A thread for The Americans on FX

Elizabeth's been shown to kill anyone who gets in the way of the mission. I wonder if she'll end up killing Phillip?

xpost lolll

I've long thought the series would come to an end with a standoff between the two of them.

Def getting a scene with Philip Stan and Oleg, right?

Stan putting the pieces together is one of the things I'm looking forward to the most.

Yeah I think Renee is some kind of FBI/CIA shadow keeping tabs on Stan since his Oleg bromance. She'll follow Oleg one day and see him with Phillip, and boom.

Maybe they'll skip forward to 2016 for an epilogue where Paige meets up with George Papadopoulos. I don't know how it will end--in a more general sense, whether it will be a dark ending or something that resembles Philip/Elizabeth/Stan/Oleg turning the page and moving on.

They're making it exceedingly clear that Elizabeth will not live happily in the US into her golden years. She'll either be in prison, back in the USSR, or dead.

back in the USSR

as foretold by The Beatles.

Loving this season so far but the only thing that bothers me slightly is that they haven't given themselves enough time to tie up all the loose ends. What about Kimmy? What about Pastor Tim? What about Martha? What about Philip's son?

Kimmy isn't really a loose end and can easily be explained away or never mentioned again. Pastor Tim has been farmed out to South America so ditto really. Martha I wholly expect to appear at some point.

Philip's son is the one that feels like a misstep and could just be quietly forgotten, but he could equally be the hand grenade the blows up Philip and Elizabeth's marriage and illusions altogether.

Yeah I guess you're right about Kimmy and Pastor Tim. I thought the omission of Kimmy was strange given that she (or rather her dad) was the entire reason why they stayed in the US at the end of the last season, but then I keep forgetting that we've now jumped three years ahead in time.

I feel like the real 'oh shit' moment was Philip and Oleg finally meeting. If Stan can turn him Oleg then that's a direct line to Philip and Elizabeth and then the whole thing blows up.

Feel like the defection of Gennadi is going to play a part too, but who knows.

If the show ends with some sort of present-day scene I kind of want somebody to end up as a shady oligarch

I'd settle for it jumping forward to the end of the USSR/fall of the Berlin Wall.

Philip's son is the one that feels like a misstep and could just be quietly forgotten, but he could equally be the hand grenade the blows up Philip and Elizabeth's marriage and illusions altogether.

Definitely feeling like this will come up again.

Also I literally cannot remember Philip/Elizabeth's son's name (lol) but the weird way they are minimally reminding us of his existence via phone calls with Philip feels like they are laying the groundwork for something.

Agree that Martha's the one story that needs, or at least deserves, some kind of resolution. I wouldn't mind if Frank Langella turned up again...I'm not misremembering, am I? He just went back to Russia, right, he didn't die.

I feel like Martha already got that last season with her brief revisit, in the supermarket and with gabriel and that?

Frank Langella's voice is in the new Destiny video game which is a bit weird.

i agree that they could leave martha as is and it would feel narratively sound. she got enough of a postscript and through that we understand the hell she's been condemned to

Right, her arc seems tied up to me. I can't imagine any good reason to bring her back other than fan service (which is something this show seems to avoid).

flash forward and she’s partnered with Philip Jr’s mom

Pretty good episode--can't get enough of the line-dancing. I've gotta say, a lot times I have no idea what's going on when Elizabeth is out in the field on an operation (like the opening scene last night, which was so dark I couldn't see anything). I don't worry much about that. She's out there doing something for Mother Russia. Next week's preview looked really promising.

(like the opening scene last night, which was so dark I couldn't see anything)

I'm glad it wasn't just me! I guess it was intentional.

Maybe the pair ratio of wins to fails has always been lopsided and we've only just seen mostly the wins, but iirc every single thing Elizabeth has done this season has failed. When's she gonna snap?

