The Americans ‘The Clock’ review: Metaphors galore

After last week’s premiere, which focused on the elaborate façade that Elizabeth and Phillip have built in order to remain undercover, this week’s episode of “The Americans” pushes in a little closer to look at what lies beneath that façade: family. Specifically, the danger to the couple’s own family that occurs when they take on a last-minute mission involving a meeting between the British Prime Minister and the American Secretary of Defense.

It all begins when Elizabeth agrees to take the job even though the meeting is in three days (in a reversal from last week’s episode, this time Phil is the one to incredulously  ask if she’s being serious). She’s worried about all the rants that she’s been hearing from President Reagan lately, telling Phil, “He wants to destroy us.” Phil agrees to give the mission a try, and everything starts out smoothly enough; Elizabeth gets to do some old-school spy stabbing, using the tip of her umbrella to inject poison into the leg of a man who turns out to be the son of the Secretary of Defense’s cleaning lady. This may seem unnecessarily circuitous, but since time is short, this is their best option. They have the antidote to the poison, and if the cleaning lady, Viola, doesn’t steal the clock from the room, replace it after Phil puts a listening device inside, and keep her mouth shut about the whole thing, they’ll withhold the antidote and her son will die.

Whereas the series premiere shows two slick agents in control of the situation, “The Clock” allows a glimpse into the cracks that can appear when the situation starts to spiral out of control. Phillip and Elizabeth’s entire mission depends upon Viola doing what they want, and if she doesn’t do it, it’s likely that their cover will be blown. She has seen their faces – for some reason, the only disguise involved is a moustache for Phil and nothing for Elizabeth. She’s their only way into the Secretary of Defense’s house, because due to their new FBI agent neighbor and his odd hours, they can’t be constantly sneaking out at night. Her concern for her son also brings up some uncomfortable feelings in the Jenningses – namely, thinking about what would happen to their own children if they were arrested, as well as having to confront the hypocrisy of worrying about their own kids while they’re poisoning somebody else’s son. It’s clear that neither one feels entirely comfortable with this plan; when Viola’s brother breaks into her apartment with a gun, demanding that Phillip give his nephew the vaccine, Phil manages to get the upper hand, but can’t bring himself to go any farther. There’s a moment when we wonder if he really is going to kill all three people in the apartment (after last week, we know he’s more than capable of doing so without hesitating), but it passes quickly. Even though Viola broke her word by telling her brother, and even though they have nothing to go on other than her word that she told no one else, all Phillip does is leave with the threat if they ever say anything, bad things will happen to them. For Elizabeth’s part, she breathes an obvious sight of relief when she gets the signal to give the dying man the antidote and wrap up her part in the chaotic mission.

These moments of mercy show the couple’s true weakness: the fact that they’re parents. When Viola breaks her promise yet again by not putting the clock back, Elizabeth reveals that she’s ready to die rather than face arrest, torture, and the threat of never getting to see Paige and Henry again. She worries about how her daughter would cope if their cover was blown, leading to a heartbreakingly vulnerable scene in which she wakes up Paige in the middle of the night, saying she doesn’t have to wait until she’s 15 to get her ears pierced, and then offers to do the piercing herself. It sounds weird written down, but on screen, it works perfectly. Elizabeth can’t tell her daughter so many things; all she really has are the small things, like piercing Paige’s ears the same way her own mother did for her when she was younger. In a way, it’s also a tacit acknowledgement by Elizabeth that Paige is going to have to grow up whether Elizabeth likes it or not.

Meanwhile, Phillip is still involved in his delicate little dance (still complete with awkward smiles! This time over caviar! I don’t know why I love this so much) with neighborhood FBI agent Stan, who is off their trail for now, but has picked up a weapon that might damage Phil and Elizabeth: an informant inside the Soviet Embassy. It turns out the woman he follows throughout the episode, who at first seems to have no relevance to our two spies, is a Soviet Embassy employee who’s been illegally trading caviar in return for money shipped back to the USSR inside stereo speakers. As Stan casually informs her at a fruit stand, the Soviets would be unlikely to look kindly upon this, and would probably sentence her to forced labor in a prison camp…unless she decides to accept U.S. protection and feed information to the FBI. This is a dangerous development for Phil and Elizabeth, considering that it appears everyone at the Soviet Embassy is involved in spying on Americans and seems to talk pretty freely about their operatives and operations. There may also be trouble with the Undersecretary of Defense’s wife, who cased the Secretary of Defense’s house for Phil under the assumption that he’s a Swedish agent who’s in love with her.

In addition to showing how they function as parents, “The Clock” also shows us more of how Phillip and Elizabeth work not just as a team, but as a husband and wife. There has definitely been more of an opening up between the two since the last episode; although we see the clockwork efficiency of a pair that has been together for 20 years, we also see Elizabeth beginning to confess her fears, and we see the implication that the two have been sharing details of their past lives and childhoods with each other. This is a big step forward into a less rigidly defined relationship of greater complexity, culminating with Elizabeth’s admission after the slapdash three-day job that the KGB shouldn’t ask them to do impossible things. An Elizabeth who feels that her country is asking too much of her and putting her kids in danger could easily turn into an Elizabeth who feels betrayed by that country, which is something I would love to see more of (in addition to some more character development of Paige and Henry, but hopefully the show will get there. I suppose I can’t ask it to do everything in two episodes).

The drama is not just on the home front, however; as promised in last week’s episode, the Cold War is about to get hotter. It appears that the information Phil and Elizabeth gathered during their surveillance mission reveals plans for a U.S. missile defense shield in Europe – which means American-controlled ballistic missiles right in Russia’s backyard. “The Clock,” then, works as a title on a number of levels: we’ve got the actual clock that is central to the spy mission; the ticking clock counting down the hours until Viola’s son either lives or succumbs to the poison; the countdown to the moment when Phil and Elizabeth’s cover is inevitably blown; and, of course, the ultimate countdown to Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika reforms and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union itself. However, all that is still almost a decade away for our characters. For now, all they can do is try to keep their private world from imploding.