The Great Patriotic War

It’s a growing war in the Jennings household.

The rift between Elizabeth and Philip is far greater than a disagreement. It’s a full division of ethics, morality, and political ideology. Since Philip decided to remove himself from the spy mission, he and his wife started living separate lives, all the way to the point in cleaving the parenting responsibilities in half. Paige to Elizabeth and Henry to Philip. Philip, from day one of the idea of getting Paige on board with the spy mission, has been opposed to it. He’s sat on the sidelines, in the dark mostly, on how Elizabeth is teaching Paige and the problems have gotten so bad, it’s becoming a danger outside of the house. Paige is taking risks and making terrible mistakes. And it’s all comes down to Elizabeth.

I’ve said that Elizabeth has been using (teaching) kid gloves with Paige for far too long and it’s blowing up in her face. She’s letting Paige make too many mistakes. Where others would have been let go, Paige is continuing to be used on missions. It’s nepotism at its worst. This time, Paige gets into a fight at a bar and throws down to physically defend herself. She’s known there so she’s drawn a huge spotlight to herself. “You can never go back there.” “Yes, I know that.”

Paige asks her mother to spar to blow off steam (and practice) where all of her transgressions come out–and Philip is there for it. She gets mad at her mother and snaps back, throwing an attitude far beyond her age and training. Sex comes up and that throws Phillip for a loop, forcing Elizabeth to tell him about the college intern mark Paige has/had in her sights. Elizabeth tries to talk him down, that she told Paige in no certain terms to not honeypot this guy to make him a source. With the bar fight, Elizabeth gets a much brighter picture that Paige isn’t meant for this line of work. When she says it to Philip, that he was right, he angrily tells her that “I said she would be able to do it. My point was that she shouldn’t do it.” Not only is he angry that his message was completely ignored, he’s furious over what Paige is turning into. The spy lessons may not be sticking too well, but the propaganda is.

Elizabeth spends way more time with Paige than Philip now. It also looks like Elizabeth and Philip don’t spend much time together. They definitely don’t have the bond they used to. Elizabeth is using Paige to keep the Soviet fight alive since she pretty much lost Philip in that role. As Elizabeth sees it, him stepping away from the work, is a giant step away from her. She can’t confide in him, she can’t work things out with him, she’s doing all the heavy lifting by herself. I think she resents him for it and that’s inadvertently seeping into Paige.

Philip is so flustered by finding out all that stuff about Paige during the sparring match that he goes to her apartment to talk to her. He asks if her roommate is around and when she says no, he finally speaks up about what she’s doing with her mother. Paige let’s loose with a flippant comment along the lines that he isn’t like her or Elizabeth, they see the world differently than he does now. It’s serious shade thrown at him and I’m not sure if she even realized it. I certainly did when his whole demeanor changed. If Philip was mad before, this pushes him over the edge. He tells her to attack him, show him what she’s learned, all the skills that Elizabeth has taught her on the quest to “save” the world.

He straight up dominates her. She’s tentative at first but he makes it clear he isn’t playing around. It’s a reality check from her father with anger fueling it. Oh, so you know what the world is like? You know everything? You think you’ve been in the trenches with your mother? You know nothing. He easily blocks every single one of her attacks and reverses the ones that leave her wide open. He could have easily choked her out but simply pins her against the wall, unable to do anything. This shocks the hell out of her. He is far more capable–and dangerous–than she ever thought he was. Paige still thinks the American source killed himself in front of her mother, she has no idea the extent of the darkness her mother, father, and those who have worked with them have done.

So with this battle going on, it was heartwarming to see Elizabeth and Philip come together. It had been so long since we’ve seen them express any sort of compassion to each other, it felt like a major milestone. Maybe things would start getting better between them. The morning after the lovemaking, Philip is a bright and bushy tailed man. After he makes Elizabeth coffee she lays down a bomb at his feet. Kimberly leaving the country, away from her father, is a problem. She needs the information the tapes they get stashed with her father. All other missions have failed and it’s desperation times because the summit is getting close. She needs him to do a hail mary mission: meet with Kimberly in Greece, get her to go to a communist country, plant drugs on her, and get her arrested. This will allow them to yse Kimberly as leverage to get her father to tell Elizabeth everything she needs to know. Then, Kimberly will be released and Philip will be all the way out of the spy game. Elizabeth will never ask him to do anything for the Soviet Union again. After a while, Philip agrees to do it. But…would he have said yes if Elizabeth didn’t break the ice last night? Did she honeypot her own husband to manipulate the decision in her favor?

