4x05 Clark's Place

[7.3/10] That is a weird ending and a pretty blunt song cue to go out on. There’s something to be said for the juxtaposition between Philip and Elizabeth having a passionate evening together while Martha washes down a valium with red wine and sees her coworkers surveilling her through her bedroom window.

There is something to be said for the idea that these spies -- whose daughter is overwhelmed by the truth of their lives, who are trying to fend off a priest who knows more about who they are then they’d like, whose major asset in the FBI is being smoked out by her colleagues, who have to repair their familial friendship with their nextdoor neighbor who also happens to be on Martha’s trail, to avoid that neighbor’s partner recognizing that Elizabeth is the woman he fought with last season -- are, well, under pressure.

There’s something to be said for the that fact that all of the Jennings save Henry, that Stan, that even Oleg and his father, are wrestling with “the terror of knowing what this world is about” as things that musn’t be said and feelings that can’t be quelled collide in moments of emotional frustration and exhaustion.

But man, I don’t know what to do with a pack of scenes that culminate in such graphic imagery and such an obvious needle drop. The Americans, for all its fireworks, is usually more subtle, and less indulgent than that.

Still, it at least shows our heroes, and villains, and the people who walk the line between them dealing with all of these things. The most affecting story is clearly Martha’s, who is slowly but surely finding herself deeper and deeper into Clark’s world with less and less to show for it. The reveal that she had a panic attack after the events of last week just makes her situation that much more tragic and pitiable. The fact that she’s ready to leave, ready to give it all up, only makes her fate seem even more star-crossed.

Let’s be frank. I cannot imagine how Martha makes it out of this season alive. The sharks are swimming too closely; she’s going through too much and is coming close to knowing too much, and who knows what she may have confided in her parents over the phone. Things end badly for characters like that in prestige dramas. That’s magnified by the fact that Philip, who’s already disillusioned with what he’s called on to do and have done in this line work, has grown to care about Martha to the point that Elizabeth notices it (and maybe that’s part of what precipitates her advances at the end of the episode). Martha can’t talk to anyone about what she’s going through -- she can barely talk to her “husband” -- and she’s starting to crack under the, say it with me now, pressure.

But perhaps so is Oleg. Let me be frank -- this was an Oleg-heavy episode, and that’s rarely something that makes The Americans better to me. But the other side of the coin is that you probably needed to devote some time to showing him coping and grieving her loss. It’s not a homerun, but his reaction works here. His brother is laid to rest but, to his father’s dismay, not with military honors because no one is allowed to talk about the war in Afghanistan. Nina dies fighting for the same cause, at least in Oleg’s mind, doing whatever was asked of her, and she’s still executed by the state.

When he returns to D.C., he returns like Philip, disillusioned by the indifference of the people calling the shots. As the Rezidentura, Arkady is sad at Nina’s death, but blames it on her for not hewing to the right path, something that visibly disgusts Oleg. He passes on the information to Stan, who’s devastated by the loss of the cause that kept him going, and both men seem frustrated at their governments that seem to put blame in the wrong places and don’t value the things they think are important.

At the same time, Paige is buckling under a related, but different form of stress. She too is consumed by the inner turmoil of knowing a terrible secret, and having no one trustworthy to confide in with it. She cannot fully trust her parents, because they’re the ones who lied to her in the first place. She cannot fully trust Pastor Tim, because he already shared her secret with his talkative wife. And she is caught between the fact that this thing inside her is too much to bear, but any way she might exercise it, any confidante she might seek solace in, would only deepen the risk to her parents whose genuine love for her she still believes in.

In her most pronounced way yet, Elizabeth is starting to have her doubts. While she, more than anyone, wanted to bring Paige into the fold as a counterweight to her newfound faith, she’s starting to recognize the pain and discomfort this heavy secret puts her daughter in. It’s not just freeing knowledge -- it’s responsibility, to know things you cannot say, to say things you don’t mean, with legitimate life and death stakes behind every word. That is a lot for anyone to bear, let alone a headstrong but still vulnerable teenager.

It’s a responsibility that her parents are used to, but being worn down by. Philip tries to assuage Martha’s anxieties, and gives her a number where she can reach him whenever she needs to. The Jennings try to reassure Pastor Tim, bringing in an El Salvadorian “priest” who offers a compelling story of the Jennings as devotees of the same cause that the pastor himself believes in. And Philip, at his wife’s behest, makes up with Stan, feeding him an apology and flattering hearsay from Sandra that puts him back in his neighbor’s good graces, under mostly false pretenses, in a way that his daughter can bring herself to do.

That’s the biggest contrast of “Clark’s Place.” It’s between the people who are brought into this world and start to crack under the -- once more with feeling -- pressure of all the hard and terrible things it requires them to do, and the people who have labored under those expectations and requirements for years, but are running out of excuses for why they still do it, and outlets that take away the pain, however briefly or musically.