'The Americans' Season Finale: One of TV's Best Shows Reveals Its Secrets
The Americans wraps up its strong season on Wednesday night with a nail-biter of an episode that has as much to do with the inner turmoil of its main characters as with any spy action that occurs.
This has been the strength of the series since it premiered. The tale of two 1980s Russian spies (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) who come to America on an espionage mission, marry as part of their cover story, have children, and establish themselves as ordinary suburbanites who just happen to spend some evenings planting bugs, recruiting comrades to their cause, killing and disposing of bodies — well, that is one hell of a premise.
In fact, it’s such a killer premise that I didn’t think, early on, that creator Joe Weisberg was going to be able to sustain it with any degree of believability. Heck, there was a stretch there when I couldn’t get past the idea that Philip and Elizabeth Jennings run the least-busy travel agency that ever stayed in business. I’m glad to have been proven wrong about these initial doubts.
Related: ‘The Americans’ Transformations: Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys Get Their Sid and Nancy On
This season, The Americans has opened out into numerous areas without ever straining to maintain momentum. Daughter Paige’s increasing interest in her Christian faith was contrasted with Russia’s determination that the teenager would soon be ready to be “turned” as a budding agent. FBI agent Stan Beeman made a foolhardy but romantically convincing attempt to rescue spy-who-loved-him Nina Sergeevna from her Soviet prison. Elizabeth’s ailing mother in Russia reminded Elizabeth of two things simultaneously: How difficult Elizabeth’s life had been in Russia, and how loyal she remained to her cause. For Philip, the opposite has slowly, steadily occurred: He’s come to question what his reason for existing in his present state might be.
If the most dramatic moment of the current, third season was Philip and Elizabeth telling Paige that they’re spies for the Soviet Union, that moment was just one of many highly satisfying scenes of complex, often contradictory emotions — contradictions at which The Americans excels. This series is interested in working through its characters’ dilemmas, dramatizing inner conflict through the metaphor of espionage.
This week’s season finale, written by Weisberg and Joel Fields and directed by Daniel Sackheim, follows up on Elizabeth’s desire to have Paige meet Elizabeth’s mother before the old woman dies. The hour also brings to a head the double-dealing risks Stan has taken with the FBI in his yearning for Nina. It’s typical of The Americans that the show has even managed to take an element of the 1980s that any other show would play for knowing laughs — EST, Werner Erhard’s pop-psychology movement — and makes it, in this season-ender, a site of intensely honest admissions between two key characters.
The title of Wednesday’s episode is “March 8, 1983” — the date then-President Ronald Reagan gave his famous “Evil Empire” speech, excoriating the Soviet Union and re-freezing the Cold War. Reagan’s face and words loom up on a television in this episode, but it’s not used for cheap irony; instead, you realize it’s going to affect the lives of the people we’ve come to care about in this show.
Related: 10 Things We Learned About Marriage From ‘The Americans’
Unlike so much prestige television, The Americans doesn’t use violence, cynicism, or sarcastic humor to convey the kind of jaded fatalism that signals seriousness on television in this current post-golden-age era. Instead, it’s something original. The Americans is about realizing how you can become a stranger to yourself, and that you have to spy on your own heart.
The Americans season finale airs Wednesday, April 22 at 10 p.m. on FX.
