The Americans final season starts in a few weeks. How do you think it will end? Here are some of my predictions:
Phil will die. Most likely saving his family (maybe not directly but possibly indirectly). Possibly at the hands of Stan but that seems a little cliche for this show.
Elizabeth will eventually turn her self in and defect. Most likely to protect her family.
She was always the true believer while Phil’s heart was already not in it in Season one and it has gotten rose since for him. This outcome has the most dramatic irony and gives Elizabeth a full arc.
The main story will end in the 80s still but we will get a flash forward epilogue when the Berlin Wall fell.
The final song we hear will be “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” (the anthem of the Clinton Years).
Phil will defect, but live. He’ll give up all his intelligence, and end up in witness protection in Tuscon. Probably very happy. During some lonely nights, he’ll be visited in his dream by the people he killed.
Elizabeth will escape and go home. There will be a flash forward where she finds out what living in the Soviet Union was really like, as she’s standing in a bread line (you do not need meat today!) thinking, hey, maybe the US wasn’t so bad? But she’ll regret nothing. No ghosts will visit her in dreams.
Stan will get credit for uncovering the spy ring, though it’ll be pure luck. He’ll get promoted, but still be as useless as he has been.
Paige. Now, Paige will convince the FBI that she was totally innocent of anything going on, but as a citizen she won’t be deported. She’ll eventually contact the center and continue to spy. She’ll never get the top American security clearance she was groomed to get, but she’ll do OK. After the fall of the USSR, she’ll turn into a free-lance wetwork specialist.
The lot of them get cut loose as USSR dissolves. They are free to live out their lives as Americans.
This satisfies Phil’s dreams, forces Elizabeth to get over her delusions and calm the fuck down, makes Paige grow the fuck up and stop pretending she’s a spy kid, the son goes off to school, non the wiser. Stan and Phil remain friends and Stan never finds out the truth.
The family, finally unmasked by Hank (er, I mean Stan) will flee to Nicaragua and join the Sandinista cause. Henry will stay behind and become Stan’s ward. Paige will immediately become disillusioned and retreat to the rain forest to champion indigenous peoples and Jesus. Philip will join the security service as an adviser and Elizabeth will hop a freighter to the U.S.S.R.
I don’t really care what happens if they make it entertaining. Season four was weak and season five was worse. This show had such great promise but like so many others just went on and on. The leads are so engaging and watchable that I haven’t given up, but the writers need to nail it down.
Philip turns out to have been a triple agent all along, originally a sleeper planted in the Soviet Union as a child by the Welsh Secret Service. As relations between the U.S. and Wales thaw in the 1990s, he retires from espionage to become a leek farmer in Nevada.
Elizabeth escapes back to her beloved homeland. She is feted as a hero, but becomes increasingly disillusioned by corruption and economic hardship. In the closing sequence, we see her in her tiny Moscow apartment, nostalgically dancing in Mickey Mouse ears, wondering what might have been.
I’d watch every episode. We need to pose as hockey players to get the secret maple syrup formula!
I saw an image of S6 with Philip and Oleg talking to one another. I always wondered if the two of them were stepbrothers. We know that Oleg is in trouble from the USSR, and I suspect he’ll call on Philip for help. But Elizabeth won’t approve…
I think that Quimby and Just Asking Questions have about got it covered. Stan will write a book called “The Spies Next Door” and he and Phillip will go on tour together like G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary did.
Something will happen that gradually causes the Jennings’s web of deception to unravel. When the FBI finally has the goods on them, they march in and arrest the whole family at dinner.
This scenario was shown on the CNN series about spies. Phillip and Elizabeth would automatically lose everything they’ve built up over 20 years—house, cars, travel agency, bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, the lot—since it was all obtained by fraudulent means. In each instance, they’d be looking at 15 years in prison for fraud.
Stan will be exposed as a clueless bungler and sent to head the FBI office in Billings, MT.
Before she’s exposed, Elizabeth is going to whack Fr. Tim, just like she’s always wanted to.
Henry will disown his family and go to work for the FBI or CIA.
Since she can’t be deported, Paige will keep her mouth shut about her KGB involvement and embed herself in the “peace” movement.
P&E will feel betrayed when Gorbachev comes to power and realize they’ve been had the whole time. Phillip might turn and spill his guts, but I think Elizabeth will crack and go out in a blaze of glory.
