Like many more ordinary middle-aged couple facing a midlife crisis, they recommitted, even renewing their marital vows. (It’s easier to control your spies when they can’t trust each other.) Then, a crisis-Philip found out that Elizabeth had been raped during her spy training, and then killed her rapist, and by doing so, lost his own chance to defect-changed them, nearly chemically, inspiring a radical leap of faith. When we first met the Jenningses, they were posing as a family, but were also, after decades, married strangers, raising two children together, just as their Russian handlers had intended. “The Americans” has always been a show about intimacy, not simply as a human need but as a dangerous vulnerability, the crack that lets the light in. Thanksgiving together conversations during Stan’s divorce watching one another’s children grow up. Six seasons of sharing a beer at the end of the day, that’s how. Instead, ten minutes later, the Jennings were coolly driving away to freedom, as Stan stood by silently, as if paralyzed, watching them go. It was the last moment that Stan would be in control, during a clash of perspectives that should have, by all narrative logic, led straight to prison or, if not, to a shootout, a car chase, or something worse. Stan holds one finger up and says, calmly, “That’s a great question.” “Hi, Paige!” “What . . . what are you doing here?” sputters Philip to Stan, as if they’d all conveniently bumped into one another running errands. agent Stan Beeman says, cheerfully, to his neighbors, Philip and Elizabeth and their daughter Paige, as they enter a parking garage, preparing to flee the country. “We’ll get used to it,” Elizabeth says, although she speaks to her husband in Russian.Ī fair amount happened before that Russian denouement, although the crucial sequence began twenty-two minutes in, with a hilariously arch greeting between old friends. “It feels strange,” Philip says, gazing out at the glittering vistas of the country he hasn’t seen for more than twenty years. It was about a life spent raising kids and working long hours, entering a new stage: retirement and an empty nest. agent whose life was hollowed out for good, “The Americans” was, in its final moments, a portrait of a successful marriage. But if you squinted and ignored the pile of corpses, and the F.B.I. Certain mysteries would never be solved: for one thing, we’ll never find out if Renee was a Russian spy. In the end, the bad guys (the Jenningses, Russian spies who were somehow also the show’s protagonists) got away with their crimes. Rather than provide the viewer with bright-red catharsis, “The Americans” went out, after six seasons, in gorgeous shades of asphalt gray and snow white-a dry-eyed tearjerker to the last, leaving behind a chord of moral unease. Were you craving a bit more bloodshed from the finale of FX’s “The Americans”? Some tooth-pulling ultraviolence, or maybe another corpse crunched into a briefcase, on the long road to Moscow? If so, you were clearly watching the wrong show.
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