The Americans 6.10
In which we get to the Scouring of the Shire, so to speak, or to the Grey Havens. I'm so going to miss this show, but this was a worthy finale, and it ended at the right time, neither overstaying its welcome or being cancelled before it could fly.
Of all the endings I speculated about, Phiip and Elizabeth both making it back to Russia, alive, and with each other wasn't one. And yet this feels right, as it comes with a heavy price. They've lost both of their children, and if they've managed to save their country and world peace for a few years, they'll also soon see said country first fall apart and then reconstitute itself in the image of the people they just fought against. And that's leaving aside they haven't lived in Russia for decades, will have to relearn everything, strangers again in a strange country as they were when young and arriving in the US. And that they'll have to live with the knowledge that all they did the intervening years, the murders and betrayals, in the end made no difference (other than to the people they were done to).
And yet, despite all the serious disagreements and enstrangements, their ups and downs, they have each other. Which answers Claudia's question from last episode - what does Elizabeth have left? What Philip has got left. In is a bittersweet ending, and in a way, The Americans was the ultimate take on the "Arranged Marriage" trope; it'll make not just many a fanfiction but a lot of pro fiction dealing with the same subject look second-rate by comparison. Philip and Elizabeth were such rich, complicated characters and their relationship so intense, layered and, among many other things, proof that the old notion of couples not being interesting anymore once they've had sex and gotten committed to each other is wrong - if you can write and act the way the show's team could.
While there was suspense - notably early on until the confrontation with Stan, and then in the train until the Paige reveal - this was not an action-heavy finale but a character driven one, which feels exactly right. The confrontation wiht Stan was something the entire show had been building up to since the pilot, and in retrospect, its fallout was dependent on not one but three relationships - Stan's with Philip, with Oleg, and with Henry. Maybe even his past with Nina, a little. It all felt interwoven - if Oleg hadn't told Stan about the plot against Gorbachev, which he wouldn't have if they'd had a different kind of relationship, then the Jenningses mentioning it would not have affirmed their credibility at a key point in the middle of the ultimate proof that they'd been lying to Stan for the past six years. If Stan hadn't come to know them well enough to figure out they'd come for Paige, and kept this to himself instead of alerting Aderholt, they wouldn't have been able to talk without other FBI agents present. If Stan hadn't felt as strongly about Philip - and Henry - the way he did, none of that might have mattered, in the end.
Or if it had been anyone but Philip on the other side. Elizabeth came to care about some of her assets in varying degrees - most of all Gregory, who in the finale gets a cameo as part of Elizabeth's dream - , but I can't imagine her making herself vulnerable the way Philip did had such a confrontation arisen with any of them, or gambling all their lives on Stan neither shooting nor calling for backup. Incidentally, while I do think Philip was sincere in all he said to Stan after "we had a job to do", I also note he's editing somewhat with the aim of defusing and convincing Stan. ("Only" friend leaves out fellow illegals Robert and Emmet, for example, both of whom Philip classified as friends in situations where one didn't have the impression he was lying, but that's neither here nor there if you have to convince the other guy you did not pretend to feel friendship for him.) There's also the ambiguity of the Renee remark - it's true, Philip has the suspicion without the confirmation, but telling Stan is both cruel and kind at the same time. If it's true, he'll have been warned, if it isn't, that relationship, too, is poisoned from now on. But then, the intermingling of lies and truths, of emotions faked becoming real emotions and the impossibility of having anything clear-cut if you're living as an agent (either Russian or American) has been a theme from the start.