*pair's

I really liked the Philip/Elizabeth/Paige scene where Philip walked right up to the line about what really happened in the park.

re: the dark opening sequence

Listening to the podcast now, it was absolutely intentional that it be pitch black.

i agree that they could leave martha as is and it would feel narratively sound. she got enough of a postscript and through that we understand the hell she's been condemned to

Alternatively, she's collateral/a bargaining chip for later down the line.

It would have felt more narratively sound if we'd never seen her again after she got on the plane.

Stan's line to Philip about having more things means dealing with more, good or bad, with the later childhood flashback where kids were scraping food out of a pot was relatively subtle. I liked how that played out.

re my earlier post, I'm happy to see Kimmy again!

Kimmy's the anti Henry, he looks 3 years older every season, she looks a year younger.

When Oleg told Philip this was the last time they could meet in person I groaned. I wanted a whole season of Philip and Oleg teaming up to battle Elizabeth (and Paige).

And Paige really is turning into her mom, I guess, sleeping with that dude to gain access to...his boss's office, I guess?

Like someone else suggested upthread, what I want is a spin-off season of Philip and Stan hitting the open road.

Oleg should come along, or at least be a regular guest

finally caught up this past week and man is the tension reaching unbearable levels this year. i'm thinking that their downfall stems from paige, who keeps making careless mistakes. would be tragic if she's the one caught, and then aderholt recognizes her from that dinner in the first episode, but i'm thinking that's how it might shake out.

I don't understand the weird thing that Elizabeth is doing where she's being super-harsh about training up Paige, and taking her on all of these missions, but then also trying to pretend that they never kill anyone. First of all, Paige is supposed to be this incredible deep-cover sleeper agent, angling for a job in the CIA or State Dept. Shouldn't she just stay out of all of this cloak-and-dagger stuff? Secondly, why is Elizabeth trying to shield her from the realities of the job? Seems like Paige is just going to be more disillusioned when she figures out how many people her mom has killed.

because she’s in denial, and also a mom

trying to slowly get Paige in, and pretending she can somehow indefinitely defer the day when Paige sees the worst part of the job seems very much like a thing someone with a family business who isn’t completely comfortable justifying it would do

Last night was such a packed episode I may need to watch it a second time.

they definitely made a point of showing what the stakes are for most of the main cast

Paige in the bar was fantastic. After last night--if that hadn't happened already--it's virtually impossible to have any good feelings about Elizabeth or Philip. (The Kimmy thing always creeped me out--for the obvious reason, and also the idea that this girl would take an interest in this reptilian polyester hustler.)

I mean, I know Philip subsequently warned her about Greece, but the deed had been done at that point.

The juxtaposition of the Philip/Paige stuff and the Philip/Kimmy stuff was...unsettling.

they broke Philip

the Philip/Paige stuff

Yeah, that too. Trying to warn your daughter away from the life is good; your chosen method, not so good.

the juxtaposition of Paige declaring that her mother can't decide who she can and can't have sex with and Philip furthering his spy work by pretty much feeling his orders and training told him exactly who to have sex with, followed by Paige pulling out the "you aren't like me and mom" card when he's done those exact things kind of blew up with him challenging her

the end-run of the little russian cultural sessions is probably to reveal more of this to Paige, but right now, it's putting a pretty veneer on what her parents are actually up to and Philip has absolutely no respect for that

xp: I thought there was some weird punishing subtext about her sexuality as well.

The grim expression on Philip's face when he was having sex with Kimmy was pretty hard to watch. But yeah, he's now actively betrayed the Service in a way I don't think he had before, and that's going to blow up big time.

Also when Elizabeth killed the Russian couple I thought she was going to take out the kid as well but that really would be the point at which her character is broken and can never be fixed.

Phillip knew instantly when Stan told him about the Russian couple that she'd done it. If he'd said she killed the kid too, I don't know what Phillip would've done.

yeah that phone call was a major moment for Philip. Kimmy will definitely tell her CIA dad that she was warned to stay in Greece during her trip. I imagine she will obscure some of the precise details with her relationship with Philip, which could buy them time, but that call was the beginning of the end of the Jennings' cover.