“Is there anything I should know, as an FBI agent, about the Jennings family?”
“Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are not Russian spies.”
“Do you think it doesn’t matter who our leader is?”
“It was all for nothing, Elizabeth. You destroyed it all today.”
“I’ve always known, Mom. Every time, every lie, my whole life. And I know now.”
“Sex? Ha, what was sex? Nobody cared! Including your father!”
“Hi. I was hoping to make it home for dinner, but things are very topsy-turvy at the office.”
If you expected fireworks in the second-to-last episode of The Americans ever, you didn’t get them. Not in the usual sense anyway. Ever since The Sopranos established the structure for the contemporary drama’s short-season model — and certainly since Game of Thrones began using character-defining, character-destroying acts of violence to cement it — penultimate episodes have become the go-to spot for bodies to drop, en masse. (At least on shows where people kill other people for a living.) Yet the only prominent character to die here is Tatiana, the KGB agent based in the Soviet Rezidentura, whose relationship with Oleg Burov ended in career suicide for her when he outed her plan to steal weaponized biological agents to the FBI. Perhaps desperation is what drove her to accept a dangerous mission way out of her wheelhouse to assassinate a reformist negotiator; desperation is certainly what drove the Centre to ask her to do so, since their star agent refused. That star agent—”Jennings, Elizabeth,” as both the episode’s title and Stan Beeman’s computer list her—winds up killing Tatiana herself to stop the assassination. It’s over in seconds, and the eyewitnesses appear more confused than panicked. It’s the quietest public execution you can imagine.
No, this episode’s weapon of choice wasn’t weapons at all, but words. Over and over again, characters said things they’d never dared say before, or never had to, or never wanted to, or never even thought of. And no matter how soft-spoken the character or actor involved—The Americans is the most soft-spoken show on the air—each such line sliced through the show’s quiet like a knife.
I reviewed the beautiful penultimate episode of The Americans for Decider.
Tags: decider, reviews, The Americans, TV, TV reviews