Welcome to Last Night on TV, our ongoing series that looks back at what happened on television the night before. If we’re going to stay up all night and watch TV, we might as well talk about it the next day.
We’re only three episodes into season four of The Americans and already the feeling of doom is palpable. Philip is sleepwalking through his multiple lives. Elizabeth is – gasp – having fun with capitalism. Plans are being made to assassinate members of the clergy. Biological weapons are leaking. No matter where Philip and Elizabeth turn, the options presented to them seem to put the lives and happiness of their children in danger. “For the last two days, I’ve had an alarm going off inside me,” Philip admits. “Run, run, run. And it’s not going off inside of you.” Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, we’re in for a very tense season.
The previous episode may have born his name, but “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow” truly belongs to the question of what to do with Pastor Tim. Now that we’re here, it’s kind of a relief to see this storyline in action. There were times in Season 3 where The Americans seemed unsure of how to handle Paige’s character. Too many competing plots points – from Paige’s blossoming religious identity to Philip and Elizabeth’s conflict over the Center’s recruitment mandate – all converged on how Paige processed the true identity of her parents. Rather than commit to a specific course of action, then, Season 3 put her into a kind of holding pattern, making her grief and confusion the sore spot at the show’s center that The Americans quietly plotted around. When the season ended with her telling Pastor Tim about her parents’ true identity, it seemed to back the storyline into a corner. Philip and Elizabeth could kill the pastor – thus alienating their daughter entirely – or the writers could speed up her recruitment process. Either way, she’s just along for the ride.
But then Pastor Tim told Alice, and Paige got pissed. It’s not surprising that Tim would tell his wife about the Jennings’s secret; they are married, after all, and The Americans has always presented the two as something of a unified front. It is Paige’s feeling of betrayal – an illogical and oh-so adolescent response to a complicated thought process – that gives the show its first chance at a Philip-Elizabeth-Paige collaboration. Suddenly we see Tim and Paige at odds and the latter hinting that she might be willing to manage a relationship for the sake of her parents’ continued safety. Most importantly, this dissatisfaction was in no way manufactured by either Philip or Elizabeth. Paige’s anger is authentic, and this anger opens the door to any number of interesting possibilities. It took almost an entire season, but Player Paige Has Entered The Game.
This episode also introduces another possible season-long arc in Elizabeth’s infiltration of the immigrant family she meets at Mary Kay. Last season it was Lisa (Karen Pittman) and her security clearance; this season, Young Hee (Ruthie Ann Miles) and her mystery objective. At worst, these espionage subplots go a long way towards demonstrating Elizabeth’s skill in the field and her softening towards American values. It’s also a neat flip of gender stereotypes within the spy genre: almost every operation that Elizabeth runs involves a slow and deliberate process of winning another person’s trust, while Philip is resigned to running the honeypot, again and again and again. Young Hee and her family represent something more than just friendship, though. Elizabeth is becoming intimately involved with people who made a choice to immigrate to America. Cracks are beginning to show in Elizabeth’s anger towards the West; this could be the interaction that nudges her over the edge.
Meanwhile, old storylines chug away in the show’s periphery. Stan continues to circle in on Martha (“WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME?!”), even trying to enlist his colleagues in a surveillance operation to find the cause of her overnight rendezvous. Back in Russia, Nina deals with the fallout of trying to pass along letters from Anton Baklanov to his son. Nina’s story in particular has been a bit of a question mark these past two seasons. There is value in expanding the story to include locations within Russia, and Nina’s machinations have always served as a nice counterpoint to those of Philip and Elizabeth (her life falls apart while theirs continues undeterred). To a certain extent, though, Nina feels like a character – and Annet Mahendru an actor – that the writers are loathe to get rid of, and I can’t say that I blame them for the indulgence, especially if the show chooses to focus less on the Russian embassy in her absence.
Despite the fact that The Americans has never been particularly dependent upon cliffhangers, “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow” ends with a doozy: Gabriel, potentially infected with an air-born pathogen, and Dylan Baker’s William reluctantly enlisted to administer medicine and quarantine Gabriel’s apartment. Much like in real life, the threat of nuclear war has been a dark cloud hanging over the heads of the characters, but it was in many ways a conventional threat. People build bombs, people point them at enemies, and people pull the trigger; as long as Philip and Elizabeth do their jobs well, these people can always be coerced or eliminated. Biological warfare is something else entirely. There’s something unnerving about the thought of contamination – dying slow and in a great deal of pain – that makes it hard picture either side in a war worth supporting when these options are in play. The vials of germs offer a literal depiction of the unseen problems threatening to tear Philip and Elizabeth’s world apart, but they also speak to their irrelevance. What is the point in traditional spycraft in a world where the contents of a mint container will indiscriminately kill thousands?
So many questions raised for next week’s episode. Will Gabriel live? Does Nina stand a chance at trial? Will the Center move forward with the assassination of Tim and Alice? And, most importantly, will Henry ever forgive his parents for bailing on the EPCOT trip? Poor kid only has Strat-o-Matic Football and video games to keep him occupied while everyone else around him is doing their own thing. Then again, that pretty much describes my own adolescence, and I thought I was having a grand old time. You do you, Henry. You do you.
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