A thread for The Americans on FX

Well, of all the bad things that could have happened to any number of characters in any number of episodes but particularly this one, I suppose this was the least surprising. The character had been a dead end for several episodes now, and there was no real way out of their situation. I like the actor and the character a lot, actually, but I'd been commenting to my wife that the show didn't quite know what to do with them.

Great show, but seriously dark stuff. Like, emotionally dark, and in a really bleak, methodical sort of way.

I loved the way Martha told a partial truth (she thought so anyway) to Agent whatshisname. Boldness is a good look for her.

Just occurred to me that the big surprise if this ep sets Russian what's his name up with an excuse to turn against his country and team up with Stan. Iirc Oleg does not know of the Jennings by name or face ...

Yeah that immediately occurred to me as well. If Oleg turns, and Stan is investigating Martha AND convinced that Philip is boffing his ex-wife, then it's surely only a matter of time before he stumbles across something. Then again he is inept, so...

Stan's not inept! He's the most twitchy and paranoid guy in the cast! He's always on guard for spies.

i can't believe they did this to her. heartbroken.

not to be a dick, but long overdue in my opinion! that storyline was going nowhere and was consistently the least engaging of the C plots. i think they'll be able to use her death make some forward moves with oleg and stan's relationship and their loyalties to goose the plot in new ways.

she was my tv spy girlfriend, shutup

condolences and dasvidaniya comrade

Right until the last second I was in denial and thought she was going to make it. Obviously in retrospect she had to go and it wouldn't have been realistic for the KGB not liquidate a traitor, but still, wtf man!

so did oleg's father not follow through with his promise, or did he have no power over it? and if he didn't follow through with it, to what end? will oleg find out (assuredly)? will oleg stay in the USSR? wtf is going to happen????

I'm interested to see them try to turn Pastor Tim.

^all those possibilities FAR better than "what will she do in prison THIS week?!?!?!"

I'm sad to see her go but there was no way they wouldn't have executed her

Does this mean we won't get more from the recaptured dissident Jewish scientist? Because he's a dead-end right now, too.

Hope his season does not end with Paige killing Pastor Tim. Five seasons announced, right? So I'm going to guess this season ends with them on the run, one way or another. Better - they go on the run because Paige kills Pastor Tim!

The same actor who plays Pastor Tim also plays an aggressive, dick-swinging trader on Billions. When I recognized him it kinda blew my mind.

Literally nothing we have seen of Paige suggests that she'd be capable of killing someone, or even covering for a murder. She might be required to do the latter anyway, and the Centre might think she could do the former, but what do we know.

If they really want to find a relatively inconspicuous way to get rid of Pastor Tim then the pissy sarcastic guy with the fridge full of diseases might be a better route.

Great interview w. the creators on this week's ep.

I'd be curious to know how the Nina suff plays on rewatch, knowing how it ends. The whole time I think it's natural to watch those scenes and think "how's she coming back?" rather than about what's going on in her head.

Literally nothing we have seen of Paige suggests that she'd be capable of killing someone

It's definitely a silly hypothetical argument, I agree, but just an episode or two ago we saw Philip beat a kid to death with a rock when he was younger than Paige, and we already had a subplot involving the Paige-age child of that other illegal family killing his entire family. So the groundwork is there, it's not without precedent. Also, Paige has been in full-on freak out panic mode for a while now.

Anyway, yeah, it would be pretty unlikely, but the weak link of this show has always been the ridiculously high body count, all the murder and killing the least plausible aspect of the whole scenario. I want to say Nina is one of the rare times a death wasn't some conspicuous disaster (dead man on bus!) or setup (though why they did it the way they did it is a mystery to me, couldn't they have at least gone outside?).

Wow, just read that interview, so yeah, I guess that answers that! Still, just go outside to execute someone, you lazy Soviets.

It was planned in a very specific way so the person who was going to be killed doesn’t know they were going to be killed, and it was done that way for humanitarian reasons — they didn’t want the person to suffer, to be spending all this time in a cell pondering their own pending execution.

i mean obvs challops there: not telling people they're about to die is problematic in a zillion ways as regards appeals and due process but i know which way i'd rather have it happen

Back in NKVD days for some executions they used to have a hidden shooter behind a wall who would put a bullet through the back of the victim's neck while they thought they were being weighed.

woooooow when they said "shortly" they REALLY MEANT shortly, huh

about as wrenching a character death as it's possible for someone whose arc had clearly come to its doomed end and who was totally out of plot mileage. and it was her final rebellious bit of agency that finally sealed her fate. and there i was thinking nothing would top the quarantine scenes for the emotional wringer.

I loved the way Martha told a partial truth (she thought so anyway) to Agent whatshisname. Boldness is a good look for her.

partial truths being, of course, philip and elizabeth's MO! i love how these situations force the characters to change. paige is already lying to fbi agents...

can't wait to see P and E try to work pastor tim, easily the best route fwd from a dramatic standpoint. william is an a+ character to have introduced!

