6x08 The Summit

[9.0/10] This has been Elizabeth’s season. It’s not that Philip has had nothing to do, but in essence, he reached the climax of his arc in season 5. He recognized that this life was killing him, and he needed to get out, and he did. He had his realization; he soldiered on despite that, until Elizabeth saw and understood enough to give him her blessing to tap out. Sure, there’s some thematic meat to Philip having flown too close to the sun in his efforts to be a big American businessman, and his philosophical conflicts with Elizabeth are brought to the fore nicely this season, but most of his story, most of his personal growth, was done by the time the first few minutes of season 6 had elapsed.

Instead, this season is about Elizabeth’s awakening, about the accumulation of moral and emotional debt that are finally enough to snap her out of her Centre-approved, mission-focused myopia. “The Summit” in particular is about Elizabeth feeling the emotional impact of what she’s been tasked to do, about questioning her orders, and about recognizing that true devotion to her ideals, to her country, means following them wherever they take her, rather than blindly assuming that her handlers know their way.

That takes two big pushes here. The first is another explosive argument between the Jenningses, where Philip comes clean about his reports to Oleg. Elizabeth has the sense of surprise, betrayal, and anger that you would expect in the situation. She is understandably furious and doesn't want to hear her husband’s reasons. But whether she wants to or not, she hears him. She hears his admonition to let herself be a human being who feels things in these operations, not just a vessel for greater forces. She hears him imploring her to think for herself.

But it’s not enough. That comes in the midst of one of those operations, where she means to tag the negotiator’s briefcase with a listening device, but goes to his home to find that he’s made the promised attempt to euthanize his wife, and botched it. What follows is a moment of kindness, where Elizabeth ends Erica’s suffering, where for the umpteenth time this season, she takes a life.

This time, though, it’s not because the Centre told her to. It’s not because the mission requires it. If anything, the mission would call on her to prolong this somehow, to persuade the negotiator that Erica can be saved and that he should go to the summit. Instead, she ends Erica’s life as an act of mercy. She kisses her on the forehead, a dose of sentiment that the customary Elizabeth would have no time or use for.

Whether she wants to or not, she feels this death. She sees the devoted husband who has to watch his wife suffer and dies, the funhouse mirror version of the Jenningses reaching this horrid breaking point. She feels for this woman, who has acted, even on the brink of her life’s end, to open up this side of Elizabeth, and in death, she succeeds.

No, Elizabeth does not keep the painting that the negotiator insists she take, the one that maybe looks like her mother, that looks like Russia, that looks like whatever rorschach test Elizabeth is now able to imprint herself on after being wholly unable to appreciate or even understand art when the season began. She still burns it, but she hesitates for that moment, she takes it in, to preserve it in her mind if not in substance. For Elizabeth Jennings, that is a quantum leap.

It comes at the best and worst time though. It comes at the best time because it gives the chance for Elizabeth to do what she always wanted to do -- to make a difference, to change the world. But it also comes at a time when she becomes more and more perilously close to being caught, or dying, or both.

That comes from Stan’s efforts to nudge along the bureau and to run his own investigation on the Jenningses. The key development here is that he goes back to talk with the guy from Gregory’s crew from back in the show’s earliest season. He runs Elizabeth’s picture by the former associate, asking if she was the one who hung around Gregory. All Stan gets (beyond an appreciative combo meal for keeping his word), is that the woman who connected with Gregory had beautiful hair and smoked like a chimney. It’s not much, but it’s enough, especially with his glimpse at Elizabeth’s flower pot, and the matchup of sketches of the illegals from the past and present. Stan is getting more closer, and more suspicious, the longer he tugs at this thread.

Philip, on the other hand, is breaking down. He seems despondent over his business, over what his failure is going to cost his family, his coworkers. He calls Henry just to chat, in the same way that Elizabeth did two episode ago. He gets fitted for a suit, one that could be the one he wants to be buried in. He gives himself a last mental meal of sorts, watching a Russian movie to give him a taste of home. It’s still odd to me that the show is going a bit Death of a Salesman with Philip here, but it doesn't skimp on the bleak signs in the process.

Still, Philip forebears when he has to. He goes to talk to Stavos, the employee whom he fired two episodes ago. He tries to explain how much has gone wrong, how much he is suffering as much as anyone. All he gets from Stavos is a stung affirmation of his loyalty, of a reminder and startling revelation that he knew there was something squirrely going on “in the back room” of the travel agency, but never told anyone.

Their KGB training suggests that Philip would need to kill Stavos now, to stage it like a suicide the way he did for Martha’s coworker so that no one throws any suspicion on him. But he’s beyond the point where he can kill someone who doesn't deserve it to save his own behind. Instead, he just walks away, and lets it sit.

It’s the sort of thing that Elizabeth would never do...until she does. She continues the ploy with Jackson the young film buff. She gets him to turn over a detailed memo about what his Senator boss is up to. She gets him to unwittingly plant a listening device during a summit. She sleeps with him, Carrie Matheson-style, to gain his trust. But the kid, however easily swayed he may be, isn’t dumb. He figures out what’s going on, or at least that this situation isn’t on the up-and-up, and calls her on it.

Elizabeth responds how we’d expect her to. She makes excuses. She takes him a secluded spot under a bridge where no one can hear him scream. When he tries to leave, she grabs his arm and becomes much more forceful. She holds onto it for a long long time for T.V. land, contemplating whether she can kill this young man who, in another life, could be her son. He makes it harder when he tells her that he doesn't understand her admonition to keep quiet. But in the end, she does what Philip would do, what Philip did, and lets this innocent live because he doesn't deserve to die just because his life has become inconvenient.

It’s the next link in the chain that Philip’s warning and Erica’s wake-up call started. She goes to kill the Russian negotiator, as ordered by Claudia. She learned, thanks to Jackson’s tape, that he offered the USA complete nuclear disarmament on behalf of Gorbachev. But at the last moment, she can’t do it. For the first time, or at least in the most significant way, she questions her orders.

It’s then that Claudia puts her cards on the table. This isn’t a mission; it’s a coup. It’s the KGB and Russia’s military-industrial complex working to overthrow the leader who might bring peace, who might show some kind of weakness to the Americans, who might let a new day dawn. It is people who are disloyal in their own way to the party Elizabeth believed in. It is the hard-won epiphany that these institutions act not out of noble sacrifice or devotion to a cause, but for self-perpetuation, to preserve the status quo, not change it.

It is the cherry on the cake of what could be the mission statement, the overarching theme of The Americans. Philip tells Elizabeth that whatever the orders are, wherever they come from, they are the ones who carry them out, so the credit and blame for what happens falls on them. It’s about an awakening from being mindless automatons who do what they’re told to acknowledging that as the ones taking these actions, enacting these plans, they bear the responsibility.

But with responsibility comes choice. Elizabeth does not forgive her husband for his betrayal. That is a bridge too far. But she makes her own choice about which side to be on, about who and what to fight for, about who really has her nation’s best interests at heart, that puts her at odds not only with the side she’d unquestioningly followed until now, but also with the person she was before this season started.

There’s still, no doubt, many fireworks to come as the Centre works to overthrow their civilian leader, and Stan works to arrest his best friends, and the life that the Jenningses tried to build for their kids is threatened more seriously than ever before. More than any of that, however, this final season has been about Elizabeth waking up, about her claiming that agency, finding the feeling in her work that she had compartmentalized for so long. This is her story, and if it ends here, it ends well.