[7.7/10] We learned last season, in a recounting from Gregory, that Elizabeth had concerns about becoming a mother. “The Walk In” reinforces that , with a flashback to her and Lianne, sitting in a park and talking about her reluctance. And yet the show has played somewhat coy with the “why” of it. The natural explanation, given Elizabeth’s general inclinations, would be to think that she’s worried about kids compromising her ability to be devoted to the mission, that it creates an added liability that would make it harder for her to do her job as a spy.
That’s what she sees in another person in “The Walk In”. We get a genuine mission of the week here, with Philip and Elizabeth being tasked by the Centre with infiltrating some kind of U.S. government plant whose big move gives them the chance to sneak some technical info about the literal American war machines.
But in the process, Elizabeth is intercepted by a janitor, who clearly understands that she is not who she claims to be, and far more dangerous than she lets on, but also too intimidated to say it out loud. Elizabeth mirrors this, holding a crowbar but never outright threatening him with it. It’s a beautifully constructed scene, one where two people have completely made each other, and know what’s going on, but play their parts and signal one another without ever putting the implications of their acts and gestures into words.
The janitor implicitly seeks mercy from Elizabeth, showing him pictures of his kids out of his wallet and telling her that his family’s expecting him home for supper -- a message both that people would notice him going missing, and that she’d be taking a father away from his children if she followed through on her intimated threats.
And Elizabeth turns the same table on him. When she and Philip glean the info they need, the prudent (in spy terms) thing to do would be to take out the Janitor, leaving no witnesses or anyone who might later roll on them like Viola did when her concerns for her child were outweighed by her sense of moral guilt. Instead, Elizabeth takes a picture of one of the janitor’s children, a tacit warning that if he tells anyone what he saw, there will be consequence for the ones he loves most. Those children are what save the janitor, but also what make him vulnerable to Elizabeth’s strong-arming.
That’s the double-edged sword of those types of connections. The people you care about can provide a life raft or a boost in the middle of difficult times, but that very openness also means that they have power over you, a power that they, or someone else, can take advantage of.
That’s certainly the case for Stan. He gets his biggest triumph as an agent since he flipped Nina in this episode. His detective work on the eponymous disgruntled government employee who offered himself to the Rezidentura pays off, thanks to Nina’s tip that allowed him to narrow his target. Stan puts together that employee calling in sick, his faux laundry routine, and the mention of a big meeting in town to track the guy down to the roof of a laundromat, where he’s about to snipe some leaders of the World Bank.
Stan tries to talk him down, listens to his rant about coming home from Vietnam and deciding who the “real enemy” was, and when things get hairy, ends up shooting the guy before he can do any damage. It raises Stan’s already high standing in the Bureau, with him possibly in line for a medal, but more importantly for our purposes, it leaves him indebted and drawn closer to Nina.
At a time when his wife, Sandra, sighs in frustration at Stan’s inability to understand her self-help seminar, Nina is feeding him intel that makes him the toast of the FBI. She tells him she loves him, and he says it back, the goal Nina said she’d meant to achieve in one of her reports.
It’s then revealed that it was all a feint. While the show has played things a little close to the vest about how much Nina was truly in one camp versus another, here it’s revealed that the info she passed along was specifically intended to give Stan a boost that he would associate with ehr, that would make him trust her and grateful to her, and thereby bring him further into her web. Love, affection, connection in this episode is what ostensibly gives Stan his triumph, but it’s also what makes him susceptible to Nina, and by extension the KGB’s grand plans for him.
Paige has some grand plans of her own in “The Walk In.” With mom and dad going out late (ostensibly for work reasons), Paige takes the temporary parental absence as a chance to go investigate what the real deal is with this mysterious Great Aunt she’s never met is.
It’s a nice storyline in the episode. It has the tension that comes from the fact that the audience can worry both about whether Paige may blow her parents’ cover or at least discover it, and that we don’t know what’s really at the end of her journey here. Is the “Great Aunt” just a safe house, or dead end, or something more sinister that would put Paige at risk? It’s another great instance of the show using what the audience knows and what it doesn't know to make things suspenseful.
It’s also a nice opportunity explore Paige a little better. There’s something relatable to her finding a kindred spirit on the bus, who’s being shipped back and forth between divorced parents. There’s something very organic about her trying to unravel this mystery, and only finding an old woman suffering from dementia, even if it’s a ruse.
And there’s something very true to life, albeit dramatized in a typically outsized fashion, about a teenager testing her boundaries and resisting her parents’ attempts to reel her in. The talking-to Paige receives from Philip makes for an outstanding scene. Again, there’s layers to their conversation, in the way that it feels so true to life in those uncomfortable “you done bad” parental exchanges, that sees Philip, the typically “fun parent,” laying down the law in a way we haven’t really seen before, and sees Paige buffer him, out of a combination of standard teenage rebellion and her well-founded suspicion of and frustration with the fact that her parents are keeping something from her.
