'The Americans' Season 3 Finale Postmortem: 'There's a Therapist Who Could Make a Lot of Money Off Paige Jennings'

Warning: This post contains storyline and character spoilers from this week’s season finale of The Americans.

Paige knows, Martha knows, and thanks to a desperate phone call Paige made to her pal Pastor Tim in the Season 3 finale of The Americans, Pastor Tim knows that Paige’s ‘rents, travel agents Elizabeth and Philip, are actually undercover KGB spies.

But how much does Martha know about Clark/Philip? How will she react when she finds out just how far he’s gone to protect her? And how much further will Paige’s grief over the family she thought she had take her towards potentially blowing up the Jennings household even further?

The Americans showrunner Joel Fields spills all to Yahoo TV about the “long journey to explore here for these people.”

Congratulations on a great ending to what a lot of viewers feel is the show’s best season so far.
Well, thank you. Ours, too. Not to take anything away from the prior seasons, which we feel proud of, but we felt really good about how this came together. So glad you liked the ending, because I was saying earlier there’s somewhat of a tradition to ending big episodes or ending big seasons with a musical montage, tying many stories together, but I don’t know that anyone’s ever done a political speech montage. Somehow it worked.

Related: Ken Tucker Reviews ‘The Americans’ Season Finale

To go back just a little bit, how long ago did you plan that the storyline would go this far with Paige finding out about Philip and Elizabeth?
Well, we knew that Philip and Elizabeth were going to tell Paige that they were spies. At one time, we thought it was definitely going to happen at the end of Season 2. Then we thought it was going to happen at the beginning of Season 3. Then it was definitely the end of Season 3.

Something that’s happened for me and [series creator] Joe [Weisberg] in the writing of this show is that we found that we generally stick to our big plot points, but they tend not to fall necessarily exactly where we think they’re going to fall, because we try to follow the story. Sometimes it expands; sometimes it contracts for us. For example, the fact that they had the big confrontation with Paige in episode 10 was such a surprise over the course of the season that Joe and I just sort of disappeared for a few days, wrote the outline, and handed it to our writers. They got to be the first audience to read that and get that surprise.

What was their reaction?
Well, they knew it was coming, but I think as far as they knew at that point, we had punted it till the end of the season. It seemed to be just what the drama wanted at that moment, though… the time had come. These two parents were trying to plan the perfect way to handle their child. What they weren’t considering was the inevitable fact of parenting, which is: Your child is their own person, and has his or her own plans.

Did you always plan that this part of the Jennings’s story, Paige finding out, would become such a big, ongoing part of the show? It promises to be central to the rest of the series.
It’s funny. I think from my first conversation with Joe, we talked about the incredible power of children finding out that their parents have a secret life and what that meant, how different that was for every child in every family. I think clearly that’s something that was in his head from the beginning, and it proved to be a very rich, dramatic theme to tap.

Related: ‘The Americans’ Postmortem: Holly Taylor Talks About Paige’s Shocking Confrontation

Despite the cliffhanger with Paige calling Pastor Tim and spilling the truth about her parents, one thing that seems clear from the episode is that, if Paige is this rattled by what she knows so far, which is just a fraction of what her parents do, she may not be as suited for spy life as the KGB thinks. Fair?
What Joe and I are excited by is the rich questions [about Paige’s future]. There are deep veins to tap in terms of these characters. There’s a long journey to explore here for these people.

Paige is particularly distraught about the prospect of having to lie to everyone, including her brother, for the rest of her life. Is that the thing that pushes her into making that call to Pastor Tim?
I don’t think I can or want to pick one thing. I think she’s going through a tremendous crisis. Her parents know that she’s struggling with it, but clearly they’re not seeing the extent of it.

She says to Pastor Tim on the phone, “They’re liars, and they’re trying to turn me into one.” That’s a big part of it, but she also says, “I’m in so much pain. I’m hurting so much.” Her whole world has fallen apart. She’s lost essentially her past. She can look through albums and now question everything. If you don’t have your past, if your perception of your whole world was wrong for your whole life, who are you? You could certainly imagine her on a therapist’s couch in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. It could take a long time to talk this through. There’s a therapist who could make a lot of money off Paige Jennings.