I'm trying to look back over the last two seasons and see how they didn't waste Nina's character. There were little details that were important, but for the most part they just shoved her off to the side. Not that her death wasn't an emotional suckerpunch (it very much was!), but I could imagine ten better ways I'd like to have seen them develop her story starting just before the point they sent her back to Russia. The partnership of Oleg and Stan doesn't seem worth it.

I'm willing to wait and see what will still come of it, and to see how it plays on rewatch. They've earned that much.

I loved the way Martha told a partial truth (she thought so anyway) to Agent whatshisname. Boldness is a good look for her.

i think her partial confession was a cry for help, she knows the agents will investigate her admitted affair because it's a potential for blackmail etc (duh). she''s in over her head and knows it.

I can't believe Stan didn't take the opportunity to plant a bug in Martha's apartment.

Bad news travels fast.

Not a lot of pivotal moments this week, but the way they're building mad tension is to be commended!

it's that thing this show does, builds the tension and pressure til it's almost unbearable and then there's no explosion, just something that leaves you silently reeling and absolutely no relief to the tension at all

re: the pay-off of nina's story - yeah i think oleg will be steered on to a different course by it, a possibly game-changing one, but even if he isn't, the worth of extending her story came from doing justice to her as a character, even if unconnected to the rest of the story

Hans is getting a lot better at this surveillance business, but it is a long apprenticeship. I enjoyed watching him getting grilled in a completely ego free manner by a true pro.

A very Napoleon Dynamite-ish disguise on Hans this week, I thought. And the reveal that they basically checked that "priest" out from the Center's props department was hilarious.

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/14/11411564/how-tv-gets-made-americans-fx-production

anyone else think it was significant that elizabeth said she'd been with a friend, as opposed to the usual "at work", after she saw young-hee? we've seen a lot of philip's emotional connections to his marks but not elizabeth's, until...now? show's giving us no clue as to what she's working young-hee for

I think Young-Hee will prove be an asset of some kind, so the genuine friendship that has developed will make it incredibly tense and emotionally wrenching for Elizabeth to work her, well imo of course.

The likelihood is that she - or perhaps her husband - has access to the high security nerve gas doodads that William doesn't have access to.

Anyone else feel like a load of S3 plotlines have been somewhat abruptly jettisoned? All the Afghan stuff, the thing with Kimberley, are those missions basically over for them now and never to be spoken of again?

Paige doesn't appear to have any interest in boys at all but surely there's some narrative potential in a relationship between her and the dorky Beeman kid?

Yeah, a lot of stuff from last season just vanished, or at least was abruptly written out of the show as the mission evolved.

Not a lot of pivotal moments this week, but the way they're building mad tension is to be commended!

Except for using "Under Pressure" to underscore that they are under pressure. For a show usually so adept at music queues, that was so on the nose it was silly.

The on-the-noseness was funny! The Americans has a p self-aware sense of humour

I'm really not sure that was supposed to be funny.

i am going to venture that this has been a notably weaker season than last.

I'm not sure it's weaker so much as maybe necessary, getting a bunch of ducks in a row for a rousing finish. At least I hope, because yeah, there's been next to nothing this season that has advanced what we already know, from the psychology of the characters to the state of various suspicions/assignments/investigations. Under pressure? What else is new?

I take it back, something big just might have happened this episode: I think Philip/Clark is increasingly showing maybe real feelings of some sort of Martha, or at least an increased sense of responsibility. He gives her the top secret phone line, which is a major trust thing, and when he tells her he loves her, over the pay phone, they cut to Elizabeth shooting an ice glare, the implication being she read his lips and is ... jealous? Anyway, that's what I got out of it.

I think Clark and Martha's relationship has always clearly been real!

Sure, but really real, now. Increasingly. I'm not sure they've done a good job explaining why/how, though, other than Philip/Clark is driven by guilt.

i have a big crush on martha in any case

Under Pressure on the nose but also brilliant and effective.

I think the Kimberley thing wasn't supposed to be an ongoing plotline so much as a vignette that tells us something about Philip's morals and their mutability with regard to his job. We may never see her again, but we can see the impact of her plotline in Philip's continued dissatisfaction with the Center.

Alison Wright also plays the wife of Clarence Thomas in HBO's Confirmation. I thought it was pretty shit tbh and seemed like classic typecasting.

I think the Kimberley thing wasn't supposed to be an ongoing plotline so much as a vignette that tells us something about Philip's morals and their mutability with regard to his job.

Also shedding light on his relationship and attitude to his daughter. Shame because it was a great storyline that just seemed to disappear. Then again it isn't exactly realistic for even the Centre to expect Philip to maintain two wives and an underage girlfriend.

Wondering where the Stan sexual jealousy thing is going. I've been assuming for some time that the smoking gun will be Elizabeth's gunshot scar, and had thought it was going to happen at some chummy family holiday, but now maybe not, especially if Elizabeth takes it upon herself to work him as a source.