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The Americans - S2 of the KGB spy drama - Keri Russell & Matthew Rhys - Wed on FX

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C

Cornballer

Member
A bunch of quotes from this week's reviews:

Matt Zoller Seitz said:
Let’s talk about the Russians first. As we’ve discussed in previous recaps, the Nina-Stan relationship is one of the show’s most complicated. Nina started out as a double agent, feeding information to Stan, then became his lover, then a triple agent; her promotion at the end of last season added another complication: Arkady knows about her previous betrayal, but has conspired to keep it out of the official record because he values her as an asset and likes her as a person. Oleg, who’s both opportunistic and keenly observant, seems to instantly sense that there is something more to Stan and Nina’s relationship than what he read in her official reports; he was only able to gain access to those reports by working his family connections back home, and getting his security clearance bumped up a notch.

In one of the episode’s tensest scenes, Oleg confronts Nina in a hallway at the Embassy and tells her what he knows about her, both from perusing her file and from watching her and Arkady and connecting the dots. He knows that she and Stan are in a sexual relationship that probably goes beyond asset and target. He knows from reading her file that Stan recruited her, but is intrigued by the fact that the file doesn’t say what Stan recruited her for. And he knows that Nina suspects that Vlad Kosygyn, the man who used to sit at Oleg’s desk, was probably murdered by Stan as part of the FBI-KGB “hot war” that flared up near the end of season one.

Near the end of “The Deal,” the KGB and the Mossad work out the details of a swap, trading Anton for one half of the Israeli abduction team that Elizabeth and Philip broke up (a man who spent much of this episode in Philip’s custody). Oleg, already an intriguing character, becomes a great one in this episode, showing off new skills and an even more ruthless sensibility. He leads the FBI surveillance team on a false chase that ends with him standing face-to-face on the dock with Stan. After talking him into dropping his weapon — no easy feat if you’re facing an FBI agent and speaking in a Russian accent — we realize Oleg’s true motive of insisting that he be a part of the prisoner swap; he wanted to get a look at Stan and see him as a person, not just a name and a file. Why? Here’s a theory: I don’t think Oleg is motivated solely by political ambition within the department. I think he’s in love with Nina. I think he’s jealous of Stan. That’s why he threatens to expose her as an asset of Stan’s (“What can you give me in exchange for Nina’s safety?”), but doesn’t say exactly what will happen if Stan refuses. I haven’t seen next week’s episode as of this writing, so I offer this in the spirit of blind speculation, knowing that I could be totally off base, but: I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if Oleg leveraged his knowledge of Stan and Nina to get Nina to sleep with him.

Related: I found it fascinating that, after Oleg hassles Nina, her next move is to tell Stan about the tension between Arkady and Oleg at the Embassy. I don’t think this is a case of a Russian agent giving an FBI agent a piece of “useful” information that may or may not actually be useful. She may also be protecting herself. Arkady is on her side, and Oleg is, at this point, at least an adversary, and potentially a future exploiter. By hipping Stan to the battle of wills between these two men, she sets the stage to somehow undermine Oleg, or at least protect herself.
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Sepinwall said:
There were so many incredible original moments. Martha and Elizabeth's drunken bull session was a thing of sad comic wonder, as Elizabeth finds a non-fatal way to put this particular genie back in the bottle but has to endure hearing her husband's other wife discuss their sex life — and in terms suggesting there are parts of himself that Philip has only shown to Martha. Each woman believes that the relationship they have with this man is real, and while Elizabeth has a much stronger emotional claim to that belief, the nature of their work makes it impossible to know for sure.
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Alyssa Rosenberg said:
The best half of the hour is essentially a bottle episode, as Philip and the Mossad agent who turned out to be defending Anton poke at each other over American culture. “What are you? The Kenny Rogers of Tel Aviv?” Philip teases him about the accent in which the other man broke into Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” when playing drunk for a D.C. cop. But the agent is not shaken by Philip’s indictment of his tradecraft.

He and the Soviet Union, he explains, share skepticism about the United States. And his argument for Israel shows a sly sense of his audience. “My kids in a communal hall. My wife works in the field with other wives. You like communism? Come to Israel. It works much better there,” he explains to his captor, offering up a vision of family that’s better integrated than Philip’s situation, where he lies to his children but is tied to his wife by profound secrets.

Maybe the Mossad agent senses that in him. “I go home for Passover. I sing country-western with an accent. I hide what I do. I don’t hide who I am,” the Israeli tells the Russian at the beginning of their conversation. At the end of it, he asks Philip for his name, but then rescinds his request. “But your name isn’t your name, is it?” he muses. “Is your face your face? Are your children your children?” These are questions that have plagued Philip as long as “The Americans” has been spending time with him.
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Poniewozik said:
As the capture of the Mossad agent and physicist Anton played out, “The Deal” gave an ugly shading to Philip’s character by having him make some off-handedly anti-Semitic remarks: “You throw some shekels his way too?”; “So is this what you Jews do, spy on your friends?” and so on. Words are not bullets, of course, but the volition of his remarks reminds us that we should only sympathize with him so far. Lying, threatening, killing–those are nasty things, but at least something the Directorate S agents do out of some patriotic ideal. They’re things he has to do. Sneering about “shekels” is something he chooses to do.

It’s a hard truth, but it’s not the whole picture. Though Philip may distance himself from his charges, he also has things in common with them. His battle with the Mossad agent in the bathroom, for instance, ends with an exhausted moment of rapport between them: they’re both professionals, doing their jobs, and each knows he’d do what the other does in his situation.

