-taking wild card,” so I hope we see a couple episodes in the future that feature something other than Elizabeth being aggressive and having to be talked down by her husband.
Stan is another person who learns a little something about trust in this episode. (Please savor that smooth segue from my above tangent on characterization.) After finally engineering a meeting with Soviet Nina, he is flabbergasted to hear that the Russians think the assassination attempt was an attempt at a coup. He’s beginning to realize that the other guys are just as jumpy and scared as the U.S.; sometimes, it turns out everybody’s human. Because, as you know if you know your 1980s history, it wasn’t Soviet agents that tried to kill President Reagan, nor was it General Haig – it was a mentally unbalanced man trying to impress the actress Jodie Foster.
This might be the most traditionally spy-esque episode the show has done so far. It has all the classic elements that you might expect from a TV show about espionage: guns! Coded message machines! Really terrible wigs! (On Keri Russell, at least. Apparently the price you pay for having great hair in real life is getting stuck with a Dorothy Hamill wig when you go undercover.) None of this feels stale or overdone, however; these are all details that flesh out the 1980s universe and make it feel even more exciting, as well as raise the stakes. We’ve seen Phil and Elizabeth carry out missions before, but none of them have been on such a large scale. A war between the U.S. and USSR would be nuclear and global, and all that’s standing between the world and chaos are people like Elizabeth and Philip and Stan, who are just trying to keep their respective camps – and their own lives – under control.
What we are left with at the end of the episode is a short but poignant scene between Stan and his wife where it is revealed that even as the Jenningses’ marriage gets stronger, Stan’s is unraveling – a nice reminder that however badass “The Americans” gets, no one here is a superhero.
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The Americans got renewed! That good news along with what happen on tvd has made this thursday in like forever and I still have to deal with Scandal.