Episode Title: “A Little Night Music”
Writer: Stephen Schiff
Director: Lodge Kerrigan
Previously on “The Americans:”
Things are getting dangerously personal for both sides on D.C’s Cold War battleground as the causalities pile up. After the murder of their friends and KGB comrades, Emmett and Leann, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip (Matthew Rhys) rightfully fear for their family. Claudia (Margo Martindale) pops up out of nowhere (like she usually does), with an unsanctioned mission for the couple that could lead to the capture of the man responsible for the gruesome murder. Meanwhile at the Russian Embassy, Oleg (Costa Ronin) uses his family connections to undermine Arkady (Lev Gorn) and get closer to Nina (Annet Mahendru).
According to Claudia, the Center has no idea who killed Emmett and Leann, but she’s got her suspicions about Andrew Larrick, a closeted Navy SEAL whom the couple was blackmailing. Claudia instructs the pair to get to the SEAL through Brad Mullen, a young Navy recruit. Elizabeth easily gets the lonely sailor’s attention at record store where he’s checking out some classical music. But when the two start to get intimate in a hotel room, Elizabeth suddenly backs off. She later tells Brad she was raped by a SEAL she met at a bar. When asked, she identifies him as Larrick.
Listening to Elizabeth recall the story, it’s hard not to feel disgusted and sympathetic at the same time. While her manipulation of the self-identified loner virgin is heartlessly low, even after taking into account last week’s threat of an innocent factory worker’s children, we know Elizabeth is likely drawing on her traumatic ordeal with her KGB trainer. To hear her recall the event in an unwhispered, matter of fact tone, we get a sense of how Elizabeth now sees it, after she and Philip dispatched with the man responsible. Meanwhile, poor Brad just wants to help her get justice by volunteering to steal Larrick’s files.
Over at the Embassy, Oleg gets access to Nina’s files and commends her for sleeping with the enemy, though he suggests it must be taxing on her soul. Oleg also uses his new security clearance to push for the repatriation of a Jewish physicist who fled Russia for a better way of life in the States. While Nina brushes off Oleg’s creepy advances, Agent Beeman (Noah Emmerich) tells Philip about his affair over a drink at a bar. When Philip asks why it won’t work out, Beeman tells him she’s married, wisely leaving out the part about her being a Russian spy. Though he may still be playing by the rules, the walls are slowly coming down between the FBI agent and his KGB counterpart. As his marriage deteriorates and his relationship with Nina becomes more complicated, it’s possible he may start telling Philip a little more than he “needs to know.”
“The Americans” can get playful and even a little cute with its “spy vs. spy” character interactions. In this episode, we have FBI agent and recent hero, Beeman telling “everyman” Philip what it’s like to kill someone and have an affair. Little does he know, Philip makes his neighbor, who bemoans his broken marriage, look like an amateur, having killed countless people while secretly married under a false name to a woman in Beeman’s own office. And yet he still makes time for his wife.
While their marriage may be back on track, work proves difficult for Philip and Elizabeth. Brad “chickens out” when he goes to steal Larrick’s files. We’ll have to wait and see if Elizabeth’s attempt to get him to “relax” gives him the resolve to go through with it. Meanwhile, Martha (Alison Wright) and “Clark” have a nasty fight and she later leaves him a message letting him know she’s listing him as her husband on a job application. There’s trouble at home as well, as Paige (Holly Taylor) has found Jesus through her new friend Kelly, which worries Elizabeth and Henry (Keidrich Sellati) continues to whine about Intellivision
But the real crisis comes when Philip and Elizabeth attempt to kidnap the Jewish physicist on orders from the Center. Just as they’re about to throw him in the trunk of their car, they’re ambushed by two attackers who make off with their ride and the scientist. It’s a twist that could lead to the answer to the question of who killed Emmett and Leann. At the very least it will incite more paranoia for the two sleeper agents. And looking over their shoulders constantly could mean missing what’s right in front of them.