But it also evokes a certain sense of fear in Philip. He’s not just reading Paige the riot act because he doesn't want to be found out. The implication is, especially after recent events, the Jennings are leary of what risks letting their kids into the other half of the lives would expose Paige and Henry to, but there’s only so much you can do to keep a young adult corralled and obedient, even if, unbeknownst to them, their safety is on the line.
In the final measure, that seems to be the fear that motivated Elizabeth back in 1966 and that motivates her now. Theirs is a dangerous business, that puts them in the crosshairs of an increasingly dangerous conflict in an increasingly dangerous world. It also isolates them, meaning that especially with Emmett and Lianne gone, they have no one to turn to, no one to personally trust, if something were to happen to them.
So Elizabeth struggles with whether to deliver the letter that Liane wanted given to her children in the event of her demise, whether it’s better for the son of a spy to know why his family was brutally murdered and who they really were, or whether it’s better to live in less complicated, if not exactly blissful ignorance.
The show overdoes it at the end, with a montage set to a Peter Gabriel power ballad that prevented me from being able to take any of the emotional or meaningful stuff The Americans was trying to dole out seriously as the cheesy riffs rolled in, and Henry struggled to get his constellation wheel to work without his dad’s assistance and Elizabeth burns Liane’s letter in a heavy-handed “hooray for metaphors” assault on the senses.
But I like the idea the show is playing with here. Elizabeth isn’t worried about her kids compromising the mission; she’s worried about the mission compromising her kids. She’s afraid of what it means for a child to have their parent taken away when they’re young -- something that she had to deal with, something that Philip tells Paige he had to deal with, and something she doesn't want even the children of a stranger in her way to have to deal with.
Paige and Henry complicate things for the Jennings. They mean a hard-to-wrangle teenage snooper who is as nascently resourceful at figuring things out as her parents. The mean an extra pair of lives at risk anytime something goes wrong. And worst of all, they mean the ever-present fear of what it would be like for those kids to spend the rest of their childhoods without their mom and dad, in the midst of that dangerous world, a prospect that haunts Elizabeth as she sees the dark reflection of a dear friend and her family once more.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2018-07-17T22:17:28Z
[7.7/10] We learned last season, in a recounting from Gregory, that Elizabeth had concerns about becoming a mother. “The Walk In” reinforces that , with a flashback to her and Lianne, sitting in a park and talking about her reluctance. And yet the show has played somewhat coy with the “why” of it. The natural explanation, given Elizabeth’s general inclinations, would be to think that she’s worried about kids compromising her ability to be devoted to the mission, that it creates an added liability that would make it harder for her to do her job as a spy.
That’s what she sees in another person in “The Walk In”. We get a genuine mission of the week here, with Philip and Elizabeth being tasked by the Centre with infiltrating some kind of U.S. government plant whose big move gives them the chance to sneak some technical info about the literal American war machines.
But in the process, Elizabeth is intercepted by a janitor, who clearly understands that she is not who she claims to be, and far more dangerous than she lets on, but also too intimidated to say it out loud. Elizabeth mirrors this, holding a crowbar but never outright threatening him with it. It’s a beautifully constructed scene, one where two people have completely made each other, and know what’s going on, but play their parts and signal one another without ever putting the implications of their acts and gestures into words.
The janitor implicitly seeks mercy from Elizabeth, showing him pictures of his kids out of his wallet and telling her that his family’s expecting him home for supper -- a message both that people would notice him going missing, and that she’d be taking a father away from his children if she followed through on her intimated threats.
And Elizabeth turns the same table on him. When she and Philip glean the info they need, the prudent (in spy terms) thing to do would be to take out the Janitor, leaving no witnesses or anyone who might later roll on them like Viola did when her concerns for her child were outweighed by her sense of moral guilt. Instead, Elizabeth takes a picture of one of the janitor’s children, a tacit warning that if he tells anyone what he saw, there will be consequence for the ones he loves most. Those children are what save the janitor, but also what make him vulnerable to Elizabeth’s strong-arming.
That’s the double-edged sword of those types of connections. The people you care about can provide a life raft or a boost in the middle of difficult times, but that very openness also means that they have power over you, a power that they, or someone else, can take advantage of.
That’s certainly the case for Stan. He gets his biggest triumph as an agent since he flipped Nina in this episode. His detective work on the eponymous disgruntled government employee who offered himself to the Rezidentura pays off, thanks to Nina’s tip that allowed him to narrow his target. Stan puts together that employee calling in sick, his faux laundry routine, and the mention of a big meeting in town to track the guy down to the roof of a laundromat, where he’s about to snipe some leaders of the World Bank.
