[8.7/10] Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, director of The Avengers, current pariah) once compared Sarah Michelle Gellar to Jimmy Stewart, saying there was no one on screen who could communicate suffering as well as she did since Jimmy Stewart retired. It’s a hell of a compliment, that speaks to how well Gellar conveyed what Buffy Summers was going through in seven season of BtVS. But with all due respect to Gellar (who, incidentally, has been underutilized relative to her talents as an actress), I think Matthew Rhys may have her beat in 2018 (or, at least 2015, when this episode aired).
Because it seems like The Americans’s favorite trick is to make Philip suffer. Philip has affection for a woman who’s only pretending to be his wife, and so he suffers. Philip has to kill innocent people, repeatedly, in order to do his job, and so he suffers. Philip has to manipulate and, but for a fortunate parental arrival, seduce, a young woman who’s a funhouse mirror version of his daughter, and good lord does he suffer.
That is the job after all. The Motherland over personal comfort. But “Salang Pass”, particularly it’s last couple of sequences, can’t help but gut you, because you see what Philip has to do, what he knows to do, but what is quietly eating him inside as a parent, and as someone with a conscience he’s been unable to shake despite his years in the field.
He has to listen to Kimberly talk about her parents, about how they’re away all the time, about the mom she clearly loved who isn’t around anymore, about the dad who used to be there for her who got whisked away by his job. And he’s smart enough to hear the echoes, to fear that his own daughter, who’s a hop skip and a jump from being someone like Kimberly, might feel the same way about her own oft-absent parents. And by god, it wounds him.
“Salang Pass” is an episode where he’s fighting for Paige’s soul. I know that sounds grandiose in the context of him buying her an expensive baptismal dress, but it’s driven home by his experience with Kimberly, by the acknowledgement that there are bad people out there, people like him, ready willing and able to take advantage of people who are too young to know better.
I’m not sure there’s been a more uncomfortable, layered set of scenes than Philip’s “date” with Kimberly and the aftermath with Elizabeth. It’s an episode where Philip is surrounded by ghosts and images and reminders of how fragile childhood is. He steps into a foster-care adoption situation with Martha. He reminisces about Henry and Paige’s childhood scrapes and scratches with Elizabeth. He listens to a quietly harrowing story from Stan about how his son hates him, and barely knew him after he’d been away and undercover for so long. The risks of this business, the way it can separate and estrange parents and children, are thrown in Philip’s face for 70% of this episode, and by god, he suffers for it.
Stan suffers a little bit too, as he tries to bare his soul a bit with Philip while his ersthwhile friend is processing his own cold war with Elizabeth. Stan was asked out by Tori, the woman he met at EST, and accepts that his wife is unlikely to take him back, and laments that his son hates him. Philip is the closest thing Stan has to a confidante, and Philip’s a living feint in this situation, changing the subject and putting things in his own context.
But hey, it can’t all be character development and emotion. Sometimes the plot has to be advanced. So we have Stan interacting with Oleg, naively assuming that if he can squarely finger the alleged defector as a Russian spy, he can effect a prisoner exchange for Nina. It’s enough to get Oleg to fish around with his new colleague for info, but seems like a pipe dream given the circumstances. Frankly, I don’t know why Oleg’s still on the show, since he was never all that interesting to begin with, and seems especially pointless now that Nina is MIA, but hey, I guess they need something for him to do.
Elizabeth’s major part in this episode feels more plot-heavy than thematic or character based as well. She’s working Lisa, the woman she met at A.A. who has a job at Northrup Grumman. It’s always a little exciting to see the Jenningses deploy their tradecraft. Seeing how Elizabeth sidles up to Lisa, gets her into a house away from her abusive husband, and then uses her skills to get Lisa up to the front of the line for a job at the nearby, security clearance-requiring factory, is exciting from a meat-and-potatoes spycraft perspective.
But honestly, it’s also just kind of endearing seeing Elizabeth and Lisa pal around. As the show established last season, Elizabeth doesn't have many true friends. It may be manipulative, but there’s a genuine rapport between Elizabeth and Lisa. That’s one part deception, but also one part a reflection of what is, perhaps, a genuine friendly connection between the two of them, albeit (sorry Henry) one that Elizabeth is exploiting rather than genuinely engaging with.
That’s the haunting thought that “Salang Pass” leaves you with. “Make it real.” One of the most compelling and complicated thoughts expressed via T.V.’s villains is the idea of using something true to craft a lie. (Thanks, Game of Thrones, among many others.) That is, in effect, the Jenningses job, to make their machinations and deceptions believable and indistinguishable from truth for their marks, which requires imbuing those lies with something genuine.
The closing scene of “Salang Pass” gives us flashes of Philip coping with that idea, of how he had to cross-pollinate his real life and his cover story, to make the latter believable. Even Garbriel acknowledges how difficult that can be, to keep your true feelings and your put-on ones separate when trying to be convincing in this business.
So you see flashes of Philip’s training, of how he was taught to be convincing in his lies in even the most intimate moments. And he confides in Elizabeth about it, with how it haunts him, with how he’s starting to recognize it as a form of abuse, and implicitly, how little he wants to subject his daughter to the same sorts of horrors and abuses he himself has had to endure, time and time again.
That seems to be the theme of this season of The Americans -- not just the recurring motif of children and the complex hopes and fears that they engender in every facet of the Jennigses’s life. But the realization, through those innocents who are becoming full-fledged adults, what the powers that be have done to the people immersed in that life, and what they want those same people to do the next generation, no matter how much pain, how much suffering, it may cause them.