Another cliffhanger: We didn’t see Martha in the finale, which was a surprise. When we last saw her, she got a big surprise herself in terms of Clark revealing himself more completely to her. What should we assume from that?
Well, we saw [Philip] kill for her. We saw him set up Gene to take the fall. That’s pretty big.

But how much does Martha know at this point?
Philip says she doesn’t know anything yet about Gene, but that she’ll find out. Elizabeth has a question about Philip’s strategy in how she’s going to find out. It remains to be seen how she’s going to react to what’s happened, what he did to protect her.

Related: Matthew Rhys Talks the Martha/Clark Confrontation on ‘The Americans’

So we should assume that she does know exactly who Philip really is at this point?
You can define in your own mind what it means to know who somebody really is. She knows that he doesn’t work for the U.S. government. She knows that his presence is a very big secret from FBI counterintelligence, and that he’s been wearing a disguise that he’s just taken off, and in an act of trust said, “I’m willing to show you what I truly look like.”

Now she’s about to find out that the recording device she had been using has been found in the drawer of a guy who killed himself and seems to have taken responsibility for doing what she knows she had been doing. That’s plenty for now.

After Elizabeth and Paige see Elizabeth’s mom, Paige asks how her grandmother could have let Elizabeth go off by herself. Elizabeth tells her, “You would never have to do anything like that.” Is she saying Paige will never have to leave her, or is she saying she will never allow Paige to be recruited by the KGB?
What I love about that line is there are so many different meanings there. We have characters who are conscious of some levels and not conscious of all levels. I’ll leave the interpretation of the line up to anybody who wants to watch. I will tell you we talked through all of those meanings and more in the writers’ room.

Philip was trying very hard to tell Elizabeth something at the end, when they were interrupted by the Reagan speech…
It’s not that there’s some specific secret that he’s trying to express. What he’s trying to do is find a way to express a version of what he said to Yousaf, that he feels like s–t all the time. That he’s in pain. Even that is a hard thought for him to articulate to himself, let alone to his wife, even though he’s trying.

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When Gabriel asked him earlier in the season if he’s falling apart, he really wasn’t that far off, was he?
Gabriel is a pretty smart, intuitive guy. He’s been doing this a long time. He also called him a child, but children grow up, as we’ve seen this season. There’s an intrinsic danger in this case to children growing up, because then you find your own way.

When Philip was in Gene’s apartment, Gene’s toys seemed to spark an emotional reaction with him. Is that part of his overall reaction to having to go along with the Kimmy situation? One of the things in particular that Philip seems to feel most bad about is that he often has to take advantage of people who are innocent, including Martha. Is that why those toys sparked that reaction in him?
I think there’s a lot of truth to that, and I think they’re also reminiscent of the toys Henry plays with. The last thing you want to do before you kill somebody is have them humanized.

Speaking of Henry, we got a little more insight into his personality this season. There were some great moments with him and his newfound fandom of Saturday Night Live. But with the focus so much on Paige, we see him being left out, being a little lonely. Thank goodness for Stan and his own loneliness, or who knows what kind of trouble he might have gotten into? Will Henry be pulled into the family drama next season?
I love to hear you point out the relationship with Stan, because on the one hand, yes, thank goodness for it, because the poor kid needs somebody to hang out with. On the other hand, as a parent, seeing your child seeking an alternate parent is a threat. As a deep-cover spy, if that alternate parent happens to work for the FBI’s counterintelligence department, that’s an even greater threat.

Particularly if Henry happens to overhear some discussion, and even innocently repeats some of it to Stan…
It’s not good. It’s not good.

And Stan: His marriage seems to be pretty clearly over, though when we see Sandra talking to Philip at the EST meeting, there seems to be a lot more confusion with her than she might have led Stan to believe. Is that fair, that maybe they aren’t completely done with their relationship after all?
Well, I mean, I think she certainly talks about things not being as hunky-dory with her new boyfriend, but she also doesn’t want Stan to get any hope. So we’ll see. To me, the combustible part of that scene is the fact that she’s reaching out to Philip… here’s this person of integrity, for whom honesty is the most important currency, suggesting to Philip that he enter a relationship based on trust and honesty, which may be the most dangerous thing in the world for him.

The Americans returns for Season 4 in 2016 on FX.