The Americans – “March 8, 1983” – Season 3, Ep. 13 (FX) SPOILERS
“You can’t see ten feet in front of you. I’ve done nothing but try to take care of you, and because you’re not getting what you want, you think I’m the enemy. And when Elizabeth doesn’t see things exactly the way you see it, you think there’s something wrong with her. You know who there’s something wrong with. Grow up.”
As KGB spy handler Gabriel, played with a precise mixture of grandfatherly warmth and icy detachment by Frank Langella, dresses down his charge, Philip Jennings, thusly, the two have arrived at a long-deferred, finally unavoidable turning point in their relationship. Philip, of course, has been a Soviet spy embedded in Washington, DC for his entire adult life, having navigated a fraught, prickly, at least initially window dressing marriage to fellow homegrown soldier Elizabeth. The Americans is set during the early ‘80s height of the Cold War, a time during which many Soviet and American pawns and proxies (Cuba, South Africa, Afghanistan) were erupting in civil unrest bordering on revolutionary violence and actively affecting the larger chess game in disproportionate ways. Stateside, Philip and Elizabeth are entrenched and invaluable operatives, skilled and deadly intermediaries involved seemingly in every covert Soviet action on the Eastern seaboard, not to mention the parents of two teenagers. Continue reading “DVR Hindsight #11 (4/23/15): The Americans – Season Three finale”
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