The trouble with only killing people “who deserve it” is, who determines “deserve”? You start down that path, and sooner or later you’ll be doing nothing but killing the “deserving”.
"A man could kill from sunup to sunset and still his work would never be done. "
Philip seeing the happy family sitting the restaurant and knowing he will never, ever have that again with his family was heartbreaking.
The show was always about a marriage so we should have realized this was the ending we would get.
Poor Stan. I don’t believe P and E “played” him. I think other than lying about the severity of what they did to keep the situation from escalating, Philip was truthful about how he felt about Stan.
In hindsight I get why we didn’t get one but I would have loved to see flash forwards to how everyone fared in the 90s.
Anyone who thinks Stan’s behavior was out of character needs to remember his relationship with poor Nina. Stan has a long history of putting his feelings before his job.
What many forget is that Stan’s job before Counter Intelligence was as an undercover agent infiltrating white supremacist gangs; he came to the job already jaded and probably had expended his cache of being able to surpress his feelings.
Yeah, I was actually shocked by the close reading the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum gave that scene:
I rewatched the scene after reading this, and there’s nothing technically disproving it. But it really requires a strong belief in not only death of the author, but of the actor (because Matthew Rhys has said multiple things in interviews indicating that he sees the character sympathetically and the friendship as genuine).
Nussbaum’s reading is more cynical than mine. I think Philip genuinely has strong feelings of connection and friendship for Stan. I also think he feels like a failure as both a Russian and an American, a failure in both parts of his life. There is truth in what he says. But at the same time, in my reading of the scene, Philip is also using the truth, half-truths, guesswork, and outright lies in service to his larger goal: to extricate himself, his wife, and his daughter from this dangerous moment. He knows exactly what he is doing. He was trained for situations like this one and he has honed his skills brilliantly over the years. But that doesn’t negate the genuine emotion he experiences, including perhaps some guilt for manipulating his friend. And therein lies the brilliance of the scene IMO. If it were a scene strictly of Philip lying to Stan, as Nussbaum reads it, I wouldn’t find it so compelling. Similarly, if I saw it as some sort of soul-revealing session in which he reveals The Truth, I’d find that far too pat and unconvincing. The various nuances of deceit and truth have always been key themes for the series.
I agree with this. Philip was working hard toward his goal of getting his family safely out of that garage, but he wasn’t doing it by cold-bloodedly manipulating Stan. He was doing what made him such an effective operative over the years: he deployed his own genuine feelings and reactions, and relayed them honestly and sincerely to the person he was trying to persuade to do something.
Elizabeth had the same talent. Neither told the whole truth, with Stan or with any of the other people they’d ‘worked’ over the years. But Philip was using his real emotions to get to Stan. He was leveling with him enough to let Stan know, on some unconscious level, that what he was being told was real. It didn’t hurt that the plot had already given Stan information from Oleg that corroborated part of what Philp was saying–but the emotional truth of the pitch Philip gave was what really sold it.
Part of the appeal of The Americans has been that this tactic used by foreign spies—to make use of real reactions and feelings in order to manipulate others—is something that goes on every day, even where no international espionage is involved. It’s something that we can, perhaps, recognize ourselves doing, at times.
As for the finale as a whole: I felt it was well-written and made. The open-endedness of it felt reasonable, rather than as if the show-creator had just given up (the reaction I had to Lost, among others). No character behaved in a way that seemed anomalous or implausible, and the developments fit with actual history in a fair manner.
That might seem like faint praise; I really liked it a bit more than that would seem to indicate. The flavor of the show remained true to itself, and it’s now possible to view the entire work with satisfaction.
No, I don’t know what you mean. If you think I’m being coy, you’re projecting.
I never said not verifying she is a spy is the same as verifying she is not a spy. I said if there is no twist, she becomes a red herring. Those are not the same thing. Philip informing Stan he thinks she’s a spy put the twist on her.
Just as an aside, didn’t Paige look super geeky with those eyebrows?
Mmmhmm. Even though we already knew Philip suspected her? Helluva twist there!
Fact is, we didn’t learn anything new about Renee in this episode.
Stan learned something new and that changed the narrative.
I think that somewhere along the line Stan will wind up helping Paige. After all, he’s the only adult she has any connections with.
I can visualize Philip, Elizabeth, and Martha (and her adopted child) bumping into each other in the line to the first McDonald’s in Moscow.
In real life, wouldn’t Stan have been taken off the case as soon as the Jennings became suspect?
I didn’t find the question of whether Renee is a spy to be ambiguous at all. I thought the lingering look she gave the Jenning’s house as the FBI was clearing it out said “I’d never be that careless”, then she walked away.
To me, at least, it was clear as a bell.
If Renee was an Eastern Bloc spy of some kind assigned to keep an eye on Stan and/or the Jennings then presumably pretty soon Stan is going to come home from work and find our his wife has disappeared off the face of the Earth.
Yes, or at least he’d be reduced to a passive role in the office while another agent took over.
I would love to see that conversation. 
You think they would abandon having a spy placed so closely (so her cover must be golden) to a key FBI agent without a reason to believe that she had been burned?
Man, the more I think about it, poor Stan. He basically can never trust and has to indefinitely run counter-intel ops on his wife. His best case scenario is that she IS a spy and he busts her.
If she is an illegal, her cover won’t hold up. If she got recruited somehow, it might hold, although not if like Gregory it came via radical political action.
Here’s a super interesting and very detailed look at several of the disguises/costumes Elizabeth wore in the last couple seasons: “The Americans” Had 6 Seasons of Amazing Spy Disguises - Racked
Nice article there, SlackerInc. I guess one big question is “Whither Paige?”. Claudia, who has acted almost as a surrogate grandmother, has seemingly folded her tent and silently stolen away. She could go to Stan, the only person who has any knowledge, and even then not much at all, of her complicity with her parent’s activities. Is she aware of Mom and Dad’s suspicions about Renee? Does she have the skills to fabricate a new identity? Even if she can remain Paige Jennings, the career path she was on seems closed off to her now.