[7.2/10] I have to admit, The Americans has been a little more impenetrable for me so far this season. I’m not going to claim I perfectly understood everything from Season 1. It’s a thematically rich show with well-drawn characters, which means there’s always more layers to feel back. But I felt like I had a better handle on what the show was trying to say with each episode, and maybe overall, in the first season than the second.
For example, the main story in this episode is reasonably straightforward. The eponymous Yousaf is the number two man in Pakistani intelligence. The KGB wants to recruit him and, since this is The Americans, it decides to try to use a honeypot to do it. But despite Elizabeth dipping her line in the water and getting a nibble, Philip wants to use Analise, the young wife of an undersecretary who said she was in love with him (whom we haven’t seen since very early in Season 1) instead.
The import of all this is reasonably clear. Analise isn’t ready or prepared to do this sort of thing. She makes inroads, but when having to sleep with Yousef, comes back feeling used and angry and miserable. That’s intercut with scenes of Elizabeth taking out Yousef’s boss in the swimming pool, a complicated procedure that requires finesse and talent, without breaking a sweat. The upshot is that one of these women was ready, able, and willing to do this job, and the other was wholly out of her depth.
Philip made an emotional decision rather than a pragmatic one, because he loves his wife and couldn’t stand the idea of her sleeping with this man. As a result, the mission goes poorly; Elizabeth seems miffed, and their new handler thinks it’s a bad idea as well. “Yousaf” goes for what’s been a recurring motif this season -- the Jennings speaking truth while trying to gird their lies -- as Philip tells Analise how hard it is to know that “the woman he loves” is having to give herself to another man. It shines a light on Philip’s motivations here, to keep Elizabeth from being intimate with yet another mark, and lets us in on his emotional state, where he’s struggling with the blurring of his personal and professional lives.
My only question is why? Why now? This season opened with Elizabeth and Liane sleeping with the patsy from Lockheed before Philip and Emmett burst in. It’s a tack he had to suspect she was going to take with Brad the navy boy (even if she ultimately begged off). You can come up with reasons for it -- the Jennings are more than just a couple in name only so maybe that’s what makes it different, maybe his disillusionment with the job is bleeding through -- but in the end it feels kind of arbitrary as to why this is happening when and how it is.
What doesn't feel arbitrary is the continuing escalation of the tension between Elizabeth and Paige. While things are uneasy between Philip and his daughter, the ice seems to melt a little here and their relationship seems to start to get back to normal. But after Elizabeth discovers that Paige has been practicing forging her signature, another chunk of the dam breaks. Elizabeth lays down another punishments, and forbids Paige from going to the religious camp she wants to spend the summer at.
It’s a good storyline, one that’s burned fairly slowly over the course of the seasons, that waxes and wanes as these things do, and feels true to the “you can’t tell me what to do” spirit of teenagerdom. Both women in the Jennings household have their rationales -- Elizabeth worried that her daughter is being naive, misleading, and will come back a “Jesus freak”, and Paige bristling at her parents’ efforts to thwart her in her efforts to become a better person. The friction there is earned and relatable, and I appreciate how it’s been threaded throughout Season 2 so far.
I’m less into Stan uncovering the trail that may expose Emmett and Liane as “illegals.” I do appreciate that Agent Gaad is getting his moment in the sun in this episode. He not only finds the secret compartment in Emmett’s briefcase that exposes him as not quite on the up-and-up, but he has a fun, subtext-filled exchange with Arkady that sees the pair of old pros trading innuendos and vague threats as Gaad gets to keep his job. If there’s one thing this season has managed to do, it’s make Gaad into an interesting character in his own right and not just a generic boss for Stan.
Stan is making inroads on the case though, meeting with Emmett and Liane’s son and trying to put the pieces together between their apparently motiveless slaying and the fact that they were vacationing right next to a major military-industrial confab. It’s mostly piece-moving, and hey, given that there’s four more seasons, I’m skeptical that Stan’s going to tighten the noose around the Directorate S program anytime soon, but there’s earned sentiment in his conversation with Emmett and Liane’s son, and extra meaning in his comments about everyone having secrets given his marital situation.
