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

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H

HerbertBirdsfoot

Member
I think Nina and Oleg were playing Rescue Raiders. And Astrosmash was on the Intellivision. Man I am the target demographic of the show. Owned both of those games.
 
N

Niraj

I shot people I like more for less.
Cornballer said:
Nice work casting Paige and Henry - I'm always a little worried about child actors, but they're both pretty good.
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Yeah no kidding man. I think Henry's actor sold that last scene pretty well. Justified is pretty decent in that regard too (Loretta and Kendall).
 
V

Verdre

Unconfirmed Member
Lots of great scenes in today's episode. Loved Stan in his garage, still a joy to watch Nina and wonder exactly which parts are real and I was pleasantly surprised at how well Henry's actor pulled off that last scene.

Edit: Oh, and some wonderful acting from the driver in the woods.
 
T

TheMan420

Banned
I.love.this.show! Man what great actors, makeup & wig design plus a great story line. The true parts of history I love like the russian sub sinking.
 
M

MaritalWheat

Member
Verdre said:
Lots of great scenes in today's episode. Loved Stan in his garage, still a joy to watch Nina and wonder exactly which parts are real and I was pleasantly surprised at how well Henry's actor pulled off that last scene.

Edit: Oh, and some wonderful acting from the driver in the woods.
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Yeah the driver in the woods was heartbreaking. This show is so goddamn great, I'm super happy to see a third season is coming. Superb acting all around too.

Stan's home scenes make me physically squirm at this point, just such a high cringe factor in every interaction with his wife.

Edit: So, did they sneak into the base immediately after the driver scene (offscreen action), or is that yet to happen? I was confused by the timeline on that.
 
A

ambientmystic

Member
Yet another brilliant episode, time just flew by watching it.

I'm quite surprised that they didn't off Vasili (previous head of the Rezidentura) and gave him a second chance instead.

Man, Liz and Phil's new handler is starting to grow on me, but she doesn't have the menacing presence that Claudia had.

MaritalWheat said:
Edit: So, did they sneak into the base immediately after the driver scene (offscreen action), or is that yet to happen? I was confused by the timeline on that.
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I think that scene was part of their prepwork heading into the base. I'm not quite sure myself.
 
D

Dan

No longer boycotting the Wolfenstein franchise
MaritalWheat said:
Yeah the driver in the woods was heartbreaking. This show is so goddamn great, I'm super happy to see a third season is coming. Superb acting all around too.

Stan's home scenes make me physically squirm at this point, just such a high cringe factor in every interaction with his wife.

Edit: So, did they sneak into the base immediately after the driver scene (offscreen action), or is that yet to happen? I was confused by the timeline on that.
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I think they're doing that the next morning. Definitely hasn't happened yet.
 
E

evil solrac v3.0

Member
loved the scene where Phillip asks Elizabeth if "she likes this" in reference to life in America and all her nice shoes that she has and how easy life is.
 
V

VeryGooster

Banned
dat tension

On the edge of my seat...

I HAVE to know if Henry gets an Intellivision by season's end

In seriousness, looking forward to see how they handle Philip's devotion to the cause versus his comfort in "American" culture. I do like the direction that propeller plan plot went. I definitely liked this episode more than last week's.

Was actually looking to see though if the sub sinking was a reference to a real incident but didn't find anything.

Edit: lol AV Club posted a video of a Camaro ad. http://youtu.be/NXKlfBDFS0U
 
S

Spectral Glider

Member
HerbertBirdsfoot said:
I think Nina and Oleg were playing Rescue Raiders. And Astrosmash was on the Intellivision. Man I am the target demographic of the show. Owned both of those games.
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MisterFalcon said:
It was this one, Paratrooper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXjWHYst1Nk
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Yep, definitely Paratrooper. And it was Astrosmash, though they added in that music it was playing, that game had no music.

Another really good episode. Getting the feeling that Oleg is really going to screw up with Nina cause he's fallen for her just as hard as Stan, maybe more so.
 
R

ReturnOfTheRAT

Member
I really liked last nights episode because it added another wrinkle to Americanization conflict that Philip has been going through. It's been on the back burner, but returns with the purchase of the muscle car and the excitement it brings him. American built machinery; power and styling, and as we all know, an outward example of status. The last part just adds to Stan's other frustrations.

Then on meeting their handler he parks the car and has a moment to take in the beauty of it all. That admiration for American made equipment is soundly deflated. It's a complete downer for him to be told that the stolen plans were mechanically faulty and the reason for a large loss of life. The high is gone and now he feels like shit.

The show does a great job of making you feel real emotion for characters you're supposed to despise.

Edit:

I'm pretty happy with myself for putting that together before reading the AVClub review and seeing the commercial.
 
