[9.2/10] I think a decent amount about Dan Harmon’s story circle, his method for spinning narratives that have resonance. It’s more intricate than this, but it basically comes down to a character being someplace comfortable, having to leave it to get something they want, paying a heavy price to obtain it, and returning home, having changed. I don’t think the creators of The Americans had Harmon in mind when they penned any part of the series, but it’s hard not to think about that rubric when lingering on the final scene of the series.
After so long, the Jenningses are home. After decades away, they are back in Russia, After years and years of not being able to speak their native tongue or enjoy their favorite foods or give the slightest hint of their real history, they are back, able to be the people they were before they left.
But they’re not those people anymore. In twenty years, they have changed. Moscow has changed. As Philip says to Stan in the episode’s showpiece confrontation, he doesn't know why he lived the life he did, and he’s no good at being a cartoonish American businessman with flashy suits and catchphrase strategies. He’s this strange, different version of himself, not the beleaguered spy he was for so long, but also not the normal American he dreamed of being for almost as long.
Elizabeth is no longer the unyielding, dutiful spook she once was. She has taken a stand against her organization, on behalf of her people. She has, over the course of this season, opened herself up to feeling things in a way she never allowed herself before. She allows, works for, even sacrifices for, the possibility of detente between the place she was born and loves in a reflexive way, and the adoptive homeland that disgusted her for so long.
In brief, they are home, but they return as different people, so very much affected by all that they have seen and done in the time they were away.
But true to the story circle, they pay a heavy price for getting what they want, that chance for peace between peoples: their children. The perilous return to Moscow costs them Paige and Henry who, for different reasons, cannot go with them. It is the hardest thing in this episode, to couple the safety of escape, the catharsis of having averted disaster, with the tragedy of two parents who know they’ll never see their children again.
It’s hard to know which parting feels tougher: Henry or Paige. The subtext-laden goodbye to Henry is the one that got to me in the moment, because it has the sorrowful tenor of a small farewell that has to stand in for a much larger one. It is the sadness of knowing no one can say what they really want to, that they cannot explain what is happening, only convey those feelings without alarm, to leave him innocent of all of this.
It’s sad because we know that Henry wakes up one morning knowing that so much of his life was a lie, a lie with questions he’ll never be able to get answers to. He is blameless in all of this, someone who is about to have his life rocked, without ever knowing fully why. The one bit of solace is that, in their years of parental neglect, the Jenningses inadvertently pushed him toward Stan, who’s become a surrogate father to Henry, and will presumably be his support system, his shoulder to cry on, his bridge to the next phase of his life, with so much of it having been upended by this one day in his life.
But Paige’s might be harder because it is a rejection. As much as the “With or Without You” needle drop feels like an indulgence a bit too on the nose, even for a series finale, the montage it plays under carries the shock and surprise of Philip and Elizabeth seeing her standing on the platform at the last stop before crossing the border. She knows her mom and dad cannot risk turning around to get her and having to make it through another passport check; she knows she can’t explain it to them, she just gives them one last look as they’re forced to move on.
“START” never tells us explicitly why Paige leaves, but given the events of the past couple episodes, it’s fair to infer that she’s decided she does not want the life of a spy, that she doesn't trust her parents. While she’s come to accept so much, understand so much, about what her parents do, the line may very well be crossed after she learns the depths of their actions. She knows her parents slept with other people now. She knows that they’ve killed people now. Not very long ago, her mother told her that she needed to commit now and do it forever, or decide that this life wasn’t for her. Paige makes her decision here, after the revelations meant to keep an old friend from capturing them also reveal to her how far her parents have gone, and how far she might have to go, if she follows in their footsteps, wherever they mean to lead her.
That confession is the most tense moment of the hour though. While “START” suggests there will be somewhat of a cat and mouse game between the Jennings and the FBI team that is closing in on them, it mostly comes down to a stand off between the Jenningses and Stan. It’s a scene that the finale needed to have. I think I would have felt cheated if they’d gotten away without Stan having his epiphany, finding his proof, and confronting his would-be friends over what he’s learned.
It’s a devastating, angering moment for Stan. He describes his life as “a joke” when he starts to poke through Philip and Elizabeth’s lies. There is an understandable sense of betrayal, of disbelief that the people he cared about like family were also the people he was working against every day of his professional life in Washington. He is ready to make them pay for that, to answer for what they’ve done.
