I don’t think Martha is overly needy. She accepts that Clark travels a lot and can’t be home very much, and she understands that he can’t tell her a lot about his job. She has trouble with the fact that they have to hide their marriage, but any woman would feel the same. Martha may be gullible but she’s also loving and generous, which makes “Clark’s” job that much harder for him emotionally.
I agree that Martha isn’t needy. She’s the opposite of needy. She’s desperate.
I’m not insulted, but I think you make yourself sound like a jerk. She’s plain by TV/movie standards, where their idea of making a woman ugly is to give her a pair of glasses, but by real life standards, she’s fine.
There’s a gallery of Doper photos here: http://www.nouilles.info/sdpix/
That’s the real world, and those are just the people happy enough with their looks to post their picture. Martha would be in the top 10% there. In my personal opinion, she’s at least as sexy as the woman that George Clooney just got engaged to.
But if you want, post your picture in the gallery, and maybe your wife, if you have one, so we can see why your standards are so strict.
So… what the hell is Mr. Gay Army Man’s plan with the phone line? Also, Direktorate S is going to notice somebody killed their signals guy pretty quickly, I’d think.
Also, why did Annalise freak out? Did she have no idea at all what she was getting into?
(…he posts, hoping to derail the ‘this show is totally unrealistic because Nina is too hot to be going out with a loser like Stan’/‘is Martha hot or not’ discussion…)
I have a few questions about the army guy as well that I hope someone can answer for me.
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Am I correct that the soldier we see getting off an airplane early in this episode (S2 E10) is some high ranking CIA official that trained some people who murdered the father of the young lady from some Central American country (I think it was Nicarauga?) and who then kept trying to murder him?
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When he got a phone number from that junction box in the basement and called it and asked for “Bobby”, who was the lady who answered? Was that Phillip & Elizabeth’s new handler?
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Was he the same man who killed those friends of P&E and their daughter?
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Not CIA. I think he’s regular Army. But yeah, otherwise correct.
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Apparently it was–I didn’t notice, but the AV Club recap mentioned it.
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Maybe, maybe not. He claims not to have killed them, and Liz and Philip bought his story, but right now we don’t have any other suspects.
I enjoy the hell outta this show, but i have to confess that an enormous percentage of the plot is a complete mystery to me.
I’m very happy to hear that. I thought that senility was gaining on me. But you are not alone. I feel much the same way.
Law Monkey, thank you very much for the info.
It was already established in season 1 that Annelise is a bit crazy. I think she went into it intending on staying faithful to her husband, but she kind of gets off on all the sexual intrigue. She felt guilty.
It was dangerous of Philip to use her for such a mission, but he really wanted to keep Elizabeth out of it.
Recaps! Up to this point I’ve only read recaps of shows I watch for the entertainment value… It now occurs to me that I should probably find a good recapper who can help me make better sense of it, which I am sure would increase my enjoyment…
If you find such a place, please post it here and let everyone know.
I will start a search of “The Americans Episode Guide” and also “The Americans Recap” and see if I can find anything.
If I do, I will come back and post it here.
Thanks 
I picked Season 1 Episode 12 as a sample and checked some recaps at different sites.
Believe it or not, so far, Wikipedia has the best recaps.
Here is their recap for that episode: The Oath (The Americans) - Wikipedia
Sanford Prince (Tim Hopper) tells Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) that he has recruited an Air Force colonel who will give important information on the SDI project for $50,000. Elizabeth brings this new information to Philip (Matthew Rhys), who is wary, citing Prince’s gambling addiction. Elizabeth believes Sanford is delivering them the “highest source” within the Reagan administration, while Philip believes it could be a trap.
Elizabeth receives a signal from Prince that he has left something for her, and finds a jar at the dead drop. Peeling back the label, she sees schematics for the U.S. missile defense system. Elizabeth meets Claudia (Margo Martindale) who believes that the Americans wouldn’t hand over such important information just as a trap, telling Elizabeth that she believes the Colonel is real and a meeting with him has been set. Elizabeth has grown tired of Claudia as their handler and tells Philip that he wants her to be reassigned. Philip resolves to convince Martha (Alison Wright) to plant a bug in Gaad’s office to see if the FBI are planning anything. Later, while at dinner, Philip proposes to Martha, who happily accepts.
