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| Matthew Rhys & Keri Russell as Philip & Elizabeth Jennings, The Americans |
SPOILERS for the final episode of The Americans
After six seasons, the Cold War spy drama The Americans finished its run in May. Set
in the 1980s, the show is about a married pair of Russian deep-cover agents
living in America. It found a way to delicately balance thrilling stories of
espionage with captivating meditations on marriage and raising teenage
children.
Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (played by real-life couple
Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) and their kids, Paige and Henry, live in the
suburbs of Washington D.C. In the first episode, Stan Beeman, an FBI counterintelligence
agent, moves in next door. How well does anyone know their neighbours?
The premise is simple but the series got increasingly complex
over the years, built on tensions both political and personal. As with any
marriage, Philip and Elizabeth have their ups-and-downs at home and on the job.
Living multiple lives takes its toll on a person and as the 80s wore on, it
became harder for the couple to keep their secret or agree on the ongoing strategies
for helping their homeland.
In a recent interview on the Scriptnotes podcast, which
focuses on screenwriting, one of the producers of The Americans – Stephen Schiff – said of the show: “All of us are
spies in our own lives.” For the writers, that was the key theme that informed
the ongoing writing of the series.
The show is as much about Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage as
it is about spycraft and espionage, but the series is concerned with the
verisimilitude of both. The writers are as focused on the emotional character
arcs as they are with recreating 80s technology or Styrofoam containers from
McDonalds.
“Spies in our own lives” speaks to the idea that we often
conceal things we don’t want other people to know about us, and the idea we might
dig around trying to uncover truths about other people. Schiff goes on to say – "Another thing about a spy is that a spy has a cover. And maybe many covers as our spies do. And you're presenting that cover to the world... And I think something that we really try to feel in our show is what's it like to be inside the cover."
Week to week on the series, Philip and Elizabeth have goals
to achieve, secrets to uncover and people to watch. But an equal part of their
job is to wear many disguises, become other people and keep their dominant
pseudonyms as parents and travel agents as unassuming as possible. The stress
of the job and their lies wear on each other and their marriage and by the end
of season three, it begins to impact their daughter Paige, as well.
Other, lesser shows might have had FBI neighbour Stan closer
to the truth about Philip and Elizabeth earlier on. They might have upped the
stakes prematurely, putting Paige and Henry in danger more often. For a show
that had visceral moments of shock and horror (a body disposal in early season
three was particularly difficult to watch and listen to), it was admirably
restrained for much of its run. Its fifth season was criticised for being too
slow, but in hindsight it was taking its time setting up its sixth and final
season.
Creators Joel Fields & Joe Weisberg have talked about
having an ending in mind since the end of season two. After the fourth season,
the show was given two more years to plan and plot its finale. In a series
focused on Russian spies pretending to be Americans, who have a kill or be-killed
attitude, it was hard to see what a satisfying resolution might be.
From the recent precedents of shows focused on anti-heroes
that were outright villains, do you kill your protagonist (Breaking Bad), let him escape (Dexter)
or leave the resolution ambiguous (The
Sopranos)? Fittingly, The Americans
final season took some inspiration from Russian theatre and literature –
twisting one and digging deep into the other.
“Chekhov’s gun” is a dramatic principle recorded by Russian
playwright Anton Chekhov:
"One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep."
For much of the final season, Philip is out of the spy game,
trying to make a legitimate go of his travel agency. Meanwhile, Elizabeth is
effectively doing the work of both of them, taking bigger risks, striking out
more often and getting worn down by exhaustion and conflicts within the KGB.
In the first episode of year six, Elizabeth is given a cyanide
capsule hidden in a necklace she is to wear. The missions she is sent on become
increasingly dangerous and the pill hangs around her neck as a portent of doom.
It’s as clear a case of Chekhov’s gun as you can get; it’s
placed on the wall in episode one and we’re waiting for it to go off all year.
Surprisingly, as Philip and Elizabeth plan to flee the
country in the final episode, the couple cast off the fake passports and rings
of their American life – and Elizabeth drops the capsule and the necklace into
a hole in the ground. The gun never goes off.
But it’s end game now. The pair have decided to leave Henry behind,
hoping he is able to remain safely in America, and flee to Russia with Paige.
Stan has discovered their true identities, but he’s a broken man and can’t
bring himself to shoot them in cold blood. Besides, Philip drops one more
bombshell before he leaves, Stan’s girlfriend might be a Russian agent, too.
There’s a saying I’ve heard, related to theatre, but could
equally apply to Russian literature: in Shakespearean tragedies, everyone dies;
in Russian tragedies, everyone lives.
The plays of Anton Chekhov are often about Russian upper-classes
struggling with their sense of a changing world. They’re bleak in the way the
final scenes of The Americans are – a
feeling of desolation and isolation hang over the character’s lives. And while
Chekhovian characters are worlds away from Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, the
tragedy is they must live with themselves and the consequences of their
actions.
Only a few episodes before the finale, I pictured the ending
of the series much differently. These characters have committed murder in the
name of their country and while Philip had tried to extricate himself from that
life, Elizabeth was plunging deeper and deeper inside. For her, any disloyalty
against the KGB was traitorous; there was no sense she would want to embrace an
American lifestyle.
I had imagined a showdown between the couple. I had imagined
a gunfight with Stan. And while the show often undercut my expectations, after
six years of build-up, it wouldn’t have surprised me for this show to end in a
cathartic bloodbath.
But as with the tragedies of Chekhov, the damnation for
Philip and Elizabeth is they flee to Russia and must live – their children left
behind in America.
In a tense scene late in the episode called “START” (named
after the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), the Jennings are subjected to
passport checks on a train crossing the Canadian border. Philip and Elizabeth
aren’t discovered, but as the strains of U2’s “With or Without You” rise, Paige
is seen alone on the platform – having chosen to leave the train, perhaps hoping
to reconnect with her brother. It’s a devastating moment for both her parents
and Elizabeth’s façade cracks. Have we ever seen tears in her eyes before?
The long final sequence has the couple travelling through
frozen wastelands of Eastern Europe, eventually being met by a KGB agent who is
on their side, transporting them back to Moscow. The rock music of the west is
left behind and the sounds of mournful string instruments score their return to
a place that they fought for over many years as The Americans.
Philip and Elizabeth are no longer deep-cover agents in
America but they will spend the rest of their lives digging for clues in their
own pasts, hoping they raised their kids right, forever spies in their own
lives.
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| A neat bit of foreshadowing from the final season of The Americans |
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