The Americans Review: "Covert War"

The Americans goes against orders (or does it?)  I review this week’s episode, just as soon as I understand that, in a covert war, there are rules.

Both Stan and the Jennings’ respective storylines in this episode teeter around defiance in the face of Granny’s comment about rules.

Stan gets it double time – defiance of his wife, and defiance from Nina, and he submits to his weakness: Nina’s body.  As the episode opens, we get Elizabeth and Sandra going out to drink Harvey Wallbangers and dance.  We also get a couple of nice passing references to the 1980s – Rocky Horror shows and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.  Sandra, it’s clear, has had it with Stan’s secrecy.  She has, up until now, been the demure housewife, refusing to push her husband (figuratively.)  With a few Harvey Wallbangers in her, topped off by some of a bottle of vodka, she flies into a rage, accusing Stan of infidelity when she calls the department.  She pushes him (literally) and flings her Old Fashioned glass a la Don Draper when the drifters steal his car¹.

Stan, now shamed by his angry wife, decides to end things with Nina.  It doesn’t go so well.  Stan began the season as a deliberate, calm, rational individual who didn’t overplay his hand.  We saw Agent Gaad overplay his hand, which led to the death of a potential contact.  We saw Claudia overplay her hand with the Jennings’ loyalty, and it cost her a few smacks to the face by Elizabeth.  Stan, on the other hand, has always taken everything in and processed, waiting to act until he can control the circumstances.  As we begin the episode, we learn that Nina has moved up to the role previously occupied by Vlad, which seems like it will be another of the windfall, ass-backward fortuitous gains precipitated by Stan’s cold-blooded murder of Vlad².

Instead, Nina realizes she’ll have access to Caspar Weinberger’s clock bug³ and all that the SecDef speaks about in his home office.  Is there any chance she won’t hear about the complications caused by Agent Beeman’s authorized murder of Vlad?  Stan’s actions, of late, have been all wrong.  Then again, he has returned to the Stan of old – calculated and cold – but he is now on a path dictated by the rash, angry Stan who killed Vlad and slept with Nina.  Nina, for her part, plays Stan like a fiddle, showcasing her body after he made it clear they need to end their physical relationship.  For Stan, it’s like he can’t resist.  Even his hand is unsure if he should slip her bra strap off her shoulder.  In the end, he does.  He was out, and now he’s back in⁴.

For the Jennings, nothing is ever easy.  Finding out that Zhukhov is dead was a blow for Elizabeth, and her automatic desire to defy orders came as no surprise – it seems like Claudia gives an order, and Liz begins working out the machinations of defying Granny in her mind.  Even in defying Granny, she is actually playing in to Claudia’s hands.  As her handler, Granny has become aware that Elizabeth is rash, disrespectful of authority, and tries to utilize that to get her to continue to do her bidding.  I thought the writing at the end was a bit clumsy, in that Elizabeth laid it out for her, especially since most everything else has been said through coded language, but perhaps Elizabeth’s open contempt for Claudia prompted her to be so blunt with her accusations.

It’s interesting that Elizabeth’s weakness caused her to actually defy Granny’s intended outcome – the death of the Agent who ordered Zhukhov’s death.  What remains unclear is Granny’s actual motive – would she really have had a dalliance with Zhukhov? Was she trying to crush Elizabeth underfoot?

Additionally, Phillip and Elizabeth’s weird, who’s on first-y conversation about coming home/moving to an apartment wound up being another in a long series of misunderstandings and unintentional defiance.  Odd that, as Phil’s actual married life continues to unravel, Clark’s dating life is heating up – he met the parents, and they are Lutheran!

As much as I wanted this episode to be a Beeman-centric episode⁵, it wound up setting the table for the end of the season nicely.  There’s no way the failed assassination attempt doesn’t bite them.  They gave up their safehouse, where Agent Amador succumbed to his knife wound, and where there are countless fingerprints and clues.  The Jennings’ secrecy might just explode in the next two episodes.

¹-Important to note, that was a hell off a toss by Susan Misner – right through that little window, and it was no-look, backhanded, and “drunk!”  Her entire performance during that scene was fantastic.

²-The spitting out of the hamburger was the nicest touch of Vlad’s dying scene – as if, in death, he rejected the United States, the west, and the symbol of America: The Hamburger.  At first, I thought it was the bullet forcing the burger out, but that makes zero sense.  If the bullet had gone through the back of his neck, it would’ve sprayed the masticated burger and bun everywhere.  Instead, it was just shock and slack-jawed limpness that caused the freshly bitten burger to tumble out of his mouth.

³-Great callback!  I’m glad that they aren’t ignoring the earlier part of the season, and are, in fact, showing us that those early “mission-of-the-week” episodes actually meant something.  This show has transitioned from rote, episodic “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” spy thriller with an awful lot of exposition and character growth to serialized, nuanced drama almost imperceptibly.

⁴-The better movie comparison is not the Godfather III, but rather Heat. But, there isn’t a great quote from the scene in heat when they pull off the thruway. *SPOILER ALERT* De Niro is out. He and Amy Brenneman are on their way to LAX where Nate’s plane, and freedom, awaits them. He knows what he should do, but the pull of finding Waingro and paying him back is too much.  He pulls off, and sets in motion a course that will end in his death, holding hands with Al Pacino as jets take off overhead.  Also, Heat is one of my favorite movies, directed by my favorite movie director.  So, I have a bias.

⁵-To be fair, I want every episode to be a Beeman-centric episode.  You could call the show “Stoicism” and watch as Stan’s son continues to display gender deviant behavior while Stan barely registers an external response, other than to ask a clumsily blunt question.  Later in the episode, Sandra would hurl a Jack Daniels decanter at Stan, and he’d flinch, but only because he got flying shards of glass in his eye.  Let’s go ahead and greenlight this.