The penultimate episode of The Americans jumps right into the action that’s been building all season, leaving little room for questions, such as how easy is it to get a marriage certificate with a fake name? And just how the hell many wigs does Elizabeth have?
To start things off, Elizabeth’s old buddy Sanford, who hasn’t been around in a while, pops up at the beginning of the episode to tell her that he’s been proactive enough to actually recruit someone on his own, and this someone isn’t just anyone – it’s an Air Force colonel involved in the Ballistic Missile Defense program. Elizabeth wavers between her “angry” and “too good to be true” faces during this conversation, which is understandable, seeing as how this guy either just handed her one of the most high-level and valuable assets the Russians have ever had…or he’s setting her up for an FBI trap. Unwilling to pass up such an opportunity, Elizabeth promises that he’ll get the $50,000 he wants for his new recruit’s info if he gives her a sample to prove that this is all for real.
There are a lot of excellent spy moments in this episode, and Elizabeth driving casually down a dark street at night to pick up what I assume is a mayonnaise jar stuffed with a secret document is probably the best of these, as said secret document is actually two layers of paper concealing a microdot, which, when looked at through a tiny magnifying glass, has tiny blueprints and missile defense plans printed all over it. According to Claudia, the science and tech people at the Rezidentura have verified its authenticity and said that it’s 10 years beyond any technology the Russians have.
This means that Sanford is for real – or does it? As Elizabeth points out, this first bit of intel might just be bait. Even if Sanford himself doesn’t know it, the FBI could be behind the meeting with the colonel. Claudia, however, thinks it’s worth the risk to meet with him and get even better information. The antagonistic relationship between the two women is still being handled somewhat oddly; it seems like it’s constantly pushed to the brink and then reined back into civility, so we never truly get any real clues as to Claudia’s end game, which is something I’d been hoping to see soon, since this is the next-to-last episode of the season. At least it’s clear where both Elizabeth and Phil’s feelings lie: Elizabeth wants to directly contact Moscow and ask for a new handler, and Phil agrees, saying he never liked Granny.
Phillip is actually quite hard to pin down in this episode, too; as the show has gone on, it’s shifted its emotional focus from him, the long-suffering husband whose fake wife didn’t love him, to Elizabeth, who we have come to know a lot better than Phillip. As I mentioned last week, her emotions and motivations are entirely clear, but we still don’t really know what’s going on with Phil, and we don’t see much of his inner life now. It’s consequently becoming a lot harder to sympathize with him, especially when he pulls of the kind of hijinks that involve planting a bug in Stan’s boss’s office by asking Martha to marry him. Seriously. Phil’s idea of a surefire way to find out whether or not the FBI is behind Sanford’s deal is to promise Martha that one day they’ll go public with their relationship, ask her to marry him in secret, and then be all like, “Oh heyyy, can you also do me a huge favor and plant this bugged pen since I love you so much?”
It’s not that it’s just a bad plan so much as it is also an extremely arrogant and heartless one. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting Phil to go through with it; I assumed he’d get Martha to back out of the engagement with his constant talking about secrecy and not being able to live together, but nope – he goes all the way, and the happy couple plans their wedding for the next day. This all works, though, because the actress playing Martha continues to do a great job and doesn’t come across as stupid, just as someone who’s lonely, naïve, and has been unlucky in love before in the way that makes people believe in fairytale romance. She also demands that they tell her parents about the wedding, which means that Clark has to dig up some relatives, too – Elizabeth, who pretends to be his sister in what is definitely her most awful wig yet, and Claudia, who pretends to be his mother (which was just about the greatest thing ever).
The wedding is, of course, incredibly awkward for Elizabeth, who gets to watch from the sidelines as her husband marries someone else, all the while thinking about how they never had a real wedding and were, it appears, never legally married. This is something the show has never addressed before, and in fact, I had been assuming this whole time that they were married just after coming to the U.S.; if they weren’t, that makes their history a lot more interesting, because they never even had a fake foundation to build their fake marriage on.
Also more interesting this week is Nina, who is now working with the people in charge of Directorate S. It’s unclear whether it’s this added responsibility or a coworker telling her how much Vlad liked her that sends her to Arkady, but whatever the reason, she tells him everything about how she’s been spying for the Americans. To elaborate, Nina’s coworker tells her that Vlad had a crush on her but never made a move because he thought she was out of his league; when Nina compares this sweet, innocent, murdered friend to Stan, who is currently cheating on his wife with Nina and lying when asked if he killed Vlad, the Americans don’t come out looking too good. Nina tells Arkady that he can send her back to Moscow to be punished if he wants, but my guess is that Nina’s in much too important a position to ever be sent back, and will instead become a double agent.
As the episode races toward the finish line, we also get to check in again with Viola, who is just now conveniently feeling guilty about the bug she planted in Caspar Weinberger’s office. Apparently enough time has gone by that she no longer takes Phillip’s threats seriously, because after going to church makes her feel bad about what she’s done, she goes to the FBI and they find the bug in the clock, which means that now they can make Phil and Elizabeth hear whatever they want them to hear. We’ll have to wait until next week to see whether the FBI actually is behind Sanford’s scheme or not; while it seems a little unrealistic that this is all happening at the same time, it still feels like the show has earned its big, climactic finale, which is sure to be a doozy. The promises made in this episode will have to be fulfilled soon, and if they aren’t, there will most definitely be repercussions.
- Sanford is arrested for not paying child support; this does not make Elizabeth more confident about meeting the Air Force mole
- Clark’s middle name is Herbert. That’s right: Herbert
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Writer, copy editor, and TV watcher who sadly has no Twitter account. My favorite shows right now are Justified, Breaking Bad, Parks & Rec, the Vampire Diaries, and Archer.