It could have been worse. I sure thought it would be.
From a historical perspective, The Americans’ final season feels an awful lot like, well, The Sopranos’ final season. The similarities stem in part from the sensation that Season Five and Season Six are two halves of one larger run, with the sense of anticlimax that pervaded last year’s finale actually serving as a “stay tuned” for the final ten episodes this year. The Sopranos, you’ll recall, divided its final season into two parts, a model adopted by heirs to the throne like Mad Men and Breaking Bad as well. If The Americans disguised this by solidifying the split with different numerical designations, it’s kind of fitting.
But it’s the dreadful feeling, the awful feeling, shared by The Americans and The Sopranos in the end that stands out to me in “Harvest,” this week’s episode, and throughout this final season in general. Maybe it’s the presence of that cancer-stricken artist, who’s now so racked with pain she looks like she has a seizure disorder even as she barks orders at Elizabeth so she can keep making art until the end. Maybe it’s the return via flashback of Dylan Baker’s bioweapons-expert character, dying of a self-inflicted hemorrhagic viral infection as he talks to Stan Beeman about how the Jennings live the American dream. Whatever it is, there’s something sickly, diseased in the atmosphere. It permeates even the most innocuous or cheery scenes. So when Philip and Elizabeth embark on their most difficult mission yet, one in which failure could lead to the dismantling of their entire network, while at the same time their neighbor Stan grows more and more suspicious of his friends each time we see him…I expected a catastrophe. Somehow, not getting one, not yet anyway, feels even worse.
I reviewed last week’s tense episode of The Americans for Decider.
Tags: decider, reviews, The Americans, TV, TV reviews
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