The Americans ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ review: Marriage, war…same thing, apparently

Most of the time, the parallels between marriage and the Cold War are fairly subtle on The Americans; tonight was not one of those times. However, the sense of divisiveness that permeates the episode as a whole was a little less showy, and it lays the groundwork for quite a bit of future conflict in the second half of the season. There are a lot of divisions going on in this episode: disagreement amongst the KGB, prickliness between Phil and Elizabeth, mistrust between Stan and his boss, mistrust between Agent Amador and Martha, and, last but not least, the escalating tension between the Soviets and the Americans. Everyone is treading on very thin ice now, and it’s almost ready to crack.

The Jenningses’ mission for this episode seems simple enough – find an assassin the Russians hired to kill some American scientists working on the U.S. ballistic missile defense system and get said assassin to stop killing people. It seems the Center has changed its mind vis-à-vis the whole assassination thing, but its system to recall the guy didn’t work, so now Philip and Elizabeth have to track him down on their own. They’re incredulous at the fact that the Soviets just changed their minds about the assassin, which leads Claudia to admit that there’s been some infighting in the ranks of the KGB; some of the Soviets think their agents should do anything to prevent the U.S. from getting a ballistic missile shield, but some don’t think killing people on American soil is a good idea because it might ignite World War III.

It’s unclear just what side Claudia is on, but the ambiguity worked well here, preserving her sense of menace and mystery. We got to see her human side as she talks about what could happen if the Russians escalated the Cold War by wantonly killing American scientists and her manipulative one as she tries to get under Elizabeth’s skin by telling her that she feels a “camaraderie” with her because she’s the trustworthy one, and oh yeah, Philip also slept with Anne/Irina. (This lady doesn’t mince words, nor does she waste time when trying to mess with someone’s head.) It’s fascinating that instead of denying it, Elizabeth immediately believes Claudia; it’s almost like she was waiting for Phil to betray her in some way despite their romantic promises to each other only a week ago. The fact that she believed Claudia so quickly demonstrates her serious trust issues with Phil, who swears that he only lied to her about Irina because he didn’t want to lose her. Elizabeth, however, is having none of this, and appears to be withdrawing from the marriage completely. I doubt this is the end of the relationship, though, since we’ve seen that these two obviously love each other even if they can’t trust themselves to be normal for more than one week; it seems unlikely that they’ll go back to just being spy partners, considering everything they’ve been through.

Adding to all of this stress is that in order to track down the assassin (who is German), Philip needs to further his relationship with Martha so she’ll get him certain FBI files on recent foreign visitors to the U.S. This of course entails sleeping with her. The scenes between Martha and Phil/Clark are unexpectedly hilarious, with Phil trying to maintain his sad-sack persona while Martha has little to no interest in his limp compliments (“You’re a very kind person.”). Eventually, Martha steals the correct files – in pretty much full view of Agent Amador, who she still does not want to go on a date with – and hands them over to Phil. The end of the episode has Amador following Martha, which can’t mean anything good; at first I got a creepy vibe that made me think he was stalking her out of jealousy, but it’s possible that he’s just suspicious of her file cabinet rummaging. Right now there’s no way to tell, though, and I think that unlike the Claudia scene, this one could have used a little less ambiguity, since it just felt kind of weird and out of sync with the rest of the episode.

After the Jenningses get the files from Martha, track down the giant German assassin, and make a big splashy mess of him all over his hotel room, they discover that he planted a bomb in an American scientist’s house before they could get to him. Three FBI agents are inside the house when it goes up, which means different things to different people: to Phil, it means the KGB expected a miracle of them by sending them on a mission with almost no information and that it was the Russians’ fault anyway for changing their minds about the assassin; to Elizabeth, it’s their biggest failure in fifteen years, and something she could have prevented if she wasn’t preoccupied by thoughts of love; and to the FBI, it’s a declaration of war. Actually, it might as well be a declaration of war to Phil and Elizabeth, too, since after Elizabeth says she only wants to focus on the mission, Phil suggests separating. This development was where the episode wilted a little in my eyes, since the marriage drama dovetails a little too neatly with the escalation of the larger U.S./Russia situation (and is starting to make it seem like Philip and Elizabeth are required to break up once a week), but I suppose it was inevitable after the last episode.

Another inevitable event is Stan exhibiting an astounding lack of brains and using his new safehouse to have sex with Nina. That’s right – after his boss as good as came out and told him that he suspects Stan of having an affair with Nina, Stan just took the keys to the apartment without a second thought. If it’s not bugged in some way, that’ll be great news for him, but for now, I don’t have much confidence that he won’t be caught. Nina’s in a pretty good position, though; she just got a promotion, which means she might be able to get a look at the Directorate S files inside the Soviet Embassy. This makes her an extremely valuable asset to the FBI and hopefully puts her one step closer to getting out of the spy game, although I have no rational reason for being optimistic about that.

“Mutually Assured Destruction” wants to make sure that its audience has a real sense of what’s at stake in the weeks to come – that is, if one side faces destruction, it will retaliate and destroy the other. This philosophy was the reason why neither America nor Russia was bombed into oblivion during the 1980s; at the end of the day, the voice of sanity and self-preservation prevailed. In the world of The Americans, we’re aware of the inevitable larger outcome (the show is, after all, depicting history that has already happened), but we have no idea what will happen within the individual lives of the characters and their own personal battles. Tonight’s episode serves as a reminder of just how thoroughly each person on this show depends on someone else who could easily destroy them.