In the end, yes: Elizabeth and Philip had each other. “Your house? Your American kids? Philip?” To put moral qualms over duty is vanity, and it leaves one unmoored. To Claudia, the homeland (her specific, proto-Putinist idea of it, which she believed Gorbachev has betrayed) was the family, one that had suffered losses in the millions and was therefore owed unquestioning fealty. In turn, when she realized that she’d been used and turned against her spymasters, her handler Claudia ( Margo Martindale) dismissed her act of conscience: “You never really understood what you were fighting for.” When Elizabeth learned, for instance, that Philip had been leaking information about her efforts to undermine the summit, she reacted as if he’d confessed an affair: “How long has this been going on?” (The betrayal was more intimate than the infidelities that were all in a day’s work for them.) Instead, the show dug into its root concern: Which family - your nation, your team, your blood - has the deepest claim on you? Smith,” pitting the pair against each other.
Finale notepad 2018 series#
plot to undermine Mikhail Gorbachev, which Philip eventually discovered, to his horror.Īnother series might have gone “Mr. He dropped out of the spy game she was drawn in to a K.G.B. The final season began by putting their loyalties at odds. Not Philip and Elizabeth they had entanglements, a family. This too separated “The Americans” from its predecessors, which focused on, and ended with, an antihero’s individualist journey: Walter White alone with his lab equipment, Don Draper sounding his solitary “Om.” It was also a series - even if this is strange to say about a show filled with long cons, disguises and betrayals - about loyalty and partnership.
Finale notepad 2018 tv#
If much of antihero TV is about what happens when you abandon principle, “The Americans” was about how principle can lead you astray - and how it can then lead you, if not to redemption, at least to restitution. They had a cause, even if it was deluded and wrong. Both shows had a sense of slow-rolling, inevitable doom - eventually, the game would be up, and it would not be pretty.īut unlike Walter White, Philip and Elizabeth were not in it for themselves. agent brother-in-law, so did Philip and Elizabeth ply their trade for years across the street from Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an F.B.I. It invited you to feel a complicated identification with protagonists who had done terrible things.Īs I’ve written before, the series’ broad-strokes arc was not unlike that of “Breaking Bad.” Just as Walter White ran his drug operation under the nose of his D.E.A. “The Americans” was in one sense a typical ambitious cable drama of its era. This, of course, raises the essential question of why you should have felt bad at all about anything that befell the covert Soviet agents Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys). The show featured its share of gruesome mutilations over six seasons, but the only thing broken and stuffed into a suitcase in this finale was your heart. To the end, the deepest blows on “The Americans” were the ones that didn’t leave a mark. Even the cyanide pill went unused, despite its having been introduced in the season’s first act, evidence that even Russians are not always bound by Chekhov’s rules. There was no violence, just a drawn gun that never fired.
Wednesday’s devastating series finale - dryly named “START,” for the 1980s arms talks - gave my pause button a workout.
Spoilers for the series finale of “The Americans” follow.įX’s “The Americans” is the kind of show I think of as a “pause-buttoner.” You watch with one thumb on the remote, hitting pause every so often because - ugh - the tension.
0 kommentar(er)