Philip meets up with Kimberly and floats her the idea of visiting her in Greece. She doesn’t go for it and he ultimately crosses the line with her to get her to change her mind. After years of not getting physical with Kimberly (she was underage after all), he sleeps with her to change her mind about Greece. She wouldn’t be meeting up with her friend, but her boyfriend. He’s back doing everything he resents. When Elizabeth asks him if Kimberly agreed to the meet-up, he says yes but doesn’t tell her what he did.

Through all of this, Elizabeth has blinders on. She’s laser-focused on doing the work her homeland puts her on. Figuring out the summit is just one problem, Gennadi is the other. And she’s made much more progress on Gennadi. Following Stan has paid off, they’ve found him. Elizabeth is on the hunt and after one close call in an alleyway, she sneaks into his apartment to kill him. What she didn’t realize though, is that Sofia has come with their kid to spend the night. She tries to bail on the mission but gets caught, killing both parents and leaving the child to discover them murdered just feet away.

Stan is devastated when he arrives on the scene. That day he was hanging out with Gennadi, bored out of his mind wishing he wasn’t being forced to babysit this guy. Hours later, the people he swore the bureau would protect for their help are dead. Right underneath the nose of protection.  I think it’s safe to say he’s having flashbacks of Nina.

Stan mopes into the Jennings household the next day and finds Philip alone eating lunch. Over a drink, Stan tells him about the two Russians who were killed last night and Philip has a hard time hiding his honest reaction. It’s one of shock and disgust. While he explains it away to Stan as being surprised at hearing such a thing (which is true) he knows that it was Elizabeth.

Before this, I thought Philip had already been pushed to his limit. His fight with Paige was a physical manifestation of his anger and disgust. This news seals the deal, Philip completely flips. He calls Kimberly from a phone booth that night and severs ties with her. He will absolutely not help Elizabeth in any way now. He goes a step further than “breaking up” with Kimberly, he cryptically warns her about her trip. Stay in Greece, do not leave with anyone that approaches you. Come right back home. I think this is the first time Philip has risked outing himself. This is massive.

Philip has planted his flag firmly in American soil.

Mr. and Mrs. Teacup

Another brutal episode for Elizabeth.

The Americans have always been very careful about presentation. How scenes are shot, the careful and calculated way the spies talk. Give just enough information and always listen carefully. I bring this up now because of how stark the portrayal is between Elizabeth and Philip compared to how they used to be shown. They are almost always filmed physically far apart now. In the opening, after Philip comes home after meeting Oleg, Elizabeth comes in from having a cigarette. They have a conversation from opposite sides of the kitchen.

I find this to be the hardest part of the show to watch. We’re constantly shown how far Elizabeth and Philip have grown apart. The work ruined Philip psychologically, leaving the entire burden on Elizabeth. They have different ideas on communism vs capitalism now. They aren’t on the same side any longer and that’s even split their kids down the middle. Elizabeth tends to Paige and Henry is with Philip.

When they are in bed and Elizabeth coldly refers to Henry as Philip’s problem, I never thought I’d hear that. It was one of the bleakest things she’s ever said. There’s a wall between them in that entire scene and Philip tries multiple times to get through (whether that’s done through love of his wife or will of his mission is questionable but I do think it’s out of love) and it was hard to watch. He tries talking to her, touching her, making an effort to turn back the clock to when they operated as one. It leads to another hard line from Elizabeth: “I’m tired all of the time.” That says it all.