Stan tries to talk him down, listens to his rant about coming home from Vietnam and deciding who the “real enemy” was, and when things get hairy, ends up shooting the guy before he can do any damage. It raises Stan’s already high standing in the Bureau, with him possibly in line for a medal, but more importantly for our purposes, it leaves him indebted and drawn closer to Nina.
At a time when his wife, Sandra, sighs in frustration at Stan’s inability to understand her self-help seminar, Nina is feeding him intel that makes him the toast of the FBI. She tells him she loves him, and he says it back, the goal Nina said she’d meant to achieve in one of her reports.
It’s then revealed that it was all a feint. While the show has played things a little close to the vest about how much Nina was truly in one camp versus another, here it’s revealed that the info she passed along was specifically intended to give Stan a boost that he would associate with ehr, that would make him trust her and grateful to her, and thereby bring him further into her web. Love, affection, connection in this episode is what ostensibly gives Stan his triumph, but it’s also what makes him susceptible to Nina, and by extension the KGB’s grand plans for him.
Paige has some grand plans of her own in “The Walk In.” With mom and dad going out late (ostensibly for work reasons), Paige takes the temporary parental absence as a chance to go investigate what the real deal is with this mysterious Great Aunt she’s never met is.
It’s a nice storyline in the episode. It has the tension that comes from the fact that the audience can worry both about whether Paige may blow her parents’ cover or at least discover it, and that we don’t know what’s really at the end of her journey here. Is the “Great Aunt” just a safe house, or dead end, or something more sinister that would put Paige at risk? It’s another great instance of the show using what the audience knows and what it doesn't know to make things suspenseful.
It’s also a nice opportunity explore Paige a little better. There’s something relatable to her finding a kindred spirit on the bus, who’s being shipped back and forth between divorced parents. There’s something very organic about her trying to unravel this mystery, and only finding an old woman suffering from dementia, even if it’s a ruse.
And there’s something very true to life, albeit dramatized in a typically outsized fashion, about a teenager testing her boundaries and resisting her parents’ attempts to reel her in. The talking-to Paige receives from Philip makes for an outstanding scene. Again, there’s layers to their conversation, in the way that it feels so true to life in those uncomfortable “you done bad” parental exchanges, that sees Philip, the typically “fun parent,” laying down the law in a way we haven’t really seen before, and sees Paige buffer him, out of a combination of standard teenage rebellion and her well-founded suspicion of and frustration with the fact that her parents are keeping something from her.
But it also evokes a certain sense of fear in Philip. He’s not just reading Paige the riot act because he doesn't want to be found out. The implication is, especially after recent events, the Jennings are leary of what risks letting their kids into the other half of the lives would expose Paige and Henry to, but there’s only so much you can do to keep a young adult corralled and obedient, even if, unbeknownst to them, their safety is on the line.
In the final measure, that seems to be the fear that motivated Elizabeth back in 1966 and that motivates her now. Theirs is a dangerous business, that puts them in the crosshairs of an increasingly dangerous conflict in an increasingly dangerous world. It also isolates them, meaning that especially with Emmett and Lianne gone, they have no one to turn to, no one to personally trust, if something were to happen to them.
So Elizabeth struggles with whether to deliver the letter that Liane wanted given to her children in the event of her demise, whether it’s better for the son of a spy to know why his family was brutally murdered and who they really were, or whether it’s better to live in less complicated, if not exactly blissful ignorance.
The show overdoes it at the end, with a montage set to a Peter Gabriel power ballad that prevented me from being able to take any of the emotional or meaningful stuff The Americans was trying to dole out seriously as the cheesy riffs rolled in, and Henry struggled to get his constellation wheel to work without his dad’s assistance and Elizabeth burns Liane’s letter in a heavy-handed “hooray for metaphors” assault on the senses.
But I like the idea the show is playing with here. Elizabeth isn’t worried about her kids compromising the mission; she’s worried about the mission compromising her kids. She’s afraid of what it means for a child to have their parent taken away when they’re young -- something that she had to deal with, something that Philip tells Paige he had to deal with, and something she doesn't want even the children of a stranger in her way to have to deal with.
Paige and Henry complicate things for the Jennings. They mean a hard-to-wrangle teenage snooper who is as nascently resourceful at figuring things out as her parents. The mean an extra pair of lives at risk anytime something goes wrong. And worst of all, they mean the ever-present fear of what it would be like for those kids to spend the rest of their childhoods without their mom and dad, in the midst of that dangerous world, a prospect that haunts Elizabeth as she sees the dark reflection of a dear friend and her family once more.