Credit? He has had two Soviet sleeper agents not only living across the road from him but befriending him, compromising his boss’ secretary to plant a listening device and accessing classified files, and offering him travel benefits all the while he has been working in counterintel. (Not to mention his affair with a Soviet counterspy and murdering Vlad for no reason.) He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t end up being accused as a co-conspirator. The FBI fired Gaad just for being unaware of the bug in his office and betrayal of an ancillary member of his staff. Stan is more fucked than Hank Schrader, and frankly a worse detective.
As for the ending, my guess is that Paige is going to find herself at odds with her parents as she realizes what they really are. Philip is going to have his loyalties further divided, but it will ultimately be Elizabeth who sacrifices herself for the family, which will break Philip. Henry will still be as oblivious as ever. The series will end shortly after Gorbechev announces uskoreniye and khozraschyot, pehaps mid-way through the abbreviated season and as Soviet intelligence starts collasping on itself and Philip and Elizabeth find themselves without support and potentially being sold out by other Soviet agents and/or Paige… In an extended coda we’ll see the fall of the Warsaw Pact and dissolution of the Soviet Union, with the optimistic promise that the newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States and Russian Federation, fading over the failed 1991 Soviet coup d’état and presaging the current kleptocracy.
This biggest problem with season 4 and 5 was the focus on Pastor Tim, which was both ridiculous and not very interesting. It created tension in the interfamily dynamic but in a pretty trite way. The ahow has continued to have other great moments, though, and Philip’s downward slide is the best part of the show’s ongoing character development.
And as a corollary the focus on Paige IMHO. Her season 4/5 character just doesn’t plausibly work for me. No reflection on the actor, but the writers aren’t helping her.
Speaking of Gorbachev, the final season is skipping ahead to 1987. So we’ll get to see some perestroika and glasnost. Hmm, nothing set off my auto-correct.
Amazing that the FBI was able to nail the biochemist who committed suicide but apparently never thought to contact Allison’s parents and ask for her wedding pictures. Stan might have some difficulty identifying P&E from police sketches, but he’d have to be even thicker than he seems not to recognize them from photographs, even if they were disguised.
Skynet from “the Terminator” becomes a reality. It obliterates the human race in a nuclear armageddon as retribution for the horrible treatment of its one true love: Mail Robot.
I actually think the character of Paige developing both a desire for deeper purpose and rebellion from her parents in a not so trivial form is actually pretty reasonable and representative of the attitude inherited from Elizabeth. It’s just that the ‘Father Tim’ storyline just doesn’t work. It’s not plausible that Philip and Elizabeth would expose themselves to him or let him live once he knows even part of their secret–they’ve literally killed people for less–and it really doesn’t go anywhere all that interesting. Philip’s relationship with Kim Breland is more interesting as it is fraught with both the potential for being discovered and his own moral qualms about compromising a teenage girl not much older than his daughter.
Of course, the entire premise of The Americans is kind of ridiculous on the face; while the Soviets did have deep cover agents in the United States and Eastern Europe, and did occasionally engage in ‘wet’ operations for assassination and disinformation, they did not use the former to do the latter specifically because participating in active operations would expose their embedded agents, and an agent who was caught and flipped could provide enough information to compromise their entire effort. Nor would the Soviets ever approve of agents having a family in a foreign country beyond Soviet control; despite the dogma, they knew very well of the potential for defection and generally held family of agents or lesser diplomatic agents in closed cities like Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) as effectively hostages to assure their return. The deep cover agents the Soviets implanted rarely provided more than cursory information (often misinterpreted by analysts unfamiliar with Western culture, and the reverse was as much true for American and British agents in the East Bloc) and many either openly defected or just switched identities to another cover after the fall of the Soviet Union and enjoyed the spoils of the capitalist West while Russia fell to economic and social ruin.
They’d be in their seventies now, of course, and while it is somewhat amusing to think of our current situation with an administration compromised by the Russians as being some kind of extended long-range plot, it really isn’t very plausible. Our current scenario is a combination of some reasonably canny trolling by Russian intelligence combined with the neoconservative arm of the Republican party setting up to dismantle the basic institutions of democracy for their own purposes starting circa 1993 and the Gingrich-heralded “Contract With America” which has since been hijacked by other interests because Gingrich and the GOP weren’t actually quick enough to follow through. That our own institutions have been used to attack democracy (and around much of Europe, inflaming nationalist and fascist sentiments has accomplished much of the same, rolling back to pre-WWII public attitudes) is an artifact of how indifferent we really are to actual freedom and liberty as long as we have beer and inexpensive foreign-made goods, and how quickly the public can be convinced that it is somehow someone else’s fault that we’re no longer the competitive economic powerhouse we once were. We’ve pretty much done this to ourselves, and Putin just looked for an opening to exploit.