L

Linius

Member
Great, great episode once again. Even though there wasn't much happening on the violence front it was tense as fuck troughout the whole episode. Oleg and Arkady bonding a bit over a sunken submarine. Thought it was great how they handeled that with all the Russians being so shook up by the loss of 160 comerades they didn't even know. It's all very close to them despite they're all the way over in the states. This season is incredible television so far.
 
C

Cornballer

Member
Pull quotes from the reviews:
Matt Zoller Seitz said:
It's fascinating how The Americans has evolved the tension between Elizabeth and Philip about their relative American-ness and how it affects their identity as Soviets. She's clearly got a more-Russian-than-thou attitude, and it makes Philip insecure. But even if the show's treatment of this tension was simplistic in the first season (and I don't think it was) it has become undeniably more complex in season two. It's more about Philip worrying that he's made peace with himself as a killer and all-around rotten person in exchange for American freedoms, be they the ability to bust out in country-western dance at a department story or to impulse buy a new Chevy Camaro with his son and then rock out to "Rock This Town" in the driveway afterward.

The episode makes this equation (America in exchange for your soul) achingly clear in a shot that ends the scene in which Philip's new handler breaks down while telling him about the 160 dead sailors. He pauses next to the new Camaro and regards it warily, as if he expects it to turn on him. (I love that he didn't kick the car in anger.) Philip commits great crimes but also what you might call misdemeanors. The most recent of involves tactically editing a tape to make it sound as though Stan and agent Gadd are talking trash about Martha's looks — a tactic meant to make Martha reconsider her wish to leave the department where "Clark" convinced her to spy. Not for nothing does Philip seem to spend more time looking at himself in mirrors and not liking the face he sees there.

Philip tries to get Elizabeth to admit that she can't completely shut out the pleasures of capitalist life even as she plots to destroy them. "Don't you enjoy any of this sometimes?" he asks her. She just keeps evading and evading and evading him. He repeats "Do you like it" three times but never gets an answer. But he knows the answer, and so do we. It's the same answer he'd give: yes. That's why he doesn't want to kill the truck driver out in the woods. And it's probably why she agrees not to.
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Sepinwall said:
In the midst of all this, Henry gets caught by the Intellivision-owning family down the street and breaks down sobbing in front of his parents, so guilt-ridden over what he's done and upset at the thought that they won't think he's a good person. It's a tricky scene, because young Keidrich Sellati is still learning his craft, but the moment ultimately lands on Russell and Rhys, who have to respond to seeing their son in so much genuine distress, and also at the realization that they've raised a pretty good kid, but also that they're raising him in a culture where he would be so envious of another boy's video game system that he would break the law just to enjoy it. The longer they stay in this country, the more bound up in its ways they and, especially, their children are going to become. And it doesn't matter how ideologically pure Elizabeth remains, because the world and their specific assignments don't allow for a whole lot of purity.
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Alyssa Rosenberg said:
While the members of the Jennings family all deal with their sense of guilt, back at the Rezidentura, Oleg (Costa Ronin) stands in stark contrast to them and to Arkady (Lev Gorn), who is frightened for his nephew in the Navy. Oleg has always seemed unburdened by the sorts of conflicts over enjoying Western culture that Philip and Elizabeth, with “all those beautiful shoes,” suffer. And rather than reflecting on the success or failure of his spycraft, Oleg looks to Soviet bureaucracy, and to technical explanations, for what happened with that submarine.

“I don’t want to avoid blame,” Oleg tells Arkady. “But the Navy retrofitted a propeller on an Akula class, which is two classes bigger than what the Americans use this design for, and they tested it for only three weeks. The admiral pushed it past the red line, and it shattered the shaft. They rushed a testing period that should have taken five months into three weeks. And now they’re trying to blame us.”

If Elizabeth and Philip are going to break, I doubt it will be as early as this season. But even if they hold on, Oleg seems like a more sustainable model for the future, and not just because he knows what Arpanet is and why it matters before his colleagues and superiors catch on. He is getting ready for conflicts that happen between machines, rather than men, and where casualties result from technical details rather than human error or moral failing. Oleg seems to care less than Philip and Elizabeth whether he is a good person or not. But just in case, he is doing his best to remove the question from consideration.
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Onion A|V Club said:
In the end, the car is little more than a car, but it is emblematic of the divide between Soviet and U.S. innovation and defense technology, which much of this episode’s plot turns on. (A much smaller symbol of same: When Stan meets Oleg at a bowling alley, he finds him standing in front of a bank of machines playing pinball, which Oleg notes people used to wait in line for hours to play one game of back home.) The Americans has thus far avoided tipping its hand too much about its ideology—and for good reason, as the show works best in the grey area it usually occupies—but “New Car” goes all-in with that footage of Ronald Reagan, and Elizabeth’s reaction to it. Reagan has gradually become more of a looming specter in this season of The Americans, and it’s hard not to sympathize with Elizabeth as she listens to him talk about the country’s huge spending on Soviet defense (at the expense of balancing the budget, which is mighty cringe-inducing from the vantage point of 2014). Especially when a portion of that spending was devoted to planting phony propeller plans, plans that she and Philip risked their lives to get, and that resulted in the death of 160 of their comrades. There’s something infuriating about the casual bravado that such a plan requires, a certain dick-swinging, “neener-neener” mentality that’s required to even think up that sort of sneak attack, much less implement it. It’s a very American mentality, truth be told—the utmost confidence in our own power and others’ envy of it. At the moment of that speech, Reagan might as well have been speeding off in a brand-new Chevy Camero, giving Elizabeth the finger in his rearview.

