5x11 Dyatkovo

[9.1/10] It’s been a while since we’ve had a single-serving mission on The Americans. The show has, understandably, given itself over to more long-term arcs built around long-term operations. But this episode cements why I like those sorts of missions so much. They give the show a chance to tell smaller individual stories that, while only tangentially connecting to the Jennings’ larger world, help them, and us, reflect on where they are and what it means to them.

“Dyatkovo”’s is a doozy. Philip and Elizabeth are tasked with finding a woman in Boston who may be or may not be a Russian expat who collaborated with the Nazis to shoot Russian citizens and soldiers during World War II. That mission brings the issues the Jennings have both been having to the fore. It’s been fifty years since the offending events took place, and there’s only one old photo to go on. That makes Philip in particular nervous about possibly having to snuff out another innocent life, especially after what happened with the lab tech earlier this season.

The Centre still orders it though, so the Jennings sneak into the woman’s house at night and interrogate her at gunpoint. She seems, from the first moment, to be a case of mistaken identity. She is a kindly, scared, uncomprehending old lady. She is fully mentally sound, but pleads ignorance of what they accuse her of. She panics and cries and tells them that they have the wrong person. It’s hard to watch, especially when hard-nose Elizabeth roughs her up a little and lays those deaths at her feet. It seems like Philio’s worst fears are coming true, that this is someone who has no idea what they’re talking about but who will have to die because the KGB ordered it.

But the first turn in the story comes when they tell her that they’ll kill her husband, when his life is in danger. Suddenly, her story changes; she confesses to everything, but it has the ring of someone who will say anything to protect the person she loves. She can’t answer about major details from the past in a way that suggests she’s going along with whatever the Jennings say to keep her husband alive. It makes the situation seem worse, as though someone who is not only innocent, but noble, is going to have to pay for crimes she didn’t even commit. It has the potential to wreck Philip, who’s already been devastated and struggling with the deeds he’s carried out in his role as a spook.

The rest of the episode doesn't really compare to that conflict. It’s not as though anything else that happens is bad. Stan and Aderholt’s new informant is proving useful. Henry takes a tour of the FBI that leaves him wowed and the Jennings’ mildly concerned. And Oleg’s investigation into the food bribery situation in Russia continues apace. These are all more incremental developments that are perfectly solid, but just can’t match the intensity or poignance of the Anna Prokupchik/Natalie Granholm story.

The most notable things that happen outside of that set piece all connect to it thematically in some way. Philip tells Henry that if he can get in, he can go to that boarding school, even if the flashbacks to his own modest childhood make him feel conflicted about it. It’s a strange divergence between him and Elizabeth and Henry and Paige, where one of their children, at the behest of mom, is being indoctrinated into the Russian spy way of life, and the other, with the permission of dad, is being allowed to go somewhere where he’s likely to be assimilated into the halls of the American elite that the Jennings are fighting against.

And yet, Henry’s journey seems to be inadvertently revealing of Stan who, when debriefing his young neighbor, admits that being in the agency is hard. Stan confesses that it means that he can’t trust anyone, not Henry, not his wife, not even his son. It’s a suggestion of an equal and opposite rot at the core of this kind of work, regardless of which side is doing it, which is getting to both Stan and Philip.

That comes to a head when Natalie Granholm’s husband comes home and finds her held at gunpoint. In that moment, everything comes spilling out. Natalie confesses that she is, in fact, Anna, but hers is not the story of a monster or a traitor; it’s the story of a victim. She describes how the Nazis killed her parents and forced her to bury them. She describes how young and frightened she was. She talks about how they made her drink until she was barely able to stand or see straight. Yes, she killed those people, but she was the tool of a greater, more malevolent force.

It is everything that Philip understands and fears. Here’s someone taken in by terrible people when she was too young to know better or fight back and made to do awful things. Here is a man told to kill her for these youthful deeds prompted against her will because it’s an “unjust horror” at the same time Claudia tells him the Russians did use the Lassa virus the Jennings extracted on enemies in Afghanistan. Here is someone who has since tried to be a good person, to be a spouse and a parent, and just wants to put all of that terrible terrible shit behind them.

Here is the most heartbreaking part. Natalie begs the Jennings not to tell her husband, not to let him know what they’re accusing of because “he thinks I’m wonderful.” She is not worried about her own life. She is worried about the life she had for forty years with someone she loved being tainted. And when she confesses these things, her deepest darkest secrets, that have come back to threaten her life even now, her husband's feelings for her don’t change one iota. He tells her that whatever happened in the past, he knows who she really is. Instead of reproach or disgust, he gives her understanding.

And he gets a bullet in the head for it, and soon thereafter, so does she. As strongly-written and moving a show as The Americans is, that is the first moment in the series that made me tear up. There’s is something unimaginably tragic about every piece of this. Here is a woman who tried so hard to outrun her demons, who pleads that she has become a mother and a grandmother, not the monster they accuse her of being, whose cries fall on deaf ears. Here is a man who loves regardless of the thing she most wants to forget, who is slayed by her side.

Here is a man who dreams of doing the same thing, of running away from all of this, of being able to move past it and change and enjoy the sort of life that Natalie has, and yet is the living breathing confirmation that it’s outside his grasp, never to be fully escaped. And here is a woman who sees her husband struggling with what he knows he has to do and the emotional turmoil he knows it will subject him to, and so jumps in to do the grisly deed, in a way that is both a kind means of sparing him but also the show’s most visceral reminder that what Philip and Elizabeth do is not just, no matter what they tell or have told themselves.

The sullen, angry silence that falls over Philip in the rest of the episode says that he feels that tragedy as much as the audience does. He has been cracking for a long time, and Elizabeth recognizes it to the point that she says, with the great weight of a series’s worth of strain, that they should run away from this and go home. Whatever her convictions, she sees what this life is doing to the person she loves, to her, and maybe to a husband and wife who, under different circumstances, could be them.

But this situation, Gaad’s death, Oleg’s Directorate K troubles, tells us that there’s no home to run to. The woman at the center of the bribery ring tells us there’s no refuge on the other side, just a society built on corruption too ingrained to excise. No matter how understandable your deeds, how pure your love, how true your life, this line of work, this business, will chew you up and spit you out, until all you can do is stare and reflect on what it’s taken from you, that you might never recover.