Phil and Liz face ghosts from the pilot, a challenge to their attempts to make a real family out of their cover assignments, and Stan needs to start buying lottery tickets, because he’s right about EVERYthing in “Gregory” – episode three of the 1st season of The Americans. There was so much plot in this Thomas Schlamme-directed episode, they barely had time for the 80s breadcrumbs. I’ll get to my review right after I change out of my racquetball shoes.
Thomas Schlamme, Aaron Sorkin’s directorial muse for “Sports Night,” “The West Wing,” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” directed last night’s episode of “The Americans,” which was rife with plot elements and chess pieces for the rest of the season. Despite Schlamme’s able direction, there was a noted lack of “walk-and-talk” – his signature kinetic dialogue device to give massive scope to simple conversations, often with snappy dialogue, which is good, because “The Americans” is not loaded with witty, verbose, Sorkinian dialogue. It tends to be very cold and austere.
As we open, Phil and Stan plan racquetball in what amounts to a representation for their intelligence roles. Stan positions himself at the center of the court and makes Phil run, as though Stan is holding all the cards. Phil is willing to run himself through the ringer, and the final shot comes to the back of Stan (portent?!) Phil is able to remark that leaving is tantamount to losing, which is both a reference to the Berlin Wall, and that, so long as Phil is allowed to remain in his current role, unchanged, he is winning. The game isn’t to 15, it’s to keep his spot on the court.
In the 3rd episode of a 13 episode first season, Stan already has a tertiary connection to Phil and Liz. Nina, in the form of a deus ex machina, informs Stan that a Directorate S agent (Robert – the pincushion from the pilot) was stabbed and killed in DC two weeks ago1. Robert has a direct connection to Phil and Liz. Once Robert’s wife contacts Phil via the newspaper, it becomes a matter of unraveling the mystery of how a dead man’s code appeared to contact Phil and Liz. Before we discover Robert’s wife (and child,) Joyce, we see Phil and Liz going through the machinations of whether or not Robert was actually dead. Wisely, they reach out to Liz’s contact, Gregory, the titular character from the episode.
When he is introduced, Gregory is portrayed as a trope from a Blaxploitation film of the 1970s. Now seems as good a point as any to point out that, while the 1980s are the decade for this setting, demarcating time by the hard-and-fast decades is foolish. Each decade’s trends bleed over into the next decade. This is early 1981 (likely still January), so lots of 1970s trends are still very popular. While Shaft and Dolemite were early to mid 1970s, and the trend sharply declined from 1975 onward, wide release Blaxploitation films were still produced in the late 70s, including 10 in the years 1976-1979.
We quickly move from this trope to a character who will no doubt surface in future episodes. It is clear that he has a relationship with Liz. He even calls her “Elizabeth.” From the exposition of Liz and Phil’s work-related, Soviet-approved dalliances for information, we assume that Gregory is another contact. Instead, we learn that Gregory knows Liz and Phil have a cover marriage, are KGB spies, and is working his own team of criminals to keep them from the truth. It further is learned that Liz and Gregory had a deeper connection. He is hurt when she tells him she won’t continue their relationship, and tries to hurt Phil to undermine their attempt at making their cover marriage a real one. He also seems to know something Liz isn’t ready to share with the studio audience (“don’t do [your marriage attempt] on a lie.”) Liz’s feelings for Gregory are evident in the knowledge that she disclosed who she actually was to him. Also, when he insulted her, she slapped him. If she really wanted to, she could’ve pulled some KGB jiu-jitsu on him. She went for the very feminine film trope of a slap. This is the most female she’s been since the start of the show.
Paralleled with all of this is the realization that Robert and Joyce’s marriage is real. He wasn’t supposed to have a wife (or, at least, not a Soviet sanctioned wife) and kept A) her from knowing what he was, and B) the Soviets from learning of her existence.
The rest of the episode is the cloak-and-dagger spy vs. counterspy we tune in for each week. The FBI knows surprisingly a great deal about Robert, once they know he exists, including his wife and child, and where they live. They put a surveillance team on Joyce and the baby, which Gregory’s team spots when watching the failed meet2. Liz and Phil, as well as “Granny3” spend a great deal
While the FBI, and Stan’s supervisor, are insistent that Joyce, once she slips their tail, is a Directorate S operative. Stan raises the point, “maybe she had a lot of help.” He is careful, and logical. He likes to make A to B to C connections. It seems as though the Bureau likes to skip to C from A, because C and A are true, which must mean B. When Stan sees Joyce in the car at the end of the episode, his look is one of angry confirmation – he was right again, and no one listened4.