Nina’s (Annet Mahendru) suspicions about Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) grow and she accuses him of murdering Vlad, which he strongly denies. Philip asks Martha to plant a pen, fixed with a listening device, in Gaad’s office and after assuring her that everything will be OK, she agrees. Viola Johnson (Tonye Patano), who planted the bugged clock in Weinberger’s office, has become feeling increasingly guilty, and eventually confesses. She later reveals what happened to Stan and Gaad, and they surmise that Viola was threatened by the same couple who kidnapped Patterson. Viola agrees to speak to a sketch artist. The FBI discover the bug in Weinberger’s office and decide to leave it there now that they know the Russians are listening.
After planting the bug, Martha confronts Philip about their relationship, complaining that they have to keep it secret. Philip agrees that she can tell her parents about the marriage and Martha tells him she wants to get married over the weekend. Philip and Elizabeth listen on the bug in Weinberger’s office, where they hear no mention of a trap. Sanford is arrested one night for failing to pay his child support. Elizabeth fears this has something to do with the meeting with the Colonel. At Philip (assuming the identity of Clark Westerfeld) and Martha’s wedding ceremony, Elizabeth attends as “Clark’s” sister and Claudia attends as his mother. Elizabeth asks Philip if they had a wedding ceremony and taken vows, would their relationship be different and Philip says he doesn’t know.
Viola’s time with the sketch artist results in the FBI looking for a white couple in their 30s or 40s. Nina, who has grown increasingly tired of Stan’s lies, confesses to Arkady about spying for the U.S. and volunteers to become a re-doubled agent.
I’ll let you know if I find any better recaps.
Here is an even better recap for that episode:
The Oath answered the chaos and misery of last week’s episode “Covert War” with a kind of dark solidity; picture hot lava hardening into rock. Last week, I was worried The Americans was killing off too many major characters and burning through too much plot too fast, to the point where it risked turning into a still-entertaining but shamelessly desperate second-season disappointment, like the somewhat similar Homeland. I don’t think we have to worry about that now, because so much of this episode is about reconfiguring the universe of these characters, establishing who’s up and who’s down, and hinting at how the plot might shift in season two based on those changes.
Nina, who’s still grieving over the murder of her colleague Vlad, gets a promotion at the consulate; now she’s in charge of overseeing “the illegals,” which I think refers to the posing-as-Americans spies (Elizabeth, Phillip, and their ilk). Nina’s reaction as she recites the oath of allegiance and accepts her boss’ pin is terrifically real and realistically tangled: a mix of pride and anxiety. In the space of a few months, she’s gone from a thief fearing deportation (or worse) to a woman of influence. “With every heartbeat, with every day that passes, I swear to serve the Soviet Party, the homeland, and the Soviet people,” she recites.
That this is a battlefield promotion, like so many on this series, clearly gnaws at her. Vlad didn’t just love her – he loved her–loved her. “Vlad treated me like his sister,” she tells her Sonia. The response: “Because he knew that you were out of his league.” Her rise in prominence makes exfiltration unnecessary for now; she’s important enough that the Consulate wouldn’t get rid of her, professionally or bodily, without an extraordinarily compelling reason. I suspect she’s also in a better position to learn the identity of Vlad’s murderer: her lover, agent Stan Beeman. “Did you kill Vlad?” she asks Stan during an encounter in their safe house/love nest. “I would never do anything to hurt you, you know that,” Stan says, as richly evasive an answer as any murderous liar boyfriend has given. Her dream – that she had a dream that she was waiting for Stan to save her, then woke up – describes her trajectory as a character. (What a great part, and Annet Mahendru is terrific in it. She’s as strong as Emmerich, though less acclaimed because she’s not as familiar to viewers; I have yet to see her hit a false note.)
Phillip and Elizabeth are still separated, and Phillip is digging himself even deeper undercover as Clark, fiancé of Martha and the KGB’s unwitting (or maybe half-witting?) spy. I trust Phillip to be ruthless, and I don’t believe he has anything like authentic feelings for Martha; for the most part I see his proposal of marriage as the Russian spy version of what Americans would call a Hail Mary pass: a way of controlling a woman whose ethics are fungible but who needs to feel she’s being used for romantic as well as patriotic reasons. (Phillip’s marriage proposal – tracing “Marry me” upside down on Martha’s palm with his finger – suggests that the KGB sent him to Suave School.)
