5x09 IHOP

[7.4/10] Let’s talk straight out about the best and, I would argue, most important scene in this episode -- Gabriel visiting Martha. The visit is, or at least meant to be, a good deed on the part of Gabriel. He wants to make sure that Martha is OK, to see that the Centre is looking after her, to reassure her that Clark still cares and thinks about her.

But the subtext is that Gabriel is stress-testing his own disillusionment. For somebody who’s been in the game as long as he has, he is starting to doubt the wisdom of his own handlers, of the people calling the shots. Checking up on Martha is a strange way of checking on whether the Centre keeps its promises -- how it rewards the people who have basically sacrificed their lives as they knew them and give the Soviet Union and its operatives incredibly valuable information.

The answer is that Martha lives in what looks like a dingy apartment, making what looks like unappetizing food, in a life where she has no friends and barely speaks the language and has pieced together how she was used. She isn’t bitter exactly; Martha is too strong and realistic for that, but she is hurt and angry despite her cold stoicism, something that Alison Wright plays incredibly well. And the implication is that it comes through to Gabriel, that he is beginning to feel, in ways he didn’t before, how the Centre uses people rather than rewards them.

It’s a minor Rosetta Stone for this episode and this season and maybe even the whole show, about the gradual realization that the people who have directed your life don’t really care about you, and may have even been giving you false promises this entire time. The cold open, and bedside conversation between Philip and Elizabeth strongly suggests that the glanders sample they took from William’s corpse was used in the War in Afghanistan to kill members of the Mujahideen, that it wasn’t just for defensive/preventative purposes like they were told.

Philip is aghast by this, and it’s just another plank in his bitter, growing disillusionment with his mother country and the people who run it and run him. Elizabeth is, true to character, more equivocal, stating that the two aren’t necessarily connected, even as Philip declares it a massive coincidence” if that’s the case. What’s interesting is that even as both Philip and Elizabeth find themselves less sure and okay with what they do, even as they almost silently take divergent views about Paige, Elizabeth still believes in their cause and their people in a way that Philip seemingly doesn't and hasn’t in a long time.

There’s good reason for that. This is an Oleg-heavy episode, which is never my cup of tea on The Americans, but his portion of the show in Moscow have allowed us to get a better view of what the alternative to the Jennings’ life looks like, of how the society and the government and the day-to-day existence of the people in that country work or don’t work. The misadventures of the Rezidentura in the first few seasons gave us the chance to see the counterpart to the FBI in action around the same events, to get the tension and contrast for how two sides in a conflict work against one another.

But Oleg’s turn in Moscow gives a glimpse beyond just the intelligence services; it gives us the differences between American life and Russian life, between American society and Russian society, for everyone involved, tangentially or directly, in this world. The sharpest moment of this comes when the Baza explains that the people he work for are more powerful than the ministers, and more powerful than the parties. It’s the sense that there are the elite who don’t mind the system being broken so long as it keeps working for them. There’s a deeper disillusionment, not just with the KGB, but with the forces it does the bidding of, brewing on The Americans, and it’s a fault line between the show’s two main characters that is becoming more and more pressing the further the series goes on.

Just as the Centre can still use Elizabeth’s devotion to her country to keep her working on what and how they tell her too, Agent Wolfe knows how what moves Stan and uses it to try to get the Oleg situation to break in the CIA’s favor. In short, he uses Gaad, and the desire to do right by him and get revenge on the people who killed him, to motivate Stan to give up his crusade.

It pushes the right buttons for Agent Beeman, who can only be motivated to back off his stand for a decent guy who did right by our country (at least in his view), to take one for an even more decent guy who aimed to do even righter by our country. It’s an interesting moral dilemma to put Stan in given how it sets his loyalties against one another, and I particularly like the conversation with Gaad’s wife, where you can see Stan trying to assuage his own soul with the idea that it’s not what Gaad would have wanted, only to come up woefully short.

That just leaves the excitement with the Jennings’ real son and their fake son. The more interesting part to me is Henry, who after years of fading into the background, has decided he wants to go to a fancy boarding school. It’s a really intriguing development, both because it ties into the themes of elitism that are at the core of this episode, but also because it shows Henry having adopted a different set of values and goals and wants while under the benign neglect of his parents.

In an early scene, Philip talks to Kimmi about wanting to do right by his kids, not make the same mistakes, and he currently has one who’s emotionally torn up by what her parents do and her complicity in it, and another who’s set to embark on something that runs contrary to his parents’ values and which, even worse, they knew nothing about. I’m glad to see the show finally pulling the trigger on something with Henry, given how superfluous the Jennings’ youngest child has been otherwise, but I especially like how it exposes and has consequences for how forgotten he’s been.

I’ll admit, I’m less enamored with the Tuan storyline, but it gives the Jennings something spy-y to do in an episode that is otherwise much bigger on talk and introspection. His disappearance is legitimately worrying, and their confrontation with them at the end feels tense and dangerous. The idea that for all his talk of disdain, Tuan still cares for the family who took him in when he was in Seattle is an interesting one worth developing, particularly in the context of whether the Centre understands the whole of who their agents are and what they accomplish or just hunts for screw-ups and reasons to be suspicious. (See also: Oleg’s interrogation in the episode.) But it’s all a little tangential to the bigger things going on in this episode, even as the show has to set things up for the future.

It’s a future where Gabriel is gone and no replacement is forthcoming, where Philip in particular has lost his faith in his people and homeland and worries about the consequences of his choices on his children, and where Elizabeth is still keeping the flame alive. This has been a slow season, to be sure, but it’s setting up (or at least seeming to) a strong conflict between its two main characters, rooted both in their different personal views, but also colored by whether they believe the people in charge have lived up to their promises.