Amph The Americans on FX, anyone watching?

The Prosecution rests its case. Luckily our judicial system is better than Nina's experience in Soviet Russia.

 

Is it really?

 

Depends on ones certain point of view.

 

I mean, she was guilty of treason; they gave her a chance to atone and she squandered it. Capital punishment for treason was/isn't exactly outside the norm. Martha wasn't going to have a pleasant time either if she had stayed in the U.S.

 

I feel like the past four and half seasons, the seventy or so episodes, have all been leading up to

Spoiler

The Mississippi disguises.

And it was all worth it.

 

FARGO SEASON THREE BEGINS TONIGHT! Is that what this thread is about?

 

You're looking for the Ewan McGregor and Ewan McGregor Appreciation Thread. You know, the one that's slightly less creepy than the Hayden Christensen thread.

 

Gee, thanks, Gabriel. Maybe you could have said something sooner when it would have been more helpful.

 

I saw the preview for this week's episode and I was like "**** yeah, good old-fashioned Nazi huntin'!"

But then they had to make it all nuanced and ****. This show never lets its protagonists have a win.

 

That was quite the tense cliffhanger.

Only one episode left

 

Tuan is such an annoying twit. There is a great chance that if Phillip and Elizabeth didn't go over there, Pasha the slasher would have croaked. Even if he was discovered so quickly, which I doubt, I don't think his parents would have known what to do, and certainly wouldn't have been able to carry it so easily if they were alone.

It seems like Liz and Phil are staying, but I assume that's a decision they'll live to regret.

I do hope Martha adopts and finds some happiness.

Even if she's not, the writers certainly want us to believe Stan's gf from TWD is an Illegal.

Only one season left

 

Tuan is a kid playing at the spy thing-- pretty good at it, actually. But even though he's a guy with a conscience and feelings for other people, he puts his human side away to do his job. Even Philip and Elizabeth seem to think he went too far in pushing Pasha to attempt suicide. They explicitly see themselves in him, and as the ace kid spy that Paige is not.

 

I will have to reflect on this season. I loved many episodes but I think this was my least favorite of them all. Many interesting developments for sure in the finale. I have doubts someone is actually from the Center but is instead a internal affairs type thing. Oleg was the best thing about this season.

Season 5 is definetly the calm(as much as can be said) before the storm, reflective, wrap up season.

I feel season 6 is going to be tragic for both our main families..

 

http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/the-americans-season-five-review-the-messiest-year.html


The Americans’ Penultimate Season Was Its Messiest, Most Depressing One Yet

By Matt Zoller Seitz

“It adds up,” says Frank Langella’s weary KGB handler Gabriel, not long before leaving the spy game and heading back home to Russia near the end of season five of The Americans. There’s been too much lying, too much killing, too much pretending that it’s all normal and that it takes no toll on his psyche. He’s done. He talks a bit about the tendency to rationalize evil, when he admits committing atrocities after the war: “I believed I was working in service of a higher purpose, but I was just scared.” The whole season is about the damage done, and what you decide to do (or not do) after you’ve assessed it. Gabriel got out. He proved to be an old canary in this coal mine. By the end of the season, we’d see several major characters expressing a wish to get out of their respective Cold War jobs, on both sides of the KGB-FBI divide and on both sides of the Atlantic. As goes Gabriel, so goes The Americans.
The season begins with KGB agents Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) using their daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) to spy on both her left-wing activist pastor, Tim (Kelly AuCoin), and her boyfriend, Matthew Beeman (Danny Flaherty), son of the family’s FBI-agent neighbor Stan (Noah Emmerich). One of the most chilling moments between father and daughter comes when Philip tenderly tells the distressed Paige, who broke up with Matthew to avoid compromising the family, “In time, you’ll get used to these things.” But he comes around, employs introspection and EST to sort through all the corpses he’s piled up and all the other misdeeds he’s committed, and engages Elizabeth in a serious talk about getting out: What it would entail, how it would affect the kids, what it would do to their identity as well as their lifestyle. He doesn’t want Paige to become like him. Neither, ultimately, does Elizabeth. Nor does Gabriel, if the look on his face when he admits his failings is any indication.
This was the most depressing season of a great series whose mood runs the gamut from melancholy to soul-sick — admittedly not the sort of description that’ll lure new viewers — and the fact that it saddened me so much makes me wonder if its virtues aren’t produced by what I characterize as flaws. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened in a TV show