Other items:
From the 80s:
-In the opening, when Stan turns for his profile framing closeup, just prior to the credits, the ridiculous earpiece is on display, dead center of the screen. Who would that fool? Our eyes haven’t gotten better in the past 32 years! It’s still a giant goiter-looking thing bulging out of his ear! Flesh-colored or not, it looks like he has a weird, puffy blister on his eardrum! Of course, now, we have stupid people walking around with blue blinking lights on their head, talking to no one in particular. I think we’ve regressed.
-The DMV Photo search. The FBI is going to have every DMV in the country just look, with their eyeballs, at photos for a match on the photo of a dead Robert. Now, that’d be plugging in to a national database, and having some facial recognition software do it in a matter of seconds. Stan’s partner even refers to it as a “needle in a haystack search”
-STAR WARS! And not the movie! The package Phil picks up, while I initially believed “Granny” was referring to the missile defense shield we heard Caspar Weinberger talking about a week ago, was about the space lasers designed to shoot nukes down! And the timeline is absolutely spot on – the “technology” was thought to be possible starting in 1978. Reagan was a big proponent of militarizing space, and even visited NORAD in the late 70s to see the potential benefits of frickin laser beams in frickin space!
-Even more exciting than Star Wars: NUMBERS STATIONS! They are a REAL FREAKING THING! Artificially generated voices speaking numbers over and over. No government has admitted to their use, formally. They are just radio broadcasts of creepy, artificially generated voices (usually women) saying random numbers. The plot of Call of Duty: Black Ops features numbers stations. These things boggle my mind. Let’s listen to one (it’s a Cuban numbers station):
-Doug Henning. The go-to of Doug Henning as a famous magician in reference to Joyce’s disappearing act is both hilarious and a definite 80s breadcrumb. Here’s why it’s hilarious, in one .jpg:
That’s Henning.
Family:
-Phil and Liz know about each other’s dalliances. Liz made a quick reference to the Swedish Ambassador’s wife (“you didn’t tell me she looked like THAT!”) as a passive admission of jealousy. Phil was dejected, but they have never been angry for doing what their jobs required. When Phil learned how deep Gregory has gotten with Liz, how he knows who they are, and shared so much together, he was furious. It was no longer a personal thing. Gregory said she cried in front of him. Something tells me Phil has never seen that side of Liz. Now, he is beginning to pull away. A bit.
Paranoia
-The FBI’s suspicions pan out, more often than not. The problem, of course, is that they get emboldened by guessing the easier stuff, and then jump straight to the specious conclusion, despite Stan’s protestations.
-Phil and Liz’s paranoia, including their concerns about blown covers, often pan out as well. This is because both sides are highly trained, and both sides actually ARE working against one another. This is why most “curious neighbor” plots seem ridiculous in shows. Had Stan been an IRS accountant who read the Warren Commission report and still harbored thoughts of a great Socialist plot against Kennedy in Dallas, we’d just be annoyed that some stupid IRS accountant was all of a sudden a top-notch investigator. Instead, Phil, Liz, and Stan are all top-notch intelligence agents, and they are all playing with fire. Everything is confirmed because everything is actually happening, which makes more things happen, because they were confirmed by previous suspicions. It’s a weird ouroboros of reasoning.
1-Two weeks ago?! I mentioned in the last post that the timeline was about to get deliberately slow if they want to fit 13 episodes in prior to March 30th, 1981, but holy crap – two weeks?! Phil and Liz have made progress! If this moves on a week-to-week basis, it could be episode twelve before we reach the end of March.
2-It bears mentioning, the two scenes set in Philadelphia with Gregory’s team/the FBI were gripping, and very well directed. They play like a miniature heist plot; the first scene is the team casing the score (Joyce/child), and the second is the well-orchestrated snatch and grab, complete with identifying the tail, obscuring their vision, and hustling Joyce away from what would seem to be danger (we later learn it is IN to danger.) The tension and lack of explanation are so great that we don’t know what is real and what isn’t – the purse snatching probably wasn’t actually a part of the group. It was previously mentioned that this was the roughest neighborhood in the entire state of Pennsylvania.
3-I have to make at least one mention of Margo Martindale here. I can only think of two roles she’s played, but she’s played both of them phenomenally (Maggie’s mother in “Million Dollar Baby” and Mags Bennett in Season 2 of “Justified,”) both of which were slimy, white trash women who used everyone around her. While the class and nationality of the woman is different, “Granny” is someone who will likely use everyone around her, including Phil, Liz, and their contacts.
4-Any doubt, once she knew that Robert/Phil/Liz were spies, that Joyce was going to end up dead before the hour was out? Here is the strange mental math this show is making me do. Joyce put together everything extremely quickly – the weird radio and the numbers, the fact that her husband died mysteriously, the code in the paper – she was ninety five percent there. Was that lazy writing, or because we are meeting her at two minutes to midnight of her life, did she already have her suspicions? Is she putting together that which she willfully ignored for a few years?
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