6x05 The Great Patriotic War

[9.4/10] Good stories are founded on choices. Philip and Elizabeth make some doozies in this one. After episode after episode that felt like throat-clearing and setup, The Americans is finally making good on seasons of build to reach this level of payoff. It’s gripping and harrowing in equal measure, and makes this one of the best outings the show has had in a while.

The biggest involves Philip and Kimmy and, by extension, Elizabeth. There’s an interesting web of motivations here. When the Jenningses sleep together for “the first time in a while” if their morning after banter is any indication, it feels like a bit of detente between them. There’s been this wall of isolation separating them, and the simple act of intimacy and closeness seems to do wonders for reminding the two of them how close they can and have been. It’s a hope spot, something to suggest that for however distant they’ve been from one another, there’s something that draws them back to one another for solace and understanding that cuts through the crap that’s been pulling them apart since we saw them at the end of season 5.

And yet in the aftermath, there’s something that feels a little mercenary about it. Maybe Elizabeth really needed that solace and intimacy. Or maybe, in view of the importance of her mission, she was softening Philip up before she asked him for a favor -- to get back in the game. She tells him that she hasn’t asked him for anything in the time that he’s been out, but now he needs him to go to Europe, get Kimmy to Bulgaria so she can be arrested for drug possession, so that Elizabeth can use that to blackmail her dad into spilling the beans on the CIA’s informant inside the Kremlin.

Honestly, the first time I heard the scheme, it sounded like Elizabeth was pressing, like there’d be too many complications and red flags for it to work even if all went well. That could be a sign that Elizabeth, who’s seemed desperate and even reckless lately, is taking more chances than she normally would given what’s at stake. But Philip’s objection is moral, not practical. Sure, he questions whether Breland would give up the goods, but he also tells Elizabeth that Kimmy is just a kid, and he does not want to put her through that.

Still, in the end, he does what his wife asks him to do, with the promise that after this, he won’t have to even deal with the Kimmy part of his lingering duties as a KGB agent. He tries his usual means of big brother persuasion on Kimmy, but she shrugs off his suggestion that he join her in Greece. There’s a subtle implication that maybe she’s hoping to meet boys or have other fun that could be spoiled by “Jim” tagging along. So Philip breaks glass in case of emergency, and kisses her. He sleeps with her to gain her trust this one last time, and there’s that vacant, haunted look in his eyes that he’d seemingly managed to escape in the three-year time jump. Elizabeth will get what she wants, what the Centre wants, but it comes at a cost to the person she cares about most.

Oleg is no stranger to making those kinds of gambits. In one of The Americans’s most welcome scene, he is confronted by Tatiana, not only for what he’s doing in the United States despite his pleas of merely being there to learn about “trains or whatever,” but for what he did to her. The episode confirms that she bore the brunt of his tipoff to Stan, never reaching Rezidentura and being in the same job she was when he left. But she drops the biggest of bombshells -- that she told the KGB it was him who spoiled her operation, and that she’s the cause of the hassles and threats he faced back in Moscow.

It’s a great scene because it puts a button on the personal history and consequences between the two that we never really got to explore at any point in season 5. It’s complicated, because on the one hand, you feel like Oleg did the right thing, by exposing a biological weapon plot, especially given that the Russians did end up using the lassa virus for offensive purposes later. But you also feel like he did it for self-serving reasons, threw Tatiana under the bus in the process, and as she points out, managed to escape scot free given his family connections. The bad blood and anger between them is palpable, and Tatiana’s message to the Centre that he’s not to be trusted is powerfully ice cold.

But while that story remains mostly in a holding pattern while Oleg makes the rounds with his old friends, a lot changes between Philip crossing that line with Kimmy near the beginning of the episode, and changing his mind near the end. Chief among them is what happens to Paige. After more lecture and talks with her mom about sleeping with guys for information, she’s flirting with a boy at a bar, and things turn ugly. Paige, feeling invincible after her self-defense training, knocks the crap out of them, and comes home for sparring practice and, implicitly, some comfort and reassurance.

