Gregory was offered the chance of exfiltration to Moscow but turns it down (from memory he even has a conversation with Elizabeth about this where she tries to persuade him that there’s no racism in Russia and he will be treated as a hero), before he tells Elizabeth that he is going to commit suicide by cop.
The show is inviting us to draw a parallel between what happens with Phillip’s asset and what happens with Elizabeth’s asset. I agree that they are different. I agree it is an unfair comparison to make from the show but I don’t think it is an unfair comparison for us to draw since the show is pushing towards that parallel to make a point - and the point isn’t about spycraft, it’s about the characters. Elizabeth is a stone cold killer, who reacts to moments of stress with anger (viz a viz Paige) and swift and unmerciful calculation. Phillip is probably not cut out for this anymore. His reaction to stressful situations was to blow his cover with his asset, do everything he could to exfiltrate her and succumb to depression. This is why I think the writers did it - to show us, for the umpteenth time, that these two people deal with similar situations very differently and that it could well be the breaking of them.
Gabriel has relieved the stress from the two of them for the time being and, from what little we saw in the final montage, they appear to have returned to “normal” but, as with the dragging back up of Gregory in the fight Phillip and Elizabeth have, all of this stuff is going to sit there, waiting to be used again.
I don’t think it invited us, it grabbed us in a headlock and smashed our collective skull against a concrete wall.
Elizabeth has been mad as hell with Philip for getting emotional involved with Martha. It’s simple jealousy because she was also involved with Gregory but we are where we are. So it all came out in one of those epic marital rows couples have - you lied TO MY FACE, etc.
But as we saw after, when Gabriel became a temp councillor, it was related to the stress of so much going on. E didn’t give P up about EST. Next scene he’s tending her wound.
The asset thing was just a devise in this instance. One of those simmering martial pots that occasionally boils over, and usually makes the relationship stronger.
I thought it was brilliant. They worked Martha out of their marriage.
Philip has been extremely stone cold when he needs to be. He basically ordered Elizabeth to kill that old lady last season and he had no problem using Annaliese or Fred or depositing Baklanov when he had to. Or killing that geek to protect Martha. He is also perfectly okay with Paige spying on the pastor, because that’s the only way they are going to keep him and the Mrs in line.
He did what he did with Martha because otherwise he was screwed. She knew his face and even before do you think the disguise would have fooled Beeman? He needs to get her out, he has no emotional connection with Martha at all, that has been made abundantly clear multiple times.
Because Martha was not an alcoholic who had made it clear that there was only one option that interested her: going to the police.
Lisa was clearly intractable. Neither reasoning with her, nor offering her a new life in Russia, was going to work. There were only two ways the Lisa situation could have ended: with Lisa going to the cops, or with Lisa dead.
Some fans of this show are deeply committed to the “Philip is Sympathetic & Elizabeth is Vicious” theory of what’s going on; in search of evidence supporting this interpretation, they have to be blind to certain facts that have been established in the show. (I would suspect that in the Venn diagram of fans of The Americans and fans of Breaking Bad, there is a further little overlap area for those who think Skyler was Awful and those who think Elizabeth is Awful.)
The incremental drip drip drip of the stuff he’s had to do, combined with striking up a real relationship with Martha, put him in a position where he wasn’t prepared to act in the way that he has in the past. I think this has been something that the show has done really well actually - his trajectory has been clear but, along the way, he’s done things that seem like an uptick in his badassery - the trajectory down hasn’t been smooth, but it has been human.
I think up the junction’s post at #283 is pretty interesting and gives me pause for thought. If they have worked Martha out of their marriage, that’s a very different view point to mine, which is that they haven’t and that it will come out later, when required. I should point out that my viewpoint is absolutely not gospel and very personal - it’s the sort of thing that happened with my ex a lot (i.e. nothing was worked out, even if I/we thought it was - it lay there like a trap or a weapon instead), so I am bringing my own personal worldview to this. At this point, I think it’s a Schrodinger’s plot point and it will be interesting to see what the writers do with this. Whatever happens it is more than likely to be driven by character, rather than their (the writers’) personal experiences I reckon. The one thing I believe this show has above all else is a very tight grip on its characters, which is what allows me to suspend disbelief on the insane workload they’ve got, being involved in everything, because all of the actions and reactions seem grounded in how the characters would actually react, which helps generate realism in a hyper-real scenario.
