‘The Americans’ Season 6 Premiere Recap: Orders of Magnitude

Elizabeth Jennings sits in a cafe in Mexico City and learns that the leader of the Soviet Union will be murdered if he agrees to deactivate his country’s top-secret plan for retaliatory nuclear annihilation. She learns this not in a warning, but in a demand for her assistance. Making an end-run around her superiors back home, a man from the Soviet army has come to recruit her to spy on Gorbachev’s team at a disarmament summit. Her job is to make sure that the Strangelovian project — codenamed “Dead Hand,” because why fuck around — is not on the bargaining table. If it is, she is to report back, and history will change forever.

As she learns this information, which will culminate in her receipt of a necklace with a poison pill hidden inside in order to protect the sanctity of Dead Hand should she ever be captured, Peter Gabriel’s “We Do What We’re Told” rises in volume on the soundtrack, higher and higher, until the only reason we can make out her contact’s words is because we can read their subtitled translations. It’s a clever callback to The Americans‘ first episode and its use of “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins — another eerie solo standout from a Genesis alum that was famously used in the soundtrack for Miami Vice some thirty years ago. But it’s also away to focus our attention not on the mission, but the shock of receiving it. The Americans deploys quiet and wordlessness as effectively as any show on TV; so many of its standout performers (Noah Emmerich, Brandon J. Dirden, Costa Ronin) are strikingly soft-spoken, and many of its best moments consist of characters just standing and staring at something they can only just bear to see. This isn’t an option in the middle of receiving your marching orders, so the show does the next best thing: It drowns them out. Elizabeth herself is quiet, but there’s a tumult in her head.

On a plot level, the premiere of The Americans‘ sixth and final season throws caution to the wind in three major respects. The first is obvious, and the show’s been building to it since Season 2: Paige is a spy now. It’s not quite the joining-the-family-business moment we might have expected, insofar as Philip — who was never keen on recruiting his daughter to begin with — has retired, and is living a life so painfully square (delivering pep talks during all-hands meetings at the travel agency he previously ran just as a front, going out line dancing with his employees for god’s sake) than he’s closer to the kind of hapless American dope they used to fuck over routinely than to the master of espionage he used to be.

Nevertheless, there she is, on the other side of a time jump to 1987: fluent in Russian, staking out targets in shifts with her mom and their colleagues from the Centre, bluffing her way through encounters with amorous Navy security guards. Elizabeth praises her handling of the sailor, who discovers her loitering in her car near a security zone but confiscates her (fake) ID only to force her to go out on a date with him. “Under pressure, you kept your cover,” Elizabeth says. “You said and did all the right things.” Except, of course, for killing the guy to solve the problem permanently, which good ol’ Mom takes care of herself. Note that the other spy working with the Jennings that night refers to Paige as “Julie” and doesn’t know the nature of her relationship with Elizabeth; that’s no doubt mandated by the Centre to prevent anyone from giving away the success of their “second-generation illegals” deep-cover program, but it also gives Elizabeth a little extra breathing room to murder people in order to keep her daughter safe, which I think it’s safe to assume she did without seeking approval first.

The second big shift, and the crux of the episode, is that Philip and Elizabeth have at last been officially pitted against one another. The Americans has been building to this even longer than it did with turning Paige, with Philip suggesting they defect and Elizabeth shooting the idea down in the very first episode. (The show hasn’t referred to that particular debate in years, wisely, since it happened way too soon in the series’ run; never give your characters an ironclad escape clause in the pilot.) Elizabeth has remained the Jennings’ true believer in the Soviet cause generally and their lethal methods of advancing it specifically ever since.

But — and maybe this is my fault, as I’ve never been much of a prognosticator — I never expected their conflict to become this literal, with Philip taking on the task of spying on and stopping his own wife, should it come to that. The show sends the message of whose side we’re to take in this battle in any number of ways. Elizabeth receives her marching orders from a rando general in some spooky Soviet missile division; Philip is basically begged to participate by Oleg Burov (Costa Ronin, one of the five or six most underrated performers on TV), the most up-and-down decent guy in the entire series (even Stan Beeman has murdered in cold blood), who moreover is risking his family to make the request. Elizabeth receives a necklace with a suicide pill in it; Philip is just asked nicely.

You can all but hear Elizabeth trying to bulldoze her own doubts when she declares the summit her new handlers want to disrupt a fraud; the only reason Philip has to get involved at all is because he believes the cause is just. There’s the historical record to consider, too: We know Elizabeth is on the losing side of history, and moreover we know it’s not good to assassinate a major world leader over peace talks. Finally, there’s that music cue, the way it overwhelms Elizabeth’s conversation with her contact; when Oleg and Philip have their heart to heart, you can hear every word.

Then there’s the third major departure from what’s come before, subtler but maybe even more fundamental. It’s to do with that bit about the historical record. Obviously we know that unless the show goes alternate-history on us, Elizabeth’s hardliners don’t prevail, Gorbachev lives, the entire Communist bloc collapses, and so on. We’ve known that all along, and it’s been one of the main drivers of pathos for the show where we viewers are concerned: Not only are Philip and Elizabeth ruining dozens of lives, including their own, they’re doing so for a lost cause.

Yet for the first time, they’ve been placed right at the heart of how that cause was lost. Sure, Team Elizabeth will remain on the side of history’s losers. But Team Philip? That’s a different story. For all we know right now, The Americans six-season run could end with Philip Jennings saving the life of a figure right out of your social studies textbook and indirectly causing the fall of the Berlin Wall. That lifts the Jennings right out of the also-ran status they’ve shared with other shows in which fictional characters interact with a well-documented factual milieu, from Boardwalk Empire to Halt and Catch Fire. This raises the stakes as considerably as Paige joining the KGB or Philip and Elizabeth receiving equal and opposite assignments.

Which brings us back to that music cue. Watching The Americans in 2018 is a much different experience than watching The Americans in 2013 — not just because it’s much better show than it was during that first season (a reasonably enjoyable thriller and not much more), nor because during the 2012 election liberal pundits treated Mitt Romney describing Russia as our enemy as a gaffe while now many of those same pundits are out to start a new Cold War against the country and its ex-KGB leader. You get a little closer when you start talking about why — Russian meddling in 2016 election and influence peddling with its Electoral College–appointed winner Donald Trump and his minions — but only if you treat that as the starting point rather than the finish.

Should even the worst of the allegations against the Putin and Trump governments turn out to be true, they’re basically just tit for tat if you go back to what happened after Gorbachev, when America helped establish an oligarchy by kicking off a capitalist fire sale in the country, and intervened directly and more or less openly to ensure Putin predecessor Boris Yeltsin presided over it. A slightly, but only slightly, less dramatic looting of the commons by corporations, their wealthy viziers, and their paid representatives in the United States government took place here at home. And there’d be no Trump on whose behalf to meddle if our own grotesque racism, sexism, xenophobia, gutting of the social safety net, and worship of money hadn’t made him possible.

In short, it’s much, much harder than it used to be for all but the most blinkered patriots, liberal or conservative, to look at America and Russia’s recent history and see good guys and bad guys. History is a palimpsest, rewritten as we go. And as with Elizabeth in that cafe, things that used to be sound perfectly clear are getting harder and harder to hear.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch The Americans Season 6 Episode 1 ("Dead Hand") on FX