4x01 Glanders

[8.0/10] I complained a little in my last write-up about the season 3 finale feeling like an interstitial rather than any sort of grand conclusion. But in a way, that works for someone who’s binge watching (or self-syndicating, to use my preferred parlance). If I was watching this show live, and had to wait months and months for my next fix of The Americans, then I might feel more cheated by the end to season 3. But being able to pick up immediately with season 4, the fact that the last episode comes off like a mid-season finale at best doesn't register nearly as much.

We pick up on Philip once again having concerns, feeling disillusioned in his purpose and, most notably, flashing back to the first time he killed. I’ll be frank -- I don’t know how I feel about that flashback. It seems a bit too on the nose about the toll all this killing has taken on him for something that Philip’s never mentioned before. But that’s also one of the themes of the episode, how Philip has no one to talk to about his doubts and about his pain, and how that only allows things to fester.

We see him searching for solace in unusual, marriage-threatening places. He mentions it, obliquely, in his EST meeting, though demurs on some less-than-savory details. He talks about this type of upfront honesty with Sandra, and how he can never bring it up with Elizabeth. True to that fear, when Elizabeth asks him if he’s ok, he brushes it off. And last but not least, he actually starts to bring it up, again obliquely, with Martha, finding comfort in his fake (or seemingly fake) relationship, that he cannot get in his real one.

Speaking of Martha, I hope to god that Alison Wright got an Emmy for this episode. Her reaction to Philip’s confession that he killed Gene the computer guy to protect her is utterly heartbreaking. There is such guilt, such revulsion in it, and in a show that depicts any number of harsh and painful reactions to death and killing, hers immmediately stands out as the most real and piercing. Here is a woman who, as my wife put it, represents the frog who’s slowly boiled to death. She means so well, loves so honestly, shows such loyalty, and it’s all in service of a lie meant to bring her down to such dark things.

But it also impacts Philip. That revulsion that she feels isn’t just at the act of killing, or the fact that she was involved in it -- it’s the fact that he did it. She responds to him like a leper, like a monster, and it adds to his already prodigious sense of self-loathing. Philip is tired of killing, tired of this life. The Americans has been planting the seeds of that for a long time. We’ll have to see whether this is the year when the show finally harvests them.

We do, on the other hand, have a new season-length plot arc in the offing, in the form of some biological weapons. Gabriel suggests that there’s a member of Directorate S who’s been working on them in the United States, and who has been here even longer than the Jennings have. After a few false starts and near misses, the Jennings make contact with him, and it turns out to be Dylan Baker(!), a great actor whose sarcastic wit is already a boon to the show in the three minutes of dialogue he gets in the episode.

But there’s two other implications to the bio-weapon threat in “Glanders”. The first is the reveal that Tatiana, Oleg’s colleague at the Rezidentura, is working in that program. Arkady is none too pleased about this, especially when it gives her a certain amount of authority to go over her head. It’s more of a suggestion than an actual conflict at this point, but it portends interesting things.

The second is Stan physically threatening Philip while Philip has the deadly biological agent in his breast pocket. Stan is, out of nowhere, sleeping with the woman he met at EST early last season. She spies Philip and Sandra having dinner together, which sends Stan into a jealous, accusatory rage that nearly gets everyone killed. The presence of that vial is a good way to heighten the tension of a standard jealous ex routine, and between Stan’s seeming professional suspicions of Martha, his sudden personal suspicions of Philip, and last season’s green light from the DAG to color outside the lines, he seems poised to be a greater thorn in the Jennings’ side than usual.

“Glanders” also picks up where it left things with Paige last season. She is still asking questions of her parents, trying to better understand what it is that they do and where they go, but hasn’t spilled the beans to anyone else besides Pastor Tim. I’m increasingly suspicious of the Pastor as some kind of spook or agent, given his prodding of Paige to get her parents to come in for a counseling session over the secret, or to at least have her continue asking more questions and relay them to him. But whether that’s a solid guess on my part or a wild bit of grasping at straws, Elizabeth has bugged the church and is listening in, so that seems to be coming to a head sooner rather than later.

Last but not least, the season premiere touches on Nina and Anton. After all the rigamarole last season, Anton’s prototype stealth bomber wing passes the requisite tests. Nina suggests to the former Rezidentura that she’s had more success with friendship and mentorship than seduction. But she has a demand -- to see her husband, possible spurred by Anton’s speech about what a crappy husband she was. It is, once again, more an introduction than the full start of a story, but it has intrigue, if only because I had half-assumed that Nina’s story of marriage last season was a ruse to gain her cellmate’s trust.

But if there’s a consistent thread in “Glanders”, it’s people finding solace in unusual places, whether it’s Philip confiding in Martha, or Paige having to trust her pastor with a bizarre secret, or Nina seeming to find genuine solace in what was supposed to be a mercenary relationship. The season premiere of The Americans has more seed-planting than development outside of Philip, but the seeds are engaging enough to make me want to see what grows out of them.