This Clark-Martha marriage subplot is the closest The Americans has gotten to raised-eyebrow sitcom contrivance. It makes the show’s not-so-secret agenda (examining marriage and partnership while seeming to be about spies) hilariously clear. Clark’s justification for why they can’t be publicly married, and why he has to continue to behave furtively, is a Seinfeldian masterpiece of self-serving bullshit: “I can’t even tell my parents.” “We won’t be able to live together.” “No one can know about this.”
Still, I have to wonder if the proposal isn’t partly an unconscious reaction to his separation from Elizabeth. He’s been acting surprisingly okay with it – to a degree that seems to have rattled Elizabeth – but when I see him playing the role of Clark so enthusiastically, to the point of constructing an alternate life for himself, it seems like there’s more going on here than mere tactics. When he tells Martha that his first marriage didn’t work out (“Me and my ex-wife, we didn’t care enough; what I mean is, we cared about each other, but we didn’t know how to be married”), he’s lying by telling the truth. It sounds like a confession. When you stand back from the show’s marriage plot machinations, it gets even funnier: Phillip was in a sham marriage that felt like a real marriage, but that collapsed anyway as a result of professional pressures that created the sham marriage in the first place. Now he’s getting into another sham marriage, partly (it seems to me) to expiate his guilt over the failures of marriage No. 1.
The marriage at city hall, with Elizabeth posing as Phillip’s sister and Claudia pretending to be his mother, is a little masterpiece of deadpan perversity that braids the show’s fascination with marriage, promises, lies, and performance together. (“An oath is both a statement for the present and a promise for the future,” the minister says – the second “oath” in this episode.) The scene shifts from absurdity to melancholy when the vows are exchanged and focus shifts to Elizabeth. She’s been wanting to ask Phillip to come home but hasn’t, because she has too much pride, or maybe because she’s just not the sort of woman whose personality allows for rapprochement. And now has to watch her fake husband/real husband/future ex-husband exchange actual wedding vows under an assumed identity! Her face doesn’t say, “Well, we’ve certainly gone down the rabbit hole now!” but something more like, “That should be me standing there.” Sometimes you don’t realize what you really want until someone else gets it. (Good as this sequence was, I could have done without Elizabeth’s question to Phillip: “They’re just words people say. But do you think things would have been different between us if we’d said them?” We get it, Americans; you don’t have to go all Boardwalk Empire on us.)
We see Phillip settling into his new bachelor apartment and even having Paige over for a little father-daughter hangout. I love when Elizabeth arrives “early,” but actually on time; it doesn’t just cement her perfectionist character, but it also gives us a sense of how keenly she regrets the separation and how aware she is that while the kids love both parents, Phillip will always be the more warmly regarded of the two. He’s flat-out easier to like. Elizabeth, even at her most vulnerable, reminds me of the description that brainwashed soldiers give of Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate: “The kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Meaning, not.
The episode’s most touching scene (for me, anyway) highlights the kids’ parental affection gap: Elizabeth and Paige’s heart-to-heart about that Joan Jett chick zooming in and effortlessly out-cooling her during Matthew Beeman’s band practice. “Feelings come and go, honey. It doesn’t mean the battle is lost,” Elizabeth tells her, a perfectly sound, if vague, bit of motherly advice. She continues, “We see what we see in people, things that aren’t really there.” “Is that what happened with you and dad?” Paige asks. Here, as well, the dialogue feels too on-the-nose – as if the scene is analyzing itself so you don’t have to – but the sentiments are valid. A big part of marriage, or any other kind of partnership, is seeing one another clearly, and finding a way to be affectionate and loving without idealization. Then again, what do I know? To quote Henny Youngman, “The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.”
“Marry Me Upside Down” would have been a good alternate title for this episode.
Odds and ends
I didn’t get into all the stuff about Sanford Prince and the rigamarole about the “Star Wars” missile defense system because (1) it just wasn’t as interesting as the Stan/Nina and Philip/Elizabeth/Martha personal material, and (2) it’s just a means to an end on this show anyhow. But if you want to discuss it in the comments, I’ll join you.