The trade of Anton is one of the most wrenching things The Americans has shown–it’s emotionally excruciating if not physically violent, as the scientist goes through stages of denial, bargaining, and despair, breaking down horribly in the back seat as he tries to hit Philip with the one weapon he might possibly have: an appeal to his captor’s humanity. And while it’s bound not to work, this gripping scene shows that it does hurt. “At least look at me!” he pleads. “Please! You’re a monster! You’re not a man! Whoever you once were, whatever you were, they trained it out of you. No feeling, no humanity, you may as well be dead.”

We watch Philip through the rain-slicked glass of the windshield, and maybe we don’t see a monster, but we see a man trying to compel himself to be one, long enough for this to be over. We know enough of Philip to know that the Frankenstein-like deadness on his face his to be willed, and has to take physical effort to maintain. However he treats Anton (whose abduction, after all, he’d advised against), he hasn’t trained the humanity out of himself. He’s also in the same position, separated from his home. Anton is being shipped to the Soviet Union as part of a larger deal; Philip sent Mischa away as part of his role in a larger game.
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Onion A|V Club said:
All of this brings me back to Elizabeth, who’s once again seemingly thrown by her newfound connection to her husband when Martha starts talking about what an animal Clark is in bed, and Stan, who’s put in a position where he might question his loyalty to his country in order to keep Nina safe. Whether Oleg will be able to flip Stan is very much an open question at episode’s end (and I suspect that Stan will remain steadfast because he’s just that kind of guy), but season two keeps drilling into the characters’ heads that the larger games they play on a geopolitical scale are just extrapolations of the relationships they live within on an interpersonal scale. “The Deal” features one of those moments when the series pulls in a bit of real-world history and recontextualizes it within this universe when it ends with the USSR relaxing its stringent treatment of the Refuseniks. We’re meant to believe it’s part of the deal cut to get Anton back on Soviet soil. On the one hand, it’s a clever bit of secret history; on the other, it’s just the ultimate example of the show taking tiny relationship stories and blowing them out to a grander scale.
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C

Cornballer

Member
- Andy Greenwald on last night's episode and this season
That’s what made it so utterly heartbreaking last night when Paige approached her mother in the laundry room — Elizabeth barely had time to stash the purloined files underneath a towel — not to accuse but to apologize. “It’s not all you,” Paige stammered. “It’s me, my life, my crazy life. I don’t know where to put everything.” At first Elizabeth appeared stunned by the honesty — it’s not a currency that gets much use in that house. But then she looked gutted by recognition. All immigrants to this country, even the ones who seek to destroy it, want a better life for their kids. Seeing Paige struggling with the very same issues of compartmentalization that torment her mother was devastating to Elizabeth. But then her training kicked in. “What do you mean?” she asked, not so much in denial as in character. Paige went into the basement looking for her mother. What she found was a spy. And both walked away unhappy.

“The Deal” was among the very best episodes of The Americans to date, primarily because of the exciting, artful, and ultimately crushing ways it teased out the central conflict of the series: Families aren’t cover stories. Philip and Elizabeth can lie with impunity to everyone they meet. They can even lie to themselves. But there’s no shaking the slow-dawning realization that the bonds they’ve established with each other are real. And that the children they’ve created are even more real — they’ve blossomed into uncontrollable young people full of love, curiosity, and questions. Paige and Henry can’t be slipped back into a drawer or tossed into the river like every other prop. It’s a fact that becomes harder and harder for Philip and Elizabeth to ignore with each passing day.
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A

AngmarsKing701

Member
Really great episode. Loving this season so far. Every conversation has so many layers. I love when Elizabeth tells Paige she doesn't like when Paige hides things.

Dat hypocrisy
 
T

Tamanon

Banned
Avon Barksdale said:
I hope this show doesn't get canceled.
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I can't see it being cancelled. It's currently going against some hellish competition in Duck Dynasty and fucking Big Bang Theory which soak up a lot of viewers. I think FX will let it build. They're usually pretty good about that.
 
N

Niraj

I shot people I like more for less.
Finally had some time to catch up on the last two. Good stuff. Really liked the Martha+Elizabeth scenes, those were fun.
 
B

BigJonsson

Member
Tamanon said:
I can't see it being cancelled. It's currently going against some hellish competition in Duck Dynasty and fucking Big Bang Theory which soak up a lot of viewers. I think FX will let it build. They're usually pretty good about that.
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Big Bang Theory is on Thursdays
 
RangersFan

RangersFan

Member
Just added this show to my lineup. Watched all the eps and caught up in the past week. I knew the moment the introduced Oleg he was a smart motherfucker and not just some guy with family connections. This show is great. The three leads in particular, Phil, Elizabeth, and Stan are excellent. What I loved a lot about the last episode is how the Mossad agent seems to have brought about the old conflicted Philip. Not to mention the cries and pleas of the scientist. Great show. This pretty much leaves American Horror Story and Wilfred as the only FX shows I have not watched.
 
C

Cornballer

Member
New episode tonight:
Behind the Red Door

A dangerous Naval officer becomes the key to Philip and Elizabeth's mission; an intelligence officer working with the Jennings is tasked with getting Elizabeth access to Capitol Hill; Stan struggles with the potential costs of protecting Nina.
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T

Tamanon

Banned
Stan's probably saying to himself "Wait, that's my fucking patriotism speech!"

Strangely small thing Oleg is asking for. I wonder if it's just the tip of the iceberg.
 
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