Instead, she gets more admonishments and scoldings from Elizabeth, and storms off, declaring that she can do whatever and sleep with whomever she wants. It starts another fight between Philip and Elizabeth, one that ends with Elizabeth storming off for “work.” The most interesting part of it is the Jenningses’ equal and opposite concerns about their daughter, with Elizabeth worrying that Paige just doesn't have the stuff to be a spy, and Philip thinking that she could do the job, but shouldn’t, given the toll this life has taken on both of them.

It’s another major point of divergence, and one rooted, as much of this episode is, in notions of young adult sexuality and the complications of that. It’s a theme reinforced by the drinking and dish session between Claudia, Elizabeth, and Paige, where the older spooks talk about their first times with a friendly spirit (or two). It’s anathema to Philip though, and it’s easy to read his feelings as a combination of the usual parental concerns about their children being sexually active, coupled with his own experience of how hollowing it can be to sleep with people because it’s your job too.

So in one of the episode’s most visceral scenes, he shows up unannounced to Paige’s apartment, and gives her a demonstration that she’s not as secure or capable as she thinks she is. Their fight is hard to watch. It’s another instance of a character on this show being well-meaning --- Philip is trying to protect Paige by not letting her get overconfident and thus put herself in danger -- and yet with a hint that this tough love crosses a line and might be unproductive, just like Elizabeth’s constant hard-nosed chewing outs do.

When he nearly chokes out his own daughter, it’s painful for the audience to see, a reminder that there are dangerous people and dangerous things out there that Paige might not be ready for, but also a certain amount of chest-beating by Philip when Paige implicitly questions him that comes off concerning. Still, good or bad, these events effect a shift in Philip, one that starts to make him question the rightness of what Elizabeth has asked him to do with another young woman in a similar place in her life.

But it’s not what puts him over the edge. That comes from Elizabeth’s choice in this episode, to kill Gennadi and Sofia. It’s another tense sequence, one where Elizabeth has to hide and risk exposure on multiple occasions. It’s a sequence that adds to Elizabeth’s prodigious body count this season, and splashes the brutality of these acts in the audience’s faces. These are not simple or easy deaths; they are harsh and bloody stabbings, with a family destined to be reunited, enjoying their own spot here, having that cut short at a knife’s edge.

It is a tragedy, one that gets to Stan as he walks to the safe house, laments his broken promise that he would keep these defectors safe, and sees a young boy, now orphaned, being walked away from the grisly scene by strangers. He confides in Philip, how he the bad guys made an orphan of this child, and it’s too much for him. Philip knows who did this, who’s responsible for such harm to another kid. He can’t save Ilia, and he might not even be able to save Paige, but he can save Kimmy.

So he calls her up and calls things off. He gives her a vaguely worded break-up speech meant to soothe her, but also to push her to move on, so she’s not subject to these sorts of things again. He even goes a step further, and warns her off the kidnapping plot, regardless of his participation in it. It is the most direct action he’s ever taken to thwart his wife, to thwart the Centre, to thwart the hardline forces in Russia.

That’s what makes it meaningful. We see Philip’s willingness to cross a line because his wife earnestly asks him to early on, and we see him turn around and feel the weight of her choices too much to participate in them anymore. He takes active steps to hinder her work, to hinder his former handlers’ work, in the name of protecting innocent kids from being sucked in and ground up by this world the way he was.

There’s a lot of talk in this episode about how many Russians suffered in World War II, about how it inspired those who survived, like Claudia and Elizabeth, to fight to ensure their country never faced such hardships again, to do what you have to do in order to avoid them, to be strong and courageous in the face of difficulty. But Philip only sees the further harms inflicted, the personal, internal damage that reach for strength can do. So he chooses to stop it where he can, even if it puts him at odds with the person he loves the most, and prompts The Americans’s best episode of the season in the process.