That just leaves Larek, who has returned from Nicaragua after the news of compatriots death at the training camp with a vendetta to take out the Jennings. This again feels like more piece-moving, and frankly a little flatter in terms of characterization than The Americans usually goes.
I like the idea that the show is putting someone who actually poses a challenge to the Jennings against them. The fact that he’s able to use his conman skills to track a phone number to the KGB’s switchboard operator, and uses that to find their handler and, presumably, locate the Jennings proves he’s as resourceful at this game as they are.
But right now he’s just such a non-entity. He’s a late-season Dexter villain, someone with the skills to match our protagonists but who doesn't seem to have life or existence or purpose outside of that. It makes those scenes where he advances on them perfunctory. Larek isn’t a person; he’s just a shark, and while Jaws is a great movie, nobody talks about how great the shark’s characterization was.
One of the great things about this show is how it humanizes both sides of the cold war, shows you people in the FBI and the KGB who are working against one another but who each have their understandable motivations and flaws. Larek is just a threat wrapped in a uniform, and that makes him less interesting that pretty much anyone else in this episode, despite his above-and-beyond competence at the spy game.
It makes me wonder what The Americans is doing. Why are we interspersing Philip’s sudden interest in keeping Elizabeth from honeypot missions with Larek circling in on the Jennings. Is there a connection between Elizabeth confronting Paige and Stan talking to Liane and Emmett’s son beyond the vague notion of parents and kids keeping secrets from one another. Is there a larger point or theme to “Yousef” -- the idea that making emotional decisions rather than practical ones endangers the Jennings right when a threat is popping up -- or are these just a bunch of different subplots stitched together?
I don’t know. And I didn’t always know in Season 1 either. But in an episode like this one, at this point in the season, The Americans feels more opaque than it used to, and I can’t decide whether it’s because the show is slowly but surely connecting the pieces of the puzzle, or if it’s just spinning out as it heads into this season’s end game.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2018-07-22T02:50:10Z
[7.2/10] I have to admit, The Americans has been a little more impenetrable for me so far this season. I’m not going to claim I perfectly understood everything from Season 1. It’s a thematically rich show with well-drawn characters, which means there’s always more layers to feel back. But I felt like I had a better handle on what the show was trying to say with each episode, and maybe overall, in the first season than the second.
For example, the main story in this episode is reasonably straightforward. The eponymous Yousaf is the number two man in Pakistani intelligence. The KGB wants to recruit him and, since this is The Americans, it decides to try to use a honeypot to do it. But despite Elizabeth dipping her line in the water and getting a nibble, Philip wants to use Analise, the young wife of an undersecretary who said she was in love with him (whom we haven’t seen since very early in Season 1) instead.
The import of all this is reasonably clear. Analise isn’t ready or prepared to do this sort of thing. She makes inroads, but when having to sleep with Yousef, comes back feeling used and angry and miserable. That’s intercut with scenes of Elizabeth taking out Yousef’s boss in the swimming pool, a complicated procedure that requires finesse and talent, without breaking a sweat. The upshot is that one of these women was ready, able, and willing to do this job, and the other was wholly out of her depth.
Philip made an emotional decision rather than a pragmatic one, because he loves his wife and couldn’t stand the idea of her sleeping with this man. As a result, the mission goes poorly; Elizabeth seems miffed, and their new handler thinks it’s a bad idea as well. “Yousaf” goes for what’s been a recurring motif this season -- the Jennings speaking truth while trying to gird their lies -- as Philip tells Analise how hard it is to know that “the woman he loves” is having to give herself to another man. It shines a light on Philip’s motivations here, to keep Elizabeth from being intimate with yet another mark, and lets us in on his emotional state, where he’s struggling with the blurring of his personal and professional lives.