With Henry away at school and Paige in the thick of things, that puts Paige front and center of her parents falling apart. They openly fight, it’s so bad they can’t really hide it. With the stress of the spy game not being enough, this poor girl is being turned into knots over her parents feuding over her continued role spying with her mother. When it starts up, Paige immediately wants to leave, to try and stem her parent’s fight but Philip storms out saying it doesn’t matter, there’s no use in them talking about what’s going on so she should stay to talk to her mother. Paige had recently dug up info on someone she thinks could be a source and her mother flags her down from it. She’s not ready to make a source, she hasn’t had the necessary training. If she’s attracted to this guy, then you go for a normal relationship, you can’t have a real relationship be a source. It doesn’t work. So where do we leave Paige? She’s slept with the guy after a dinner party and she’s eyeing his work badge. She’s conflicted about what to do next. I don’t think she knows what to do and I can only hope she doesn’t make a massive mistake.

Henry’s bad news is that he probably won’t be returning to his school for his senior year. In the first episode of this season, I wrote that Philip had made great gains with the travel agency, but it turns out he expanded way too fast. The business didn’t take off and the loan he took out to make it happen is now crushing him. While Philip has the joys of beer, food, and line dancing, he now knows the American past time of debt.

Elizabeth goes on another mission to get the radiation detector using the security info she got from the guy she killed last week. It ends in a complete failure with no detector and three dead. Bad luck? Sloppy, rushed planning again or bad luck? It’s a disaster either way. And as a side note, this might have been the worst shot action scene in the entire series. I could barely see anything it was so dark.

Kimberly comes home from school and meets up with Philip’s “Jim” persona. They catch up a bit, Philip giving her no new information on what “Jim” is up to now and she tells him that she’s going to Greece for Thanksgiving which means the wealth of  information they’ve been getting from the bug on her father is about to be cut off right when Elizabeth needs it. There’s nothing Philip can do about it and Elizabeth gets mad which makes her push the limits…

It’s time for the World Series and the Haskard’s have friends throwing a party. When Elizabeth finds out who is going to be there (the perfect opportunity to catch Glen Haskard and the Soviet she’s been tasked to watch on the summit negotiation team), she pushes them to go. Erica think’s she’s too sick to go (she’s right) but Elizabeth lies through her teeth (I’ve taken much sicker people than you for a night out) to convince them to go. Elizabeth is desperate for a win and she’s now taking crazy risks to get one. She’s rewarded with vomit from Erica (“I shouldn’t be here!”) and another complete failure: the bug she had put on Glenn caught him talking with the Soviet but the conversation was stopped when Erica got sick. Elizabeth is secretly tormenting this family for no reason. Oddly enough the one thing Elizabeth did get from Erica was the message “I wish I spent more time with my husband.”

Also, I’ve been waiting for this for years and it’s now going to happen. The world of the Jennings spy family and their FBI neighbor, Stan, are coming into direct contact. The defection of Sofia and Gennadi has put HQ on high alert. Gennadi has got to go, he’ll be a propaganda nightmare for the Soviet Union. They think they’ve tracked down Stan as one of his handlers so he’s the key to get to Gennadi. Claudia gives Elizabeth the mission to follow Stan to get Gennadi’s location.

The fight between progress and the status quo has made a soup of misery for Elizabeth and Philip. Things are getting worse for the both of them with no relief in sight. How far will Philip go to stop her? How much can Elizabeth use Paige effectively and good lord is Paige going to get herself caught or killed on her own? Will Stan end up being the one to expose the Jennings’ after all this time? With how well Elizabeth’s missions have been going it’s impossible to see her pulling this one off.

Urban Transport Planning

Yeah, we still have two spies on the show.

The show picks up right after Elizabeth’s mission imploded. Instead of talking about what happened, Elizabeth unloads on Paige about leaving her post. She broke every protocol and endangered the entire mission. She even goes as far to say, if you weren’t my daughter, you’d be finished. If Paige didn’t know she had a shield of favoritism around her before, she knows now.

I was worried about how Paige would be affected by seeing her mother covered by the brains of a dead man and she’s handled it way better than I ever thought she would. A big factor is that she thinks the American killed himself. She doesn’t know that the bullet was intended for her mother.