I’ve seen this too - and I’d like to state for the record that I don’t find either of them sympathetic or not. It’s more a case that both of them deal with things in very different but understandable ways. Much of the tension over the last couple of episodes for me was grounded in the idea that Elizabeth might well kill Martha and, in some senses (given Martha starting to threaten Gabriel, her going AWOL, the danger inherent for Phillip and then Elizabeth and then her family) she’d have been, if not morally, then logically right to do so. Equally, there have been plenty of times in the last few episodes where I’m looking at Phillip and thinking, “you’re being pretty foolish here”. The nuances of the characters are where this show really excels, imo.
I very much agree. And not only Philip and Elizabeth, but the kids, Nina, Stan, Oleg, Oleg’s boss, etc. Every character has depth, and has characteristics that one can like and dislike. I think Oleg is a great character (and acted well), though fairly minor. Unlike so many shows, the characters seem much like real people, with real mood swings, good and bad habits, etc.
Not sure if you’re serious, but we never got to know that kid as a character at all. Having a minor character who turns out to have done something horrifying doesn’t mean that they’d randomly have one of the main characters, with an existing established personality and story arc, do the same thing.
I agree with you both. Every time I see one of those FX ads that quote critics saying things like “this is the best show on television that you’re not watching,” I think ‘it’s great that they’re promoting it, but when are the ‘not watching’ folks going to catch on?’
The sad fact may be that the audience for the show is never going to be the majority of the US viewing audience. Some contingents of viewers are simply never going to take to The Americans: NCIS fans and Scandal fans (for example) have requirements that TA fails to meet meet (simple plots with lots of repetition for the first group, and stylized plots based on betrayals/re-betrayals/alliances-then-betrayals-then re-betrayals (etc.) for the second).
Of course it’s self-congratulatory to say ‘I like The Americans because of its deft, unpredictable plotting, abstention from cliché and stereotype, and rich characterizations’…but sometimes self-congratulation is unavoidable.
The fundamental difference between Martha and Lisa is that Martha continued to provide intel to Phillip/Clark even after realizing the he was (probably) an agent of a foreign power. Lisa, I think, thought that this was merely a case of industrial espionage and that she and Elizabeth were providing info to a competing firm (although Lisa’s husband seemed to know better). She had no reason to think that Elizabeth was anything other than what she presented herself to be, another defense worker picking up a few extra dollars on the side.
Missed this earlier, so just dropping by to reply - I’ve been watching since the 1st series was broadcast in the UK (and now have to rely on, ahem, other methods of getting the episodes as S4 is not being broadcast close to US broadcast in the UK - thankfully this is not the case for GoT), but in prep for S4, binged S1-S3 in about 6 weeks to remind me of everything that has been going on. I fell behind on S4 about 3 weeks ago though and binged the last 3 episodes in one night.
I massively enjoyed the great Americans binge experience but some bits of the show work better with a week to breathe, I think. You’ve really got to be able to stay on top of the timeline and where weeks jump past in story, for instance, so that it doesn’t seem like there is mood whiplash between episodes, where 20 mins elapse for you but weeks (or months between seasons) elapse for the characters.
It’s not about the show being too sophisticated for the unwashed masses. I think it’s more about the show being for pinko commie liberals. I think those same people wouldn’t watch a nuanced portrayal of Islamic terrorists, either.
Very true, but IF Lisa had been like Martha in being a sober, sensible person, then leveling with her about the USSR’s involvement, and offering her a fresh start there, was still one option for Elizabeth. If Lisa had then freaked out and declared her hatred of the Reds (and such), then E. would still have been able to resort to deploying the bottle-to-the-skull.
But Elizabeth wouldn’t have tried offering Lisa the possibility of a new life in a new country, because Lisa differed from Martha in being, as an alcohol addict, fundamentally unstable. (That was the point I was trying to make.)
Also having a family.
Pulling up one person at a moment’s notice is difficult enough. Pulling a woman and her 2?3? children is significantly more difficult. And that’s assuming that the woman in question wants to go and will cooperate the whole time (which Lisa was unlikely to do.)
I think the difference is Martha was like a mole, and you have to be seen as taking care of your people on the inside to encourage others.
When E said “Lisa’s done as well” no one even asked a follow up question. Lisa’s world view maybe got to Florida. She wasn’t going anywhere. Main thing though for me was it was business; Lisa got paid for info.
The take-away for me: it doesn’t really work to claim that the differing ways Martha and Lisa were dealt with ‘proves’ that Philip and Elizabeth differ radically (with Philip being Kind and Elizabeth being Stone Cold)…because Martha and Lisa were not comparable cases.
Now if the writers had wanted to use these incidents to prove something about the characters of Philip and Elizabeth, they could easily have created cases that were quite similar–and then showed Philip and Elizabeth reacting to the similar cases in contrasting ways. But that’s not what happened.