Then again, the Soviets did steal those plans, and, if Oleg is to be believed, made errors of their own in rushing them through production and testing. There are no innocents here, but there are plenty of victims, and no one source for blame. That’s the sort of moral quagmire that makes me love The Americans, and makes episode like “New Car” so rewarding on subsequent viewings. (I watched this one three times, and I’m still not sure I caught everything.) Relationships and loyalties on this show fracture and morph and fold in on themselves to such an extent that it’s impossible to maintain a rooting interest. We can only stare, semi-horrified, and wonder what comes next—and how things could possibly get worse.
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EW Interview with Emmerich said:
Last season, Stan’s relationship with Nina became kind of a through line, and this season it’s become an even bigger part of his character journey. How has this relationship changed Stan as a person?

I think on some level, Nina has reminded him of himself at an earlier stage in his career. I think that coming out of the three years undercover and relocating to Washington, D.C. and the new counterintelligence division, we find him in the beginning of season 1 somewhat post-traumatic-stress disordered out, somewhat in shock, somewhat estranged from his family and from himself. Clearly, his first engagement with Nina is to turn her into a source and a tool for his job, to unravel the Soviet mystery and get inside enemy lines. But I think that evolves rather quickly into empathy and compassion for her. And maybe in some Freudian sense, he’s trying to save himself as he develops feelings for her and trying to save her and trying to excavate her from the wrath in which she’s entangled. I do feel like it’s a complicated dynamic. But I think he feels very empathic and sympathetic and hopeful that he’ll be able to, on some level, save her from some of the scars and bruises he’s endured in his own career. Of course, ironically enough, it turns out by the end of season 1 that she’s in fact manipulating him as well…but he obviously remains oblivious to that reality.

I find Stan to be such a fascinating character. So many people see him as a bad guy, but I think he’s the one person on the show that is actually a really good guy who just gets caught up in this darkness in the wrong way. From an actor perspective, is that how you see him, also?

I see Stan as a thoroughly good person. I see Stan as someone who has dedicated his life to serving a cause greater than himself at great personal expense, he’s committed to serving his country and to protecting the security of his country, and he’s in this terrible Cold War. He’s a part of this, as are Philip and Elizabeth. I think they’re good people, and doing what they think of as patriotic and noble and in service of a cause that is bigger than themselves. They’re certainly not leading selfish lives, any of these characters…they’re all dedicated to things outside their own personal gain. And the circumstances and context of the Cold War demands very questionable actions, but those decisions are made by people higher up than these characters. They’re sort of, in a way, servants of the Cold War, so it does cause incredible personal compromise and impeachment of their own moral personal integrity. But in many ways, their lives aren’t in their own hands – they’re on the front line. So I don’t think Stan is a bad person at all. I think he’s trying to be as noble and moral and patriotic as he can be, and you go down the rabbit hole of this time in the world and you’re forced to confront all sorts of demons and compromises to perhaps what may be your own personal outlook on life, or desire to be an upstanding citizen.
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R

Rehynn

Member
Man, the S3 pickup is amazing news. I'm really rooting for this series. Many people will discover it a couple years from now and think "Where the hell was I in 2014?"

I loved the performances in the last episode. The kid that plays Henry did a phenomenal job with that last scene. And the driver sure made the most of the very little screen time he had.
 
A

Amir0x

Banned
Rehynn said:
Man, the S3 pickup is amazing news. I'm really rooting for this series. Many people will discover it a couple years from now and they think "Where the hell was I in 2014?"
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It got picked up for the third season!? Fuck yes!

I haven't seen passed the fucked up episode where Phillip delivers the scientist to Russia, so I'm excited to see what I missed
 
J

jett

D-Member
Pizza con salsiccia said:
Great episode.

Still don't get why Clark didn't
make Marthan listen to the doctored tape
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Tamanon said:
He found that everything seemed to be back to normal without pulling that trump card put.
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I thought he just felt it was just too evil to make her listen to that, figured he felt sorry for her. Phil strikes me as a genuinely nice guy, as much as he can be in the situation he is in, anyway.
 
C

Cornballer

Member
New episode tonight:
Martial Eagle

Philip and Elizabeth's long-planned mission turns ugly; Stan digs in deeper at work as his personal life continues to unravel.
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The episode will run 10 minutes past the hour tonight.
 
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