The ninth hour of The Americans’ superlative fourth season centers on the original 1983 broadcast of ABC’s “The Day After.” In it, a harrowing future vision is laid bare: fiery, bloody, desolate – apocalyptic. And a microcosm of the conflict on-display looks on in the cold, in a suburban D.C. living room: Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) Jennings, undercover Soviet spies posing as an American dream, are on the couch with their children Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati); their next-door neighbor Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), a publicly active FBI agent, is there too, invited over for the screening with his son, Matthew (Danny Flaherty). Each adult is lulled into the alternately convincing reality. But the younger minds beside them are no less shaken, their wild imaginations given physical images to contend with. Recently let-in on her parents’ secret, Paige promptly expresses her feelings – “That movie was pretty real, right?” – before Philip, who has long doubted his commitment to country over family, musters up the best response he can: “That’s why your mother and I do what we do – to keep stuff like that from happening.” It’s unclear whether Paige buys her father’s justification. It’s almost certain that he, himself, does not.
As the waves of gloom and dread start crashing with the echo of inevitability – as the sea’s tide stretches out to touch the feet of the Jenningses, the Beemans and those around them – The Americans reaches an emotional crescendo in its rueful meditation on personhood and allegiance. The series began by positioning a fake marriage within the very real contours of the Cold War, tracking in meticulous hour-long scripts how cause and purpose – how identity and belief – could gradually push up against emotion and feeling. A whole life’s work could be compromised by falling in love. A single mission could be aborted by succumbing to guilt. A facade rooted in ideological purity could become achingly real. The overarching conflict at the series’ center was always a chilly dichotomization of perspective and outlook, of livelihood and existence. But its players have always been human beings, of more complex needs and innate desires. For as detached and bleak as The Americans has remained through four years, its central contrast has long been the vitality of connection and the sanctity of identity.
The show’s fourth season realizes this juxtaposition with an overriding focus on loneliness, and the ways in which its various characters compensate for what can often be life’s isolating nature. Before meeting her demise in a shocking, early-season climax, Nina (Annet Mahendru) finds peace by befriending, even helping, a man with a chance at a better life. Nina’s time on The Americans was previously defined by her double-agent status, needing to force sexual intimacy into her professional relationships with Stan and, later, new Rezidentura officer Oleg (Costa Ronin) – all in order to survive. Any real feelings of romance or kinship were qualified by their source of manipulation. Thus the tragedy of her death – executed as a traitor in Moscow – is met with a muted sense of personal fulfillment. She achieved real.
Is death, if on those terms, preferable to a fate of continued life without such clarity? The Americans does deal fatal blows to a few more characters in its fourth season, but for the rest, it narrows the space for possibility, for change, for joy. In fact, Nina’s passing precedes several characters’ banishment to isolation. Martha (Alison Wright), the dowdy FBI secretary, married Philip – undercover as government agent “Clark” – at the conclusion of the first season, and her delusions surrounding their relationship only ran deeper by the year; finally exposed in season four, she’s sent to Moscow after holding onto Clark, and then Philip, until the final possible second. When she departs, Philip and Elizabeth’s elder handler Gabriel (Frank Langella) takes up residence in the old safe-house where Martha was being held. Its dusty, empty interiors take up three times as much space as he ever does in a single frame. He finds solace in brief encounters with Claudia (Margo Martindale), another older agent, as they banter in their own spare, very Russian way over coffee; he enjoys playing Scrabble with Philip on the slower days. But as Langella plays the man, Gabriel carries the weight of a half-century’s work of secrecy and isolation on his shoulders.
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Gabriel's isolation contrasts with the experiences of his young spies. Elizabeth, long the true believer in the couple, is tasked with befriending Young-Hee (Ruthie Ann-Miles), a Korean immigrant married to a man with access to critical information for the Russians. As Gabriel lays it out, the planned endgame is a horrific betrayal of a friendship that was never intended to be real in the first place. But in Young-Hee, Elizabeth – or Patty, her undercover identity – makes a true friend. She finds someone to bond with over the trivial but challenging differences between the United States and the homeland; to revel in another culture with, as a way of compensating for her own sense of diminished cultural identity; to confide in, however cryptically, about issues of marriage and parenting and work that keep her up at night. On that last point, Elizabeth worked a divorcée last season in Lisa (Karen Pittman), with whom she could chat about marital challenges whilst uncovering national security secrets. But in season four, Lisa is thrown into a drunken spiral, threatening to expose Elizabeth over her newly ruined life; Elizabeth, without a choice, has to kill her – a sobering reminder that getting too close has its consequences in her line of work. Indeed, it does with Young-Hee, too. This season plumbs the depths of Elizabeth’s loneliness, shaking her resolve and finally allowing her to question her role as a minor cog in a grand, inhuman machine – as an isolated agent, disciplined enough to not get close to anyone but her husband for decades, but human enough to finally allow that shield to crack.
This is all very specific to the role of a spy, of course; yet the utter, painful, mournful brilliance of The Americans is how it depicts these emotional and moral conflicts on a universal scale. Dual motivations, the costs of getting too close, our tendencies to manipulate, the struggle of balancing a sense of purpose and identity with a sense of community and connection – these issues resonate as much as they do within the series because they extend so potently to our genuine day-to-day. Philip and Elizabeth give different parts of themselves to different people and ideas; their lives reflect the idea that connection manifests out of specific chemical reactions. And it's rarely perfect. The season’s second episode features a melodic centerpiece in the form of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” From Nina and Stan, to Nina and Oleg, to Elizabeth and Philip, to Martha and Clark, to Patty and Young-Hee, to even Oleg and fellow Rezidentura officer Tatiana (Vera Cherny) – you can always see the stain, and you can always feel the love.
