1x09 Safe House

[8.0/10] Separation isn’t easy. When something is close and consistent, it’s easy to take the good things for granted, acclimate to the little pieces of someone that make you smile or make things easier for you. It can highlight the places where you don’t align, where things are hard. And when you’re apart, when the status quo changes, the absence can cast into relief those little things that you missed, and it can show you the effect it has on the other people in your orbit.

There’s two separations in “Safe House”: one permanent, and one that may or may not be. One of them begins when Chris Amador -- who is both Martha’s ex and Stan Beeman’s partner -- gets into a scrap with Philip (in his guise as Clark the Internal Affairs agent). Chris, it turns out, has no apparent suspicions of shady dealings; he seems to just be protecting his turf. But he identifies himself as an FBI agent and, when things get physical between him and Philip, and Chris takes a knife to the gut, Philip takes him to a safe house, to get information out of him.

Let’s not hide the ball here. Chris dies. The show spends some time showing the Jennings trying to keep him alive long enough to give them some information about whom the FBI is targeting as retaliation for the KGB killings from the last episode, and Stan goes on a one-man crusade to find his partner. But it would have been a cheat for Amador to survive this. He’s seen Philip’s face; he knows too much; would be too disruptive to the status quo for him to walk away from this.

So the show has the guts to kill him off. It’s hard not to admire that -- the show playing out what it sets up without trying to find some creative way to back out of it. We get just enough little details about Chris to make him deeper than the semi-charming asshole we’d known up until this point, and make his death more tragic and meaningful.

When we flash back to a chat between Chris and Stan, Chris claims to be a lone wolf, to a man without attachments, but when Stan goes to check on his partner after he doesn't show up for work, he sees pictures of family and friends, and surprisingly enough, of himself, with his arm around Chris. Amador likes to play it cool, to put himself up as the skirt-chasing solo-flyer, but as that picture, and the very fact that he’s still pining for Martha despite the voices on his answering machine show, he has more attachments than he lets on.

That lets Stan see him in a different a light. When his partner isn’t there, he realizes how much he took their connection -- one that annoyed him to the point of calling Chris a Putz early in the episode -- for granted. The prospect of losing Amador, of the KGB killing him or taking him, stirs something in Stan, something that makes him break rules, violate protocol, and act with a viciousness and determination we haven’t really seen in him before.

That’s contrasted with an almost casualness from the Jennings by comparison. We’ve seen Stan and the Jennings work both sides of a case before, but typically the contrast the show draws is a methodological one, not an emotional one. It’s the difference between how the Russians do things and how the Americans do things. But here the difference is one of care.

To Philip and Elizabeth, Chris is just another enemy agent, another guy to work for information and do what needs doing. For Stan, Chris is a partner, one he didn’t realize was that important to him until the other side took him.

(As a side note, it is again interesting to see a random development that both sides of the Cold War start chasing their own tails over. Each side has conspiracy theories about why and how their low-level guys were taken, and it all starts with a fight over a girl. There’s irony there.)

But maybe that casualness is also a side of professionalism, something that Philip and Elizabeth are leaning into now that they’re “pushing the pause button” on their marriage. There’s is a much more quotidian separation, the kind that families in America deal with every day.

That’s what’s really remarkable about this episode and to a larger extent this show. Despite the outsized spy theatrics, and despite the unusual situation between Philip and Elizabeth, it manages to deliver an emotionally involving, very real-seeming spate of fallout from the two of them breaking the news of their separation to Paige and Henry, and to the both of them starting to live separate lives.

That’s the sharpest for Elizabeth. She doesn't have help when she’s bringing in the groceries. She’s struggling to get the kids out and to school. She’s uncomfortable with something so personal and, where she’s from, shameful, being made public. It is hard on her to try this step that she nevertheless believes is for the best. She has to deal with this strange new world, with her daughter “hating her guts and making no secret of it,” and most of all with the way it hurts her son.

That becomes the hardest thing about it, the hardest thing about those sorts of splits, when innocent third parties get hurt, not because they’ve done anything wrong, not because they did anything to deserve it, but because they are not a part of those decisions, the blameless victims who just feel the hardship of the change. That is Henry, retreating inside himself when the news comes and not knowing how to deal with it.

And that’s also Vladimir, the low-level first tour kid from the Rezidentura, who Stan kidnaps in retaliation for his missing partner and then, when the dust settles and Chris shows up dead, he shoots without remorse. One of theirs for one of it’s ours. It’s not his fault. It’s nobody’s fault, in the sense that it’s a strange confluence of events that spin out from this whole multi-headed conflict, but he takes the fall for it.

It’s the scariest Stan has ever seemed. His speech about hunting, about the birds going limp, about the “soft mouth,” is unnerving in a way easy-going, soft-spoken Stan has never been before. This triggered something in him, something that made him go against his boss, intimidate Nina, and cross a line we’ve yet to see him cross until now.

That’s all because of Chris, because of the man who realized in Vietnam that he could die at any minute, who wanted to live life to the fullest in the meantime, and who had more going on under the surface than Stan, or the audience, knew until he met his end.

The Jennings can return to one another. And let’s be honest here -- there’s five more seasons of the show, so chances are they will. But Stan and Chris won’t ever be partners again. All Stan has left is the absence, the painful impression of the deeper parts of his friend he didn’t realize were there until he had cause to reflect on them. Some separations are temporary. Some are permanent. But the longer they last, the more you cannot come back from them, the more they expose and the more they can change you in ways that are just as irrevocable.