My only question is why? Why now? This season opened with Elizabeth and Liane sleeping with the patsy from Lockheed before Philip and Emmett burst in. It’s a tack he had to suspect she was going to take with Brad the navy boy (even if she ultimately begged off). You can come up with reasons for it -- the Jennings are more than just a couple in name only so maybe that’s what makes it different, maybe his disillusionment with the job is bleeding through -- but in the end it feels kind of arbitrary as to why this is happening when and how it is.
What doesn't feel arbitrary is the continuing escalation of the tension between Elizabeth and Paige. While things are uneasy between Philip and his daughter, the ice seems to melt a little here and their relationship seems to start to get back to normal. But after Elizabeth discovers that Paige has been practicing forging her signature, another chunk of the dam breaks. Elizabeth lays down another punishments, and forbids Paige from going to the religious camp she wants to spend the summer at.
It’s a good storyline, one that’s burned fairly slowly over the course of the seasons, that waxes and wanes as these things do, and feels true to the “you can’t tell me what to do” spirit of teenagerdom. Both women in the Jennings household have their rationales -- Elizabeth worried that her daughter is being naive, misleading, and will come back a “Jesus freak”, and Paige bristling at her parents’ efforts to thwart her in her efforts to become a better person. The friction there is earned and relatable, and I appreciate how it’s been threaded throughout Season 2 so far.
I’m less into Stan uncovering the trail that may expose Emmett and Liane as “illegals.” I do appreciate that Agent Gaad is getting his moment in the sun in this episode. He not only finds the secret compartment in Emmett’s briefcase that exposes him as not quite on the up-and-up, but he has a fun, subtext-filled exchange with Arkady that sees the pair of old pros trading innuendos and vague threats as Gaad gets to keep his job. If there’s one thing this season has managed to do, it’s make Gaad into an interesting character in his own right and not just a generic boss for Stan.
Stan is making inroads on the case though, meeting with Emmett and Liane’s son and trying to put the pieces together between their apparently motiveless slaying and the fact that they were vacationing right next to a major military-industrial confab. It’s mostly piece-moving, and hey, given that there’s four more seasons, I’m skeptical that Stan’s going to tighten the noose around the Directorate S program anytime soon, but there’s earned sentiment in his conversation with Emmett and Liane’s son, and extra meaning in his comments about everyone having secrets given his marital situation.
That just leaves Larek, who has returned from Nicaragua after the news of compatriots death at the training camp with a vendetta to take out the Jennings. This again feels like more piece-moving, and frankly a little flatter in terms of characterization than The Americans usually goes.
I like the idea that the show is putting someone who actually poses a challenge to the Jennings against them. The fact that he’s able to use his conman skills to track a phone number to the KGB’s switchboard operator, and uses that to find their handler and, presumably, locate the Jennings proves he’s as resourceful at this game as they are.
But right now he’s just such a non-entity. He’s a late-season Dexter villain, someone with the skills to match our protagonists but who doesn't seem to have life or existence or purpose outside of that. It makes those scenes where he advances on them perfunctory. Larek isn’t a person; he’s just a shark, and while Jaws is a great movie, nobody talks about how great the shark’s characterization was.
One of the great things about this show is how it humanizes both sides of the cold war, shows you people in the FBI and the KGB who are working against one another but who each have their understandable motivations and flaws. Larek is just a threat wrapped in a uniform, and that makes him less interesting that pretty much anyone else in this episode, despite his above-and-beyond competence at the spy game.
It makes me wonder what The Americans is doing. Why are we interspersing Philip’s sudden interest in keeping Elizabeth from honeypot missions with Larek circling in on the Jennings. Is there a connection between Elizabeth confronting Paige and Stan talking to Liane and Emmett’s son beyond the vague notion of parents and kids keeping secrets from one another. Is there a larger point or theme to “Yousef” -- the idea that making emotional decisions rather than practical ones endangers the Jennings right when a threat is popping up -- or are these just a bunch of different subplots stitched together?
I don’t know. And I didn’t always know in Season 1 either. But in an episode like this one, at this point in the season, The Americans feels more opaque than it used to, and I can’t decide whether it’s because the show is slowly but surely connecting the pieces of the puzzle, or if it’s just spinning out as it heads into this season’s end game.