This notion of companionship has been intrinsic to The Americans from moment one. To go back to that “Day After” watch party: there’s Philip and Elizabeth, acknowledging their isolated, wounded statuses as never before, placing themselves within the idea of global destruction. And there’s their daughter, perhaps the season’s most crucial piece – left to pick a side, comprehend their respective complexities, and learn the art of the craft: lie, deceive and convince. She admitted to her Pastor her parents’ secret at the end of last season, and is, in turn, forced by them to learn the tricks of the trade throughout this one, working the Pastor as Elizabeth worked Young-Hee, or as Philip worked Martha. Crucially, she gets pretty good at it, keeping her emotions in-check while reporting back to her bosses (her parents) and fighting very real feelings of guilt and confusion. She is her parents’ daughter. And as she develops a “crush” on Stan’s son Matthew to close out the season, she finds herself in their most classically confounding predicament – negotiating real feelings with the enticing possibility of intel-gathering – while also straddling the line between childhood and adulthood, trying to understand why her parents do what they do, and, well, what it is that they exactly do.
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The questions of personal, familial and ideological identity that spur out of these initial inquiries are especially critical. Paige’s induction into the School of Soviet Spying raises the stakes; Elizabeth and Philip are forced to consider what they do from entirely different angles, with their daughter eager to learn and still skeptical of their will to do good. With Paige as the starting point, the Americans characters collectively, finally realize the scope of it all in season four. Its primary themes of emptiness and connection are not accidental parallels there.
Indeed, the bioweapons backdrop injects a provocative metaphor for the art of spycraft – of getting at something from the inside out – and it is provocatively conveyed through the character of William (Dylan Baker). William has been undercover for the Soviets for decades, and has little to show for it besides a dry sense of humor and an empty apartment. He is disillusioned about his work – questioning why the Russians would want such weapons in the first place – and, more to the point, is disillusioned about his choices. There are warnings throughout the season that these weapons, which William is able to snag from an American lab in samples, could add an entirely new element to the war. Thus once he is caught by the FBI, William infects himself, both to avoid spilling secrets and to symbolically take the weapon out of play. We see its effects, the chemical eating away at him – yet what comes out are not intestines or kidneys or even too much blood, but rather, truth. In a series of blistering monologues, he laments his past, describing how the excitement of spying in his youth turned him bitter and alone, year by year. His descriptions of loneliness, of being left with a cause and nothing else to define himself as, hang over the season – over the entire series – with harrowing resonance.
Indeed, the bioweapons backdrop injects a provocative metaphor for the art of spycraft – of getting at something from the inside out – and it is provocatively conveyed through the character of William (Dylan Baker). William has been undercover for the Soviets for decades, and has little to show for it besides a dry sense of humor and an empty apartment. He is disillusioned about his work – questioning why the Russians would want such weapons in the first place – and, more to the point, is disillusioned about his choices. There are warnings throughout the season that these weapons, which William is able to snag from an American lab in samples, could add an entirely new element to the war. Thus once he is caught by the FBI, William infects himself, both to avoid spilling secrets and to symbolically take the weapon out of play. We see its effects, the chemical eating away at him – yet what comes out are not intestines or kidneys or even too much blood, but rather, truth. In a series of blistering monologues, he laments his past, describing how the excitement of spying in his youth turned him bitter and alone, year by year. His descriptions of loneliness, of being left with a cause and nothing else to define himself as, hang over the season – over the entire series – with harrowing resonance.
This is the narrative The Americans tells so beautifully, and so emphatically. It is now a story soaked in dread and facing the inevitable, its aesthetic mirroring the image of Philip, Elizabeth, Stan, Paige, Matthew and Henry watching “The Day After” for the first time. It is now a story juxtaposing the micro with the macro, the personal with the political, the emotionally complicated with the ideologically simple. It is now a story about how we walk through life in different disguises, with different wigs, as different people – and how, under that grand umbrella, we strive for a singular, encompassing, purposeful identity. It is now a story about the living cogs in a mechanical system, wherein human fallibility inevitably limits the forces pulling our strings.
And yet it is, ultimately, a story about connection. In composition, The Americans is deliberate; in performance, melancholic; and in narrative, unsettling. The series captures its historical moment with consummate intelligence, paying specific attention to the emotional tensions of the period. In the fourth season finale, executive producers Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields render explicit their characters’ primary motivation – as Oleg leaves behind his work to return to his family; as Philip and Elizabeth plot abandoning their entire cause and life to secure safety and a future for their family; as Philip’s estranged son makes it his life’s mission to track his father down; and as Paige struggles to balance her hormones and her intent. In a world as brutal and deceiving, as imperfect and unrewarding, as this one, connection is what's left to seek. And that can mean forsaking a purpose or a goal – a hauntingly life-changing proposition, as the season’s foreboding final image illustrates. But sometimes, as in The Americans and in life, it’s worth the sacrifice. In the chaos and despair of it all, we’re left to look for a little meaning.