I keep worrying that if Stan doesn’t figure out that Elizabeth and Claudia are spies soon, he’s going to seem so stupid as to become unsympathetic. But then again, I worried the same thing about Hank on Breaking Bad, and the show did a good job of answering or at least working around those concerns. So, fingers crossed.
Please, somebody make a GIF of Claudia playing Ms. Pac-Man.
Speaking of Claudia, her character has deepened with each passing week. I think the last three episodes have clarified her position toward her agents: She views them as employees first, human beings second, and ultimately disposable if ordered to think of them that way by her superiors. But I think she does care what happens to them, if only out of professional pride. She cares in the way that an infantry platoon sergeant or ship captain might.
I think I will leave it here for now. Someone else may be able to come up with an even better recap. But, for now, I am very happy with this “Vulture” site.
I did wonder if the ISI officer said something in between her post coital smoke and Philip attack? The operation was too clean and if this series is any guide, highly clean operations tend to backfire spectacularly. Like the one with Weinberger and Larrick?
Fun fact, the real life head of ISI Covert Action Group at the time was also called Yousaf, though he was a serving military officer on secondent rather than a spy. He wrote a book about it called “The Bear Trap.”.
Darn it, I guess I should just post links to any better recaps:
Here is a really nice one from the Wall Street Journal. I Googled “The Americans Season 2 Episode 10”
For anyone looking for recaps for the episodes so far, the following are links to the best recaps I could find for the 13 episodes from Season One. They are all from the site: www.vulture.com
SEASON 01 (from vulture.com)
The Americans Recap: Way to Commit
The Americans Recap: Umbrellas and Caviar
The Americans Recap: The Heart Has Many Rooms
The Americans Recap: Who’s in Charge Here?
The Americans Recap: Sex for Secrets
The Americans Recap: Show Them Your Face!
The Americans Recap: Marriage Is Not for Sissies
The Americans Recap: We Had an Arrangement
The Americans Recap: Is It Safe?
The Americans Recap: No Future in His Sleep Tonight
The Americans Recap: The Body Count Continues
The Americans Recap: Marry Me Upside Down
The Americans Recap: Games Without Frontiers
The following links are for the ten episodes shown so far for Season Two. They are all from the site: www.clotureclub.com
SEASON 02 (from clotureclub.com)
http://www.clotureclub.com/2014/02/americans-season-2-episode-1-comrades-recap/
Welcome clotureclub.com - BlueHost.com
Welcome clotureclub.com - BlueHost.com
http://www.clotureclub.com/2014/03/americans-recap-little-night-music-season-2-episode-4/
Welcome clotureclub.com - BlueHost.com
Welcome clotureclub.com - BlueHost.com
Welcome clotureclub.com - BlueHost.com
http://www.clotureclub.com/2014/04/americans-recap-new-car-season-2-episode-8/
http://www.clotureclub.com/2014/04/americans-recap-martial-eagle-season-2-episode-9/
Welcome clotureclub.com - BlueHost.com
I know that www.clotureclub.com looks like an error and should be www.cultureclub.com but it is actually correct as is.
I have no idea what “clotureclub” mean.
I hope you enjoy these recaps. I have found them to be very good. However, I’m sure there are some other sites with even more detailed recaps and I would appreciate if anyone would like to post those if you find any.
Yes, that was her.
It was, but I think Philip was right him being too smart to fall for a random woman he met in a bar. He would not be nearly as suspicious of Annelise.
Regarding Paige; I know Elizabeth was mad because Paige was planning on forging her signature, but does anyone else think she’s even more pissed off at how poorly Paige thought this through? Paige’s entire plan rests on the pastor & his wife not making any follow-up with the Jennings, and her parents not noticing she’s gone for 3 months. :dubious:
Heh! Heh! Maybe she wasn’t thinking that far ahead. Maybe all she wanted was to get to the camp and then figured she might have been too far away for her mother to do anything about it.
But it’s still very poor thinking through on Paige’s part.
Well, I’ve suspected the teenage son from the beginning. There was something about the wideness of his grin as he returned to the hotel room that seemed…excessive and noticeable. As if the showrunners were planting a clue.
Then again, it could simply have been a case of the actor trying to “act” and the director failing to notice (or to reign the kid in if he did notice).
:o (oops, that’s “rein”.)