Let’s talk about silence. I mean, the Jennings family certainly does this week, and how can we go wrong following their example? Elizabeth discusses it in the context of Rififi, the classic French crime movie by blacklisted American director Jules Dassin. She watches the film in an attempt to ingratiate herself with one Jackson Barber, a handsome young film buff who works for Senator Sam Nunn, a key player in the arms-reduction negotiations she’s spent the season trying to undermine. The movie features a heist sequence that clocks in at something close to half an hour without a single word spoken. You can see how this would appeal to Elizabeth, who knows how these kinds of things work—and to The Americans, which has worked out so well in large part by following in its footsteps.

Elizabeth talks about silence again with her son Henry, in a painful phone conversation the pleasantries of which reveal long-standing estrangement between her and the child she didn’t bother recruiting. Henry complains about having to read Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s treatise on the virtues of quiet contemplation. “It’s important literature, apparently,” he verbally eye-rolls; critics of this show’s slow-burn approach no doubt know how he feels.

Yet Henry picks up on something hidden inside Elizabeth’s strategic silences: pain that she’s struggling, in vain, to cloak in small talk. “She was asking about school and the weather,” he tells his father Philip about the call. “It was weird, because she doesn’t really call me? We barely ever talk, but all of a sudden she’s calling from a business trip and asking me about English class.” He concludes with a casual observation that hits her husband like a Mack truck: “I don’t understand why she’s so unhappy.” She never said a word to that effect, bur her silence spoke volumes.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Americans (from a couple weeks back) for Decider.

Can people change? The question drives many of the New Golden Age of Television’s greatest shows. Arguably it drives the New Golden Age of Television. To the extent that the medium’s rebirth coincides with the seismic upheavals in American life in the time period that stretches from 9/11 through the election of Barack Obama to the ascension of Donald Trump, the question may resonate because it’s so similar to the one we’ve been asking ourselves as a country for over half a generation.

Can people change? Different shows have come up with different answers. The Sopranos says no. Deadwood says yes, but at a cost. The Wire says the system prevents change, so “n/a.” Mad Men says yes, eventually. Breaking Bad (and its doom-laden prequel Better Call Saul) says yes, for the worse. The Walking Dead says yes, for the worse, and that’s good, which is why the show is bad.  Game of Thrones says we’d better fucking hope so.

Can people change? After watching “The Great Patriotic War” — an appropriate title for one of the most upsetting episodes of this series yet — I think The Americans is saying yes and no, simultaneously. Perhaps this, more than the simple fact of having co-ed co-protagonists, is its real innovation in the antihero genre. It’s telling two stories at once, chronicling two competing theories of the world. It’s its own cold war.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Americans for Decider. I’m proud of what I was able to do with this review (and, in a different way, that headline).

I’ll close with one of my favorite-ever scenes of allegorically resonant sickness in a series that’s been full of them: Elizabeth in her home-care disguise, taking her patient to a World Series party so she can spy on the woman’s husband and a potential double agent with in the Russian negotiating team, then getting vomited on as the dying artist panics and gushes up food and fluid from her disease-ridden guts. It’s Elizabeth who pushed the woman into attending the party in the first place so she’d have a chance to spy first-hand; it’s Elizabeth who talked her and her husband out of euthanasia to keep the information channel open; it’s the hated Russian negotiator who rushes over to help clean the vomit by Elizabeth’s side.

As best we can tell, Elizabeth’s primary reaction to the incident is dismay that it interrupted the taped conversation between her husband and the Russian. But earlier in the episode, the artist told Elizabeth she wishes she’d spent less time painting and more time with her spouse “The work is the best of me,” she thought, “something to leave behind. But really, who cares? Who cares. All those hours, just…honestly, I wish I’d spent them with Glenn. Just being with him, doing I don’t know what. Just…doesn’t matter.” Something’s eating Elizabeth up from the inside, too: her work. “There’s something rotten about it,” Oleg says to Philip; perhaps that’s why the artist vomits three times, once for each of Elizabeth’s victims earlier in the episode. Will Elizabeth listen to the woman whose suffering she’s aiding and abetting and get out before any more lives are wasted, with bullets or otherwise?

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Americans for Decider. This is such a rewarding show to write about. It’s got so much to give.

“I am alone without them, here. Alone.” This line — delivered by Soviet hockey player turned double agent turned defector turned likely divorcé Gennadi to the FBI agent he considers his only friend, Stan Beeman — hit me harder than anything else in this week’s episode of The Americans. As a reminder, this week’s episode of The Americans opened with Elizabeth Jennings washing a man’s brains and blood off her face, then yelling at her traumatized daughter Paige for making the unforgivable mistake of running toward the scene to make sure her own mom was still alive. It includes Elizabeth straight-up lying to Paige about the nature of the man’s death, which she calls a suicide without mentioning that “assisted suicide” is closer to the mark but still woefully inadequate. It includes Elizabeth rolling some poor sap who may have been her easiest mark ever, effortlessly getting him to tell her everything he knows about the weak spots at the secure warehouse where he works before grabbing him from behind and choking him to death on his way out the door. It includes Stan apologizing to his old ally Oleg Burov for his inadvertent role in the CIA threatening him and his family should he refuse to turn double agent, and Oleg rejecting the apology. It includes Philip Jennings growing so alarmed about Elizabeth’s contempt for the United States and oblique hints about her participation in some kind of power struggle against Mikhail Gorbachev that he accepts Oleg’s proposal to spy on, and potentially act to stop, his own wife. If you’re in the market to get hit hard, this is an embarrassment of riches.

So why did this line from a minor character in the grand scheme of things affect me so much? “I am alone without them, here. Alone.” When he says this, Gennadi has been unceremoniously yanked from his double life in the middle of the airport, where in the middle of one of his courier missions Stan approaches him saying he understands he’s requested political asylum — an agreed-upon signal that he’s at risk and must end his life in the Soviet Union forever. Stan’s old partner Dennis Aderholt does the same with Gennadi’s wife Sofia, the TASS news agency worker who helped the flip Gennadi in the first place, but who’s now so unhappy in their marriage that she’s leaking secrets to her new beau, some unseen guy named Bogdan. Other agents pick up her son Ilya from elementary school. The protection they’ll need as defectors ensures that they’ll be moved far away; if the divorce goes through, they’ll be moved to separate locations where they’ll be unreachable to one another. So Sofia moves ahead with her plan to divorce him, Gennadi will never see her or Ilya again. What all of this means for Gennadi is that he’s lost his homeland, his home life, both of his jobs, and his family in the space of an afternoon. He is a man without a country.

Is there a better way to describe each individual member of the Jennings family?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Americans for Decider. As an aside, it’s nice that the soundtrack calmed down a bit.