Instead, in the end, he lets them go, and it takes what may very well be the monologue of the series from Matthew Rhys to earn it. Instead of prevaricating, of misdirecting, of trying to find some way to wriggle out of the situation using all the skills of deception and persuasion that he learned as a spy, Philip tells his best friend the truth. He tells them that he did all this without wanting to, that he did the job he was told to do, that he did it for his country, that he was Stan’s best friend and vice versa, and that he didn’t want to lie to him. It is a revealing confessional moment, one where Philip lays his soul bare, as much to himself as to the man with a gun trained on him, that sums up his strange, raw journey over the course of the show.
In the end, it’s enough. Stan is clearly still mad, still shocked, still beside himself at what’s been done and how close he was to it, but he sits silently and lets it happen. With his complicitness, if not his blessing, the Jenningses escape into the night.
After that key moment, this last blow from The Americans delivers its messages with images more than words. No one comments on it, but we feel the pain as the camera pans down to see Henry’s passport buried in a dark hole, alongside Elizabeth’s suicide necklace and their American wedding rings, buoyed by their replacement with the Russian ones they put on in front of the priest who eventually sells them out. We see an impossibly black night brightened blindingly in the center of the frame by a gleaming red and yellow McDonalds, the site of the Jenningses’ last American meal, freighted with the symbolism of this bastion of capitalism and Americana.
And we experience Philip and Elizabeth’s long slow journey back home. These scenes, of the two of them on trains, on planes, in cars along gray sparkling city scapes and washed out tree-lined roadsides, have a Lynchian deliberateness to them. We share in this journey, with scene after scene where little happens beyond a pair of headlights peeking out through the darkness, forcing us to stop and process and contemplate what is to come at the same time Philip and Elizabeth are. There is no hurry, only the slow passage of images as she rests her head on his shoulder, and they awake to see their long-absent home.
It’s a home they return to, however, without their children. That may be the final theme The Americans imparts: that this life, however taxing it may be, really does allow you to do an incredible amount of good, to change the world even, but it costs you your family. Oleg is rotting in a jail cell, seemingly destined not to see his wife and son for decades due to his efforts to save his country for them. Stan lost himself in this life, and arguably lost his connection with both his wife and his son because of it. And while the episode still plays coy about it, he has to live with his possibility that the woman he loves now may be a part of the game, another blow that, as Pastor Tim once described it and he described to Henry, may make it impossible for him to trust anyone again.
Philip and Elizabeth, then, have to reassure themselves that their children will be okay without them, that Henry’s life is here, that Paige is capable and well-taught, that they’re not kids anymore. In a reverie on the way, Elizabeth processes her own guilt, her feelings for her kids, and maybe her feelings for her mom. Philip briefly deludes himself into thinking he could stay and explain things to Henry. But in the end, they have to accept that their children are roughly where they were when they began this life, that they will be safe and make their own choices now, except Paige and Henry have truly become Americans.
In the final frame, the Jennings return home having been irrevocably altered by twenty years of espionage and murders and close scrapes, but also by twenty years of parenthood, of marriage, of founding a family out in a strange land. They go back to Russia shaped by those things, by their efforts to save the world, to save their children, but they go back without them.
3.5/10. This was, if you will pardon my french, a shitshow, especially afer how good the last episode was. The plotting was contrived, the acting was off, and the character motivations were haywire.
Let's start with the worst part. Robyn has been an unpleasant character from the moment she's been on our screens. Sure, to some extent that's the point, but it takes any story involving her down a notch from the getgo. She's a very broad character on a show that aims for something approaching naturalism even as it depicts super-strong heroes and mind-controlling villains. While I appreciated Malcom's dliemma (his character has quickly become one of my favorites for his quiet earnestness and strength despite what was done to him), giving Robyn such outsized characteristics and personality quirks just made it hard to have sympathy for her even in what should be a situation filled with pathos for the character.
And my god, how ridiculous was it that this crazy woman is able to not only rally the troops to go after Jessica, that it happens to coincide with Malcolm baring his soul, and that they just so happen to show up at Jessica's when she has Kilgrave on lockdown and things are otherwise fairly stable. The concept of the misguided outsider thinking the hero is the real villain, and that the villain is the victim, thereby freeing the bad guy and unraveling the hero's good work, is such a tired cliche in superhero stories especially. Channeling that story through Robyn was a poor choice especially, and it was all too convenient that it happened when it did. It seemed as though the writers said, "we need something to upset the applecart here, and this is just random enough to do it."