The house divided shows again. Philip and Elizabeth have different approaches to guiding Paige through this. Philip takes the gentle road. Asks about her feelings, talks calmly and generally wants to ease Paige around. Elizabeth takes the hardline stance. She’s mad as hell and offers no comforts to Paige. No, you can’t stay here tonight, go back to your place we’ll talk about this later.

When Paige leaves, Philip moves in. He may be out of the game for a few years but he didn’t forget any of his coercion techniques. He manages to get mission information out of his wife. She opens up a lot in the comfort (maybe shield is the better word) of their home but she stops talking before she says too many details. It was hard to tell if she realized what Philip was doing or if just by instinct she knew to draw a line because he isn’t working anymore.

This episode shows more of what Philip is comfortable with now. He doesn’t miss espionage. When Henry calls from school, Philip is all about talking to his son about hockey. He only deflects the call because a volcano is spewing lava into the living room behind him. He gives a sales pep talk at work and we find out the Jenning’s are a bit cash strapped at the moment. He wheels and deals delaying a payment for Henry’s private school tuition. He likes being a traditional American dad.

Elizabeth is just neck deep in the meat grinder. She’s doing everything with the original mentality she had when first placed in the USA years ago. The Soviet way is right, America is wrong. She talks to Paige about the sacrifices they must be prepared for in their line of work. The mission with the American went wrong because she rushed the correct process to work an asset because of the strict deadline. She loves her homeland. She spends time with Paige and Claudia listening to their music, cooking their food, watching their TV shows. And then when she leaves Claudia’s apartment, America comes crashing back down like an anvil.

In another stark scene for contrast, Elizabeth brings home a bit of the food for Philip. He says it smells great but demurs that he just ate Chinese takeout for dinner. He’d love that home cuisine, but he’s just too full. Elizabeth quickly takes the dejection and moves to throw it away (their protocol so strict that that shouldn’t have a shred of Soviet anything in the house) and Philip quickly moves to take a bite. It does nothing to break the sadness of the close up off Elizabeth dumping the food into the sink and turning the disposal on.

Meanwhile, we get to see Renee possibly angle Stan to get a job at the FBI. He quickly shuts it down. Also shut down is Sofia and Gennadi. Sofia wants a divorce so the stable relationship they need is ruined and she’s running her mouth to the man she met. It’s too risky to keep them on the mission (which only Gennadi was seemingly doing) so the FBI pulls the plug. That means the two will be separated by witness protection to keep them safe. It means that Gennadi will be separated from his wife and child. His family is being physically pulled apart.

Stan also pays a visit to Oleg, who is none too pleased to see him. Stan explains how he told (and threatened) the FBI to leave him along. Oleg isn’t exactly moved by the explanation and apology so Stan moves on to the business on hand. Whatever you are here to do, don’t do it. Oleg doesn’t say anything.

The episode ends with Philip and Elizabeth on their own missions. Elizabeth works a mark for security details at a facility that holds the radiation detector she needs. Philip goes to meet Oleg. After getting the information she needs, Elizabeth strangles the mark to death.

Elizabeth is a ruthless soldier. Chills. Another rock solid episode.

Tchaikovsky

Everything is getting worse for Elizabeth. She’s being put into more and more dangerous situations by herself at an alarming rate. Her life and Philip’s have never been more different. He’s upset about a long time client going to a competitor and she has to figure out how to do a lunch meeting in the State Department cafeteria!

Philip is largely in the back seat now. He exists on the peripheral of Elizabeth’s world. He goes about his separate, civilian job while she’s in the trenches of trying to continue the Soviet Union’s fight in what are, historically, the waning years of the Cold War. He checks in with Elizabeth about Paige and that’s about it.

Elizabeth is juggling and spinning plates at the same time. And one of those plates is her most valued: Paige. While Paige is gung-ho about the secret family business, she’s still green. It’s a good three years into her training now and while she’s in the field, she’s not that good and Elizabeth is worried about her. Even worse, she’s still treating her with kid gloves.

There’s no way around it: Paige is a creampuff. Elizabeth knows this and it sounds like she’s thinking long-term with this in mind. When she talks to Claudia about Paige, she see’s her daughter being embedded into an organization like the CIA where she can stay behind a desk to pass information along, not doing covert ops on the outside.

