“I know you better than you know yourself,” said Claudia/Grannie to Elizabeth in last
night’s season finale of
The Americans. “And you don’t know me at all.” It’s been easy to doubt Grannie over the course
of the season, given her prickly affect, her habit of stalking people, her odd love
for arcade games and breakfast meetings, and the time she kidnapped and tortured Philip
and Elizabeth (oh, yeah, that). But as the season finale revealed, she’s actually
been a loyal supervisor to the Jenningses all along, voicing her own doubts to her
KGB contact (revealed to be Arkady) about the validity of a meeting with the Colonel
and taking matters into her own hands when her friend General Zhukov was killed
by the CIA.
One of the reasons Grannie is so effective as an agent is her motherly demeanor, which
allowed her to con her way into the suspicious CIA agent’s house before slashing his
jugular with terrifying efficiency. “Victor Zhukov was my friend,” she told him. “We
met in Stalingrad in 1942. The first time I saw him he was standing over two dead
Nazis.” As speeches go, this one was Tarantino-Type-A-tastic. Philip and Elizabeth
might have requested Grannie’s reassignment, forcing her to fill out 27 different
forms (bureaucracy killed the Cold War, apparently), but we have to hope as viewers
that she’ll be back next season.
With Grannie, and with each of the other female characters, one of the things
The Americans has suggested in a remarkably subtle fashion is how much more independence women
seem to have east of the Iron Curtain. Compare Martha languishing as an FBI secretary
with Nina rapidly ascending up the KGB chain of command, or Elizabeth and Philip working
alongside each other as partners with the alienation between Stan and Sandra. The
finale crystallized all this when it showed Nina wearing an apron in the studio and
washing dishes as she pondered her new exfiltrated American life—a world away from
the power suits she sports in the Rezidentura.
A nice, tidy way to pull audiences back into a second season would have been to have
either Elizabeth or Philip captured and forced to play mole. It was a superb plot
twist in the end to have Philip’s attempt to take the fall for his wife spoiled when
the meet they were both so convinced was a setup turned out to be legitimate, and
the routine matter of getting in a car and listening in on the bug in Caspar Weinberger’s
study was the event that got the pair of them almost captured and Elizabeth shot.
The Colonel, the source of so much debate, was simply a disaffected higher-up frustrated
by the Reagan administration’s grandiose posturing—exactly the right kind of person
for a KGB agent to attempt to turn. Nina managed to let Arkady know that the FBI were
closing in on Directorate S and were about to be “very happy,” which led to Arkady’s
slapstick graffitiing of an “abort” signal on a car door. It was gratifying to have
an action sequence after so many weeks of languorous, drawn-out scenes of marital
demise and emotional discomfort, even if Philip did choose to steal a car that looked
oddly similar to the one he was trying to ditch.
At the end of last week’s
episode,
the KGB seemed to have a much better hand than the FBI, but
with the unexpected arrest
of Sanford Prince, the scales are very much tipped toward an
even balance again. (The
director of the season finale,
Adam Arkin, emphasized this by showing the FBI’s file on Prince followed immediately by the
KGB’s file on Stan.) The cross-referencing of the two organizations, showcased so
superbly in the credits, has always been one of
The Americans’ strengths, and the actions of agents on both sides have tended to echo each other
in a way that could feel artificial but doesn’t. When Stan killed Vlad, a thoroughly
sympathetic character, it was in the same episode that the KGB killed Chris. As we
go into season two, each side has a window into the other’s operation. While initially
it might have felt like an obvious bet to put money on Philip defecting, the KGB’s
pursuance of Stan leaves more options on the table.
Some thoughts:
As we might have suspected, the season closed with a fantastic song on the soundtrack—Peter
Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers.” “Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games/
Hiding out in treetops shouting out rude names.” If that isn’t an analogy for the
whole of the season, I don’t know what is.
Henry has a
Star Wars comforter. And neither he nor Paige is allowed to go into their parents’ room at
night, which feels unbelievable as a rule that’s never been broken.
I loved how the director moved from a shot of Elizabeth kissing her son goodnight
to a shot of her opening her secret lockbox, complete with guns, poison, and wigs.
Poor Martha!
What did you think of this season of
The Americans? Let us know in the comments.