Speaking of convenient, I'm apparently one of the few people who's enjoyed the Hogarth-Wendy-Pam triangle this season, but Pam showing just at the right time to unintentionally kill Wendy was a bridge too far. There were tons of ways you could have had Pam realize that Hogarth is full of crap and realize that she was trying to use Kilgrave to get Wendy to sign the papers without ending up in this contrived, all-too-on-the-nose morality play where Pam ends up in jail. The scenes with just Hogarth and Wendy were actually pretty solid. The combination of Wendy's disgust and woundedness worked, and the "death of a thousand cuts" setup was tense. But the utter plot-convenience of how it ended up, especially with the hamfisted scene in the jail afteward, were facepalmingly bad.
And then what was with crazy Simpson? I mean, I get that he's taking some strange super solider pills, but his going all crazy Riley Finn seems unmotivated. His killing Detective Clemmons and torching the place felt out of character, and even if you can sell it as a Jekyll and Hyde situation with Dr. Koslov's pills, I just didn't buy the actor's performance. The insane incarnation of Simpson just seemed kind of goofy, rather than a deranged extension of the character we already knew. I don't know what to make of him.
Then the flashback with Jessica Jones in the dreamy past was so strange as well. Again, it was an extraordinarily blunt way to deal with the idea that she and Kilgrave look back at things differently. Plus I nearly died of ugh when Jessica said, "I'm all ears." And then we have some weird setup where Kilgrave's dad is trying to make a vaccine and has to use Trish? It's fine in principle, but it all goes so fast and strangely.
Then, of course, there's the end with Hope. I actually like the idea of Jessica allowing lots of collateral damage from Kilgrave's continued existence because Hope is a symbol for her -- of herself, of innocence, of a way she can make herself right with the world, and I like the idea of Hope rejecting that because she's much more pragmatic, her wounds are fresher, and she can't imagine what kind of life she can have now anyway.
But ye gads, did we really need this sort of complicated SAW-like set up from Kilgrave in the restaurant. There's a point in most seasons of Dexter where after the show has spent a great deal of time introducing characters and setting up cool conflicts, you get these more and more elaborate and convoluted setpieces as the cat and mouse game continues and the show keeps throwing more and more balls into the air. I think we reached that point here, and it's not a good look for this show, especially if, as Dexter did, it struggles to stick the landing after all the insanity it invokes.
[7.7/10] This is another episode where I really enjoyed just about everything...except the relationship stuff. Once again, the emotional core of the episode is anchored to the relationship between Eleanor and Chidi, which just has yet to click with me, which means the grand climax here leaves me cold.
But that’s the thing -- I really like most everything else about that part of the episode. D’arcy Carden does amazing work at portraying all of her co-stars. The way she’s able to perfectly capture the specific cadences of characters like Jason and Tahani was impressive, to where it’s easy to forget that it’s not really them as Carden delivers the performance. At the same time, the editors and compositors deserve so many kudos for making it feel totally natural that these were all separate characters interacting in a room together and not just one person green-screened over and over again.
I even like the emotional conceit of the episode -- where Eleanor’s identity crisis turns literally inside the confines of Janet’s void, cracking the place up and making Eleanor transform into other people and forget who she is. Chidi trying to bring her back, avoid intimacy by burying himself in philosophy, and realizing that he knows who Eleanor is and cares about her is a strong concept. And hell, I loved the hell out of the visuals the show used to convey Chidi having his epiphany to the point that it brings both of them back to who they really are. I just don’t really see Chidi and Eleanor as an OTP yet, so it lacked some punch for me.
The other half of the episode was both creative and hilarious though. Bringing in Stephen Merchant to play the head accountant is an inspired bit of casting, and the show managed to deliver a lot of exposition on how the point system works in fun and creative ways. (The beleaguered tone of the “weird sex thing” accountant was a consistent set of laughs.) I enjoyed the revelation that no one has made it to The Good Place in 500 years, and the accountant refusing to accept the notion that there’s anything wrong with that, as it speaks to a certain institutional inertia that works for both comedy and drama. Hell, just imagining the nerve center of the afterlife as a beige-lit cubicle farm, replete with a Neutral Janet is pretty inspired.
And I enjoyed the message of that segment to, with Michael realizing that he keeps looking for an external solution to his problems, someone else to take care of them, when really, he needs to look within himself to starting fixing things rather than waiting for it to happen. Of course, that leads us to yet another reboot and tease, but it’s a promising one, as this show gives us more tantalizing territory to explore.
Overall, I’m still a little leery about how much weight the show is putting on an Eleanor/Chidi relationship that I haven’t bought into yet, but the comedy, creativity, and world-building continues to be superb enough to keep me smiling throughout.
