The Americans: "Duty and Honor" review

This week’s episode of The Americans puts at the forefront the perspective of th show, and the lack of knowledge we, as the audience, have over the character’s actions.  My review is after the jump, as soon as I finish this glass of Latour.

The point of view for The Americans is extremely important to the way it tells the story.  We are intentionally, and frustratingly third person.  We can jump from character to character, and we never have the full picture.  There is no zooming camera angle on the true nature of a scene.  There is no aside about a character’s intentions.  When Stan Beeman asks for the East African Ass Diamonds last week, we assume it’s for some type of payoff.  Instead, they are used for the purpose of burning Vasili.  An omniscient narrator would have allowed us to know that before it happened; sometimes it works¹ and sometimes it doesn’t².

The important part of this lack of omniscience is that the show is conveyed to us in such quick, clipped dialogue that we are not privy to the true meaning until later.  At no point does someone say, “You’re talking about bugging the office of the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger!”  Instead, it’s “Weinberger” and “SecDef” as ways to convey that message. The message from the writers is twofold: A) Get on board.  Know your 1980s history and follow along.  We aren’t going to spoon feed you; and B) You are our mushroom.  We feed you shit and keep you in the dark, and it is your job to figure out what is real, and what isn’t.  Did you guess that Claudia was behind the Jennings’ torture?  Animal cracker for you.  We still aren’t going to explain things for you.

This makes us a third party, floating like a spirit, above what the camera lets us see. The subterfuge and espionage displayed between the Soviets and the Americans is also subterfuge between the show and the audience.  This show is whip-smart with its history and its purpose, and will not have any of those sequences where a character, for clarity’s sake, will be forced to explain their entire ingenious plot and then we will be able to watch as it unfolds.  They will also never be forced to explain their actions after the fact, in excruciating detail for someone who is giving them the third degree.  There is no Hugo Reyes character giving shallow, overly simplistic plot summaries for people who have just woken up from a coma, or returned from capture on the other side of the island, just to make sure that the audience is still with us³.

In “Duty and Honor,” this contempt and subterfuge is the most direct in the purse-snatching sequence.  I still don’t exactly know quite what happened with the purse snatching. It happened so quickly, and Phil’s attack on Andrzej (That’s how IMDB spells it, anyway!) doesn’t really give us any clue as to how his hand got bruised.  He made a point of saying “I have had too much to drink tonight” before he has another (spiked) glass at the hotel.  Even after the plot is set in motion, and the hard part is over (injuring Andrzej, getting Irina’s blood on the hotel sheets), the writers give us nothing.  They even mash together the revelation of Phil’s son⁴ with the beating.

The beating, by the way, was directed masterfully.  The low camera angle, and the shock at which it came – he gently touches Irina’s chin, and then lays into her a few times – the audience feels helpless to prevent it, similar to the sequence of the knife in Psycho – coming in at a downward angle. At the time, it seems like Irina just read that Phil wanted to smack her a bit for this deception.  It later turns out it was part of the plan.

The further question to ask, as we sit, third party, to the episode, is whether or not Irina was another attempt to test Phil.  She says Duty and Honor are all that matter.  To Phil, especially after his interrogation last week, that Duty and Honor are to his family, especially his children.  They are, in fact, the first people he goes to when he returns home⁵.  When he leaves her at Grand Central, he assures her he won’t burn her⁶, spurning her offer of escape.

Stan’s goofy storyline was a miss – he doesn’t even make an appearance until the halfway point of the episode. They’d been dancing around his flirtation with Nina since the third episode, but now, a few drinks, and Stan is ready to seal the deal?  It was very rushed, and it had the feel of writers who were worried about being able to appropriately express that relationship.  He’s already asking Special Agent John Boy to extract her for her safety, which is idiotic, because he just burned Vasili last week to save her hide (John Boy points this out.) John Boy does say that he’ll consider extracting her, but we know he won’t.  If I had to bet, I’d say Nina doesn’t survive this season.

Additionally, I’d say Margo Martindale is put on a path toward execution by the Jennings before she proves to be useful.  Irina will exist off camera for another season, and I would bet her death comes after a long layoff from the character.  Given that Nina isn’t long for the show, and both the Jennings’ and Beemans’ are having marital strife, how long is it before either Stan makes a pass at Elizabeth, or Phil makes a pass at Mrs. Beeman?  Both make sense as far as the Soviets go – access to information at the FBI, even if we, as viewers, know that Stan shares nothing with his wife.  I don’t think we’ll have a full on key-party swap a la Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich⁷.

If the first seven episodes of this season were to position the chess pieces, this may become a more active, action packed spy drama for the second half of the season.  This could be a good thing, so long as we still have character development and the infusion of 80s related plot (Star Wars making a comeback, thanks to Elizabeth’s work with the defense contractor!) or it could go awry, changing the tone and theme of the show we’ve been built to expect. Just don’t expect the writers to clue us in on any of it.

¹-Stan and the Diamonds, the meet sequence when Vasili leads the tail away from the contact, the beating/purse snatching.

²-The Jennings’ interrogation, who Stan was going home with from the bar.

³-Of course, there is also no smoke monster or deeper mythology that includes random sets of numbers or Lazarus men and four-toed statues.  Jesus, Lost was fucked up.

⁴-Phil’s son: real or fake? Phil asks, but he never gets a definitive answer at Grand Central. I think, for now, he’s fake.  But, should they need that character in a later episode, he’s there to be used!

⁵-It is not lost on me that the Jennings children are playing Chess against one another.  After Nina said that for the Soviets, everything is gray, we’ve been looking at this show in terms of black and white for some time – two competing sides, each viewing each other as the good guys or the bad guys.  The pieces on Henry and Paige’s chessboard are black and white, and my constant references to arranging Chess pieces is hinted at by the writers here.  Are they ready for the dreaded Russian attack?

⁶- He totally will.  Not this season, but next season.  They’ll use her as a way to cover some type of botched plan.

⁷-Peterson and Kekich were both pitchers on the Yankees in the late 1970s.  They swapped families.