The Americans ‘Only You’ Review: In which sad things happen and Stan gets drunk

The Americans is getting really good at the fake slow burn – episodes that start slowly and seem like they’re going to continue to meander along at the same pace, but then all of a sudden hit the gas pedal and charge off into insanity. “Only You” falls perfectly into this category. It begins by picking up the pieces from last week and dealing with the fallout from the death of Agent Amador, a man who is starting to seem larger in death than he did in life. His boss gives an angry speech about finding whoever killed Amador and exacting revenge upon them, and also all the stuff that Stan did last week on his rampage is fine; Martha is tearful and sad; and Stan reveals that Amador’s ring, which he always wore, was neither on his body nor his apartment, and therefore must be somewhere that can lead the FBI to the kidnappers.

This is a problem for Philip and Elizabeth, since they went over every inch of the warehouse and thoroughly cleaned it, so if the ring’s not there, it must be in the trunk of the car that Gregory’s team was supposed to sweep. Elizabeth signals Gregory, but it’s too late; the ring has already showed up on Stan’s radar after the owner of the salvage yard where the car was dumped tries to pawn it. This puts Stan on the trail of Gregory, who could potentially lead the FBI right to the Jenningses. But first, there’s drinking! Stan shows up at Phil’s depressing motel room (which seriously is pretty depressing) with a sixpack, obviously at loose ends. This was another fantastic scene for Noah Emmerich, who not only is great at playing drunk, but also gets to be both threatening and sympathetic as he makes it clear that he’s going to catch whoever killed Amador, and then starts talking about his undercover days down South, when he had to live in shitty motel rooms much like Phil’s. We don’t actually learn much about those undercover times, but just the dead expression on Stan’s face when he talks about that life spoke volumes.

Things between Stan and Nina aren’t so open and transparent, however; the show doesn’t spend a lot of time with Nina this week, but the few minutes she’s onscreen are used to explain that Vlad, the dead Soviet Embassy employee, was her friend, and she’s upset that he’s dead. This is something that doesn’t seem to even have occurred to Stan, as his mind is consumed entirely with finding Amador’s killer. When he lies to her and says he doesn’t know who killed Vlad, it seems more like a spur-of-the-moment self-defense lie rather than something cold and calculated, but this is probably something that will come back to haunt him in the future. His guilt is only intensified when Nina talks about how Vlad never wanted to be in the KGB; he wanted to be a doctor and only joined the KGB to make his uncle happy. This is a little schlocky, but it also provides some needed moral ambiguity rather than just making Vlad be a bad person who deserved to die.

Speaking of moral ambiguity, Claudia’s back! She is still quite difficult to pin down – a few weeks ago she was torturing the Jenningses and getting the crap beaten out of her by Elizabeth, and now this week, she’s telling Philip that if Gregory has to be taken out, she doesn’t want Elizabeth to have to be the one to do it. Is this evidence of a soft spot for a fellow female agent or just another ruse concealing some ulterior motive? (Don’t forget dead Rob’s wife, who never made it to Cuba.) And why would Gregory have to be killed, you ask? Well, since the FBI linked Amador’s ring back to him, his only two options are Moscow or death. Claudia and Elizabeth both try really hard to sell him on Moscow – it’s cosmopolitan and full of culture! – but he’d rather go to L.A.

Derek Luke is really compelling as Gregory, and I wish we had had more time with him to find out what makes him tick. Why did he betray his country all those years ago? Did he really believe in “the cause,” or was it just the excitement of having a purpose? Did he ever envision what would happen to him if he got caught? Did he seriously consider what it would be like to live in a communist country? Unfortunately, none of those questions are answered. Gregory refuses to go to Moscow, but since the KGB has already planted evidence in his apartment linking him to the murder of Amador, he decides he’d rather just goad the police into shooting him and end things on his own terms instead of struggling to get by in a foreign country.

The things people say about Elizabeth in this episode are as telling of their own characters as they are of hers; whereas Claudia thought she couldn’t handle killing Gregory, Gregory tells her straight out that she is tough and strong and should never let anyone make her soft. This is why the scene between Gregory, Elizabeth, and Philip is such a riveting one – Philip just assumes that when he walks in to shoot Gregory and tells Elizabeth to go outside, that she will because she won’t want to watch. Instead, however, she tells him what she believes: that Gregory is trustworthy and that they owe it to him to give him what he wants. And in the end, Phil listens. Perhaps this is a first step towards getting him out of that terrible hotel room, although I hope the show doesn’t go there so soon after the death of someone who meant so much to Elizabeth. In a way, it’s sort of damning her to her current life; the first man she fell in love with (as far as we know), who was her closest and most trustworthy friend and who anchored her during her first terrifying years in American when Philip was a stranger, is gone. He represents a huge chunk of her past – what does that mean for her future?