2x01 Comrades

[8.0/10] The Americans isn’t being shy about the themes it’s putting forward for its premiere, and presumably, its second season. You see it in the parallel spy couple who has an unimaginable tragedy befall them. You see it in Paige’s suspicions leading her to walk in on her parents. And you see it in that time-tested imagery of Elizabeth coming across a deer with her offspring in tow.

If “Comrades” is any indication, this is going to be a season about raising children. If Season 1 was about marriage, with spy thrills and espionage obstacles standing in for more quotidian marital difficulties, then Season 2 promises to be about the challenges of raising children, both with the fantastical worries of having to preserve your secret identity and keep them from running afoul of international assassins, and the more down-to-earth concerns of privacy and maturity and balancing work and home that come with kiddos.

And yet, I can’t shake the sense that The Americans has not given up on bumps in the road for Elizabeth and Philip as a couple just yet. There is a moment of emotional regression to the mean after they make out in front Paige and Henry that seems telling. There is a brief hesitation in Elizabeth’s eyes when she tells her other-couple equivalent that she and Philip are doing better. And even as the two of them are reassuring each other in the aftermath of the mission gone wrong, there is something off about it.

Philip and Elizabeth are trying, and they clearly care about one another, but after pretending for so long, making the real thing come naturally isn’t easy yet, not even after their breakthrough in last season’s finale.

“Comrades” ties off a few other loose ends from the finale, which help reset the status quo and loosen the net around the Jennings so that there’s more room to run. The gambler informant’s tips didn’t pan out, and he ends up dead here. The colonel from the finale gets of scot free despite Stan’s instincts and suspicions. And Nina’s false intel means that the trail has gone cold for the FBI in its efforts to catch the Jennings.

But Nina and Stan’s would be romance hasn’t followed the same trajectory. Stan goes out of his way to get bootleg videotapes of the latest releases to watch with Nina, but when he picks a Meryl Streep flick intended to make her cry and get emotional with him, Nina is not only onto the game, but reacts badly when Streep’s character monologues about being a kept woman. Despite thinking he has the power in the relationship, it’s just another brick in the wall of how Nina’s now playing him rather than the other way around, since he has no understanding and no ability to do the same anymore.

And yet by an odd coincidence, Sandra is making another go at her marriage (after watching a self-help guru on PBS) and invites Stan along to the very same movie. This time, it seems to wash over Stan, leave an impression on him, as he starts to wonder the same thing. There’s a recurring motif of characters watching other shows and movies in this one, and to be honest, I’m not sure what to make of it, beyond this sense of reflections of our lives being thrust back at us and making us reconsider things.

That’s certainly the case with the Jennings old spy friends who are part of a joint mission. They’re a mirror image of the Jennings family, with a mother and father, son and daughter, each balancing family fun with the risks and rewards of espionage.

Initially, it’s downright cute. Elizabeth and her equivalent chat and relax and can relate to one another in a way that almost no one else can. When they talk about wanting to see each other’s kids and remarking on how much they’ve grown, it’s almost normal. And the way that they both show up to the same carnival, without explicitly acknowledging each other, so they can get a glimpse of one another’s families, is honestly kind of cute.

There’s a normalcy of life -- having friends who understand you and take and take an interest in you and your family -- that the Jennings can’t really have outside of these strange circumstances. And there’s a comfort to that, the idea that there’s other people like you out there, doing the same thing, and living well.

Until the Jennings get the biggest scare of the entire show, when Philip walks in on the mother, father, and daughter of that mirror image family gunned down in cold blood. It’s a stark reminder of the risks of involving the kids in these missions, even to the slightest degree. It’s a frightening harbinger for the collateral damage that could befall the two people Philip and Elizabeth love most from their spy activities. And it’s their greatest fear realized in another’s life, which understandably shakes both of them to the core.

The Americans plays that moment without much subtlety, letting the fear seap in and ooze out of every frame. The panic when Elizabeth and Philip go frantically searching for their kids at the carnival doesn't pass the smell test in terms of plot -- The Americans isn’t cheesy enough to have one of the munchkins kidnapped as a plot-starter, and not dark enough to kill one of them off at this point -- but you still feel it because of how rattled the normally cool and collected Philip and Elizabeth are.

This is a life that the two of them chose. They know the risks and accept them every day. But their children did not, and the scary thing about their day-to-day is that it could do more than just leave Paige and Henry without a mom and dad; it could subject them to the same mortal threats that Philip and Elizabeth labor under at all times.

Things get complicated when your kids start to grow up. They become harder to please -- like Henry and his telescope. They become more curious, as Paige rifles through her mom’s suitcase looking for clues as to what her mom was really doing (and she gets an eyeful she did not want). And most of all, they become harder to protect.

Season 2 of The Americans seems poised to dig into that, to make Paige and Henry more than just some extra stakes in the missions that the Jennings pull, but as greater factors in their lives, that give Philip and Elizabeth their greatest joys and most earnest love, but also their greatest fears.