“The Americans” thoughts, Season Three, Episode Twelve: “I Am Abassin Zadran”

There’s Martha’s tearful call to her parents, during which she realizes she can hardly get the lies she’s been forced to swallow back out of her own mouth anymore. And there’s her final confrontation with “Clark,” when she tells him she wants to end their marriage, and he reveals just who it is she really married.

There’s almost no way to heap enough praise on that scene, but I could bury it with blandishments and actor Alison Wright would still tower above it. What an incredible season she’s had, investing a character who so many people, including herself, see as mildly pathetic with totally convincing charm, courage, loyalty, confusion, disillusion, and terror. Wright played Martha as someone who’d rightfully come to appreciate herself as a pretty interesting and successful person. She has the kind of job that makes people say “Wow, what’s that like?”, she has a secret husband doing top-secret work of the highest importance, and they have a genuinely terrific and imaginative sex life, the kind that requires real emotional labor to create, especially after years of romantic neglect. How nightmarish would it be to see so much of that undone so dramatically? Her tenacity, her denial, her grief, her fear—there’s your answer.

“Clark”’s unmasking itself is simply the last in an episode-long string of “oh shit!” scenes that included a suspicious Stan’s visit to Martha’s apartment and an equally suspicious Agent Aderholt’s accusation that something went on between Stan and his former mole Nina, and it’s staged like something out of a horror movie. No, really: Watch this scene from splatterpunk genius Clive Barker’s cult movie Nightbreed, if you can stomach it, and tell me there isn’t something equally nauseating in how Clark peels off his wig to become Philip. Tearing off the false face to reveal the true one is a staple of the genre. So is the wide-eyed, mascara-streaked woman’s face, staring back in horrorstruck awe, or awestruck horror — and that, in the form of Alison Wright’s Martha, is the final sight we see. There’s not another shot on The Americans’ three seasons that I’ve found that striking, that disturbing. Whether she accepts or rejects this revelation, some part of her has been irreparably devoured, by a predator wearing the face of the man she loved. She can pack all the suitcases she wants. So, we’ve learned, can he.

I reviewed this week’s The Americans, featuring my favorite scene ever on the show, for the New York Observer.

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