The work that her parents do is gross. They’ve done terrible, psyche-damaging things. Philip hit his limit years ago. When Paige first found out her parents were spies, they eased her into it. They lied to her about any notion of using sex or violence to accomplish their missions–they convinced people with words. We’re talking about a young woman who got really conflicted about pushing Pastor Tim out of the country last season. She felt guilty about changing his life behind the scenes and that was a dream scenario come true for him. What her parents kept from her is that he was almost killed to get him out of the way. Elizabeth is still fronting to Paige about the world her daughter is now in and she can’t keep doing it. Paige reads about using sex as leverage and coerision and Elizabeth tells her it isn’t true. She then fights with herself about lying to her and sort of admits that it’s possible. That you can get close to targets and how dangerous that is. This all comes to a head when Elizabeth pushes an old American contact for a lithium-based radiation detector and it goes horribly wrong. Last season Paige freaked out over getting jumped in a parking lot and seeing her mother kick some ass. What’s going to happen to her now that she’s seen a man’s brains all over her mother’s face? If Paige wasn’t her daughter, Elizabeth wouldn’t be training her this way. She’s being a parent first and it’s caught up to her.

Aside from the deal gone wrong, Elizabeth is also keeping tabs on her American negotiator mark, Glenn (the husband of the ill woman, Erica). Erica is deteriorating quickly, Claudia tells Elizabeth that her goal is to keep her alive until after the summit. Elizabeth is really uncomfortable on this mission. She’s not a real nurse so her bedside manner is terrible. She openly distains art, which is basically Erica’s life force at this point. Erica has no patience for any kind of nonsense so she forces Elizabeth to sit down and take a crack at drawing. She’s going to make Elizabeth look at the world differently. In another uncomfortable scene, Elizabeth offers Glenn help to shorten Erica’s suffering.

Then she’s got her old contact set up a lunch meeting at the State Department to catch up (he thinks she’s also an employee). A Soviet spy getting into essentially ground zero for getting caught is a hell of a task and when forced into it, Elizabeth commits to it (Claudia’s face when she tells her where the meeting is, says it all). She barely pulls it off and ends up getting valuable information. Ronald Regan is apparently going senile. That means he isn’t running the show…the people around him, who are even more hard-line about the Soviet Union, are most likely calling the shots now. This throws out the rulebook the Soviets have been using.

Meanwhile, Stan and Dennis’ mark from last season is in bad shape. Sofia was always a risk, she’s a blabbermouth. The man she met, Gennadi, ended up being a lucky get. He was all about helping out and has become valuable for the services their department put them on (it looks like an info courier). Stan has moved departments though, so he’s removed from managing them. Gennadi asks to speak to him directly and he goes to help out Dennis. Sofia is fed up with Gennadi and wants a divorce. She’s convinced he’s cheating on her and she’s met a “nice man” at work. Gennadi doesn’t know why she kicked him out. Her talking to another man is bad enough (re: blabbermouth) and the dissolution of this relationship could completely kill this asset (literally too, what Gennadi does is dangerous). Also, Oleg has been spotted by the feds in the country. He’s got all the right paperwork to be in the US, but Dennis would like Stan to talk to him if they were to cross paths. I look forward to seeing that.

Finally, I noticed a disturbing undertone throughout. Elizabeth planning for her end. Everything is riding on this summit. All of her missions now are putting her in danger. The odds of getting caught at the State Department were huge. She tells Claudia what she wants her to do with Paige if she gets caught. Talking to her old contact (starting at the bookstore) made her worry about her home and thus her future. Her contact thinks the US holds all the cards and that the Cold War is really close to coming to the end. That means the end of Elizabeth’s work…in failure. She and Philip devoted their whole lives to this. Odds are, Philip would be okay with this outcome. Elizabeth, definitely not. From her perspective, she sees the end of her life. Prison, the ever-present threat of death, failure of her life’s work. And this fear makes her push the second old contact (he went to them in 1981 about the Star Wars program) too hard. He freaks out and she almost gets killed. One dangerous job turned out okay but the second is a disaster. The consequences are going to be major.