Philip deciding early they should leave Henry because Henry is utterly American and to drag him to the USSR (should they manage to escape) would be terrible for him wasn't entirely unexpected, and that's one of the reasons why I'm glad the emphasis in the fnale was on character over action - we got to see the impact this had on Elizabeth and then on Paige, and continued to have on Philip himself, before, at the moment of border crossing by train, both Elizabeth, Philip and the audience discovered they had lost their daughter, too. Paige electing to stay in the US over staying with her parents made perfect character sense, too. Russia wasn't real to her, a country she'd never seen other than in movies, the reality of spying versus playing at being a spy, which was what she'd been doing, got increasingly difficult to reconcile even in a state of wilful self delusion, and if she'd been trying to live her idea of her mother's life, then last episode's confrontation ended that desire. I'm not sure what to make of her return to the DC area instad of living under her new identity elsewhere, but I suppose unless she's already applied for a job at the CIA, which would in retrospect affirm to all and sunder she had been not just aware of her parents' true identies for the past few years but part of the KGB as well, she's in the clear in that no one can prove she's done anything other than keeping quiet about the truth. Which she could excuse with the extreme emotional pressure that comes with being a daughter. Even Stan doesn't know any better (and can't mention anyway that Paige said "they told me when I was 16", because then he'd have to admit he saw the Jenningses and let them go). She could also declare Philip and Elizabeth basically kidnapped her on their flight and she got away as soon as she could.
Arkady Ivanovich, most sympathetic KGB authority figure to grace fiction: glad we saw you in the finale again, though having to tell Oleg's father about his arrest was not a little heartbreaking as scenes went. (I do hope that Gorbachev will now intervene for Oleg anyway, btw, though as has been said, given the future of Russia Oleg might be safer in an American cell than he'd be there.) Otoh, Arkady welcoming Philip and Elizabeth in Russia as part of the near silent final sequence was basically the stoic Russian equivalent of a direly needed hug, emotionally speaking. (And told us even if we didn't know through world history that their message in the end did arrive in time and with the right person.) I do hope the three of them stay in touch, and help each other through the difficult times ahead.
Lastly: while I'm not on board with all the creative choices (too much time on the travel agency's woes, show), I find I'm okay with never knowing whether or not Renee is a spy. Either revealing her as one or confirming she wasn't one would have felt anticlimactic, whereas Stan having to live with the uncertainty just like the audience feels like an show-appropriate ambiguous note.
In conclusion: I wasn't kidding with the LotR comparison. This was an elegic finale - our antiheroes return to their homeland, which has changed so much, as have they, that it can never be the return they dreamed of when they started their journey. They expected to die but did not; their emotional losses, however, will never be undone. They themselves are anything but innocent and have in fact fallen. But they also returned from this. And they have each other, there, at the end of things.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1286547.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Of all the endings I speculated about, Phiip and Elizabeth both making it back to Russia, alive, and with each other wasn't one. And yet this feels right, as it comes with a heavy price. They've lost both of their children, and if they've managed to save their country and world peace for a few years, they'll also soon see said country first fall apart and then reconstitute itself in the image of the people they just fought against. And that's leaving aside they haven't lived in Russia for decades, will have to relearn everything, strangers again in a strange country as they were when young and arriving in the US. And that they'll have to live with the knowledge that all they did the intervening years, the murders and betrayals, in the end made no difference (other than to the people they were done to).
And yet, despite all the serious disagreements and enstrangements, their ups and downs, they have each other. Which answers Claudia's question from last episode - what does Elizabeth have left? What Philip has got left. In is a bittersweet ending, and in a way, The Americans was the ultimate take on the "Arranged Marriage" trope; it'll make not just many a fanfiction but a lot of pro fiction dealing with the same subject look second-rate by comparison. Philip and Elizabeth were such rich, complicated characters and their relationship so intense, layered and, among many other things, proof that the old notion of couples not being interesting anymore once they've had sex and gotten committed to each other is wrong - if you can write and act the way the show's team could.
While there was suspense - notably early on until the confrontation with Stan, and then in the train until the Paige reveal - this was not an action-heavy finale but a character driven one, which feels exactly right. The confrontation wiht Stan was something the entire show had been building up to since the pilot, and in retrospect, its fallout was dependent on not one but three relationships - Stan's with Philip, with Oleg, and with Henry. Maybe even his past with Nina, a little. It all felt interwoven - if Oleg hadn't told Stan about the plot against Gorbachev, which he wouldn't have if they'd had a different kind of relationship, then the Jenningses mentioning it would not have affirmed their credibility at a key point in the middle of the ultimate proof that they'd been lying to Stan for the past six years. If Stan hadn't come to know them well enough to figure out they'd come for Paige, and kept this to himself instead of alerting Aderholt, they wouldn't have been able to talk without other FBI agents present. If Stan hadn't felt as strongly about Philip - and Henry - the way he did, none of that might have mattered, in the end.
Or if it had been anyone but Philip on the other side. Elizabeth came to care about some of her assets in varying degrees - most of all Gregory, who in the finale gets a cameo as part of Elizabeth's dream - , but I can't imagine her making herself vulnerable the way Philip did had such a confrontation arisen with any of them, or gambling all their lives on Stan neither shooting nor calling for backup. Incidentally, while I do think Philip was sincere in all he said to Stan after "we had a job to do", I also note he's editing somewhat with the aim of defusing and convincing Stan. ("Only" friend leaves out fellow illegals Robert and Emmet, for example, both of whom Philip classified as friends in situations where one didn't have the impression he was lying, but that's neither here nor there if you have to convince the other guy you did not pretend to feel friendship for him.) There's also the ambiguity of the Renee remark - it's true, Philip has the suspicion without the confirmation, but telling Stan is both cruel and kind at the same time. If it's true, he'll have been warned, if it isn't, that relationship, too, is poisoned from now on. But then, the intermingling of lies and truths, of emotions faked becoming real emotions and the impossibility of having anything clear-cut if you're living as an agent (either Russian or American) has been a theme from the start.
Philip deciding early they should leave Henry because Henry is utterly American and to drag him to the USSR (should they manage to escape) would be terrible for him wasn't entirely unexpected, and that's one of the reasons why I'm glad the emphasis in the fnale was on character over action - we got to see the impact this had on Elizabeth and then on Paige, and continued to have on Philip himself, before, at the moment of border crossing by train, both Elizabeth, Philip and the audience discovered they had lost their daughter, too. Paige electing to stay in the US over staying with her parents made perfect character sense, too. Russia wasn't real to her, a country she'd never seen other than in movies, the reality of spying versus playing at being a spy, which was what she'd been doing, got increasingly difficult to reconcile even in a state of wilful self delusion, and if she'd been trying to live her idea of her mother's life, then last episode's confrontation ended that desire. I'm not sure what to make of her return to the DC area instad of living under her new identity elsewhere, but I suppose unless she's already applied for a job at the CIA, which would in retrospect affirm to all and sunder she had been not just aware of her parents' true identies for the past few years but part of the KGB as well, she's in the clear in that no one can prove she's done anything other than keeping quiet about the truth. Which she could excuse with the extreme emotional pressure that comes with being a daughter. Even Stan doesn't know any better (and can't mention anyway that Paige said "they told me when I was 16", because then he'd have to admit he saw the Jenningses and let them go). She could also declare Philip and Elizabeth basically kidnapped her on their flight and she got away as soon as she could.
Arkady Ivanovich, most sympathetic KGB authority figure to grace fiction: glad we saw you in the finale again, though having to tell Oleg's father about his arrest was not a little heartbreaking as scenes went. (I do hope that Gorbachev will now intervene for Oleg anyway, btw, though as has been said, given the future of Russia Oleg might be safer in an American cell than he'd be there.) Otoh, Arkady welcoming Philip and Elizabeth in Russia as part of the near silent final sequence was basically the stoic Russian equivalent of a direly needed hug, emotionally speaking. (And told us even if we didn't know through world history that their message in the end did arrive in time and with the right person.) I do hope the three of them stay in touch, and help each other through the difficult times ahead.
Lastly: while I'm not on board with all the creative choices (too much time on the travel agency's woes, show), I find I'm okay with never knowing whether or not Renee is a spy. Either revealing her as one or confirming she wasn't one would have felt anticlimactic, whereas Stan having to live with the uncertainty just like the audience feels like an show-appropriate ambiguous note.
In conclusion: I wasn't kidding with the LotR comparison. This was an elegic finale - our antiheroes return to their homeland, which has changed so much, as have they, that it can never be the return they dreamed of when they started their journey. They expected to die but did not; their emotional losses, however, will never be undone. They themselves are anything but innocent and have in fact fallen. But they also returned from this. And they have each other, there, at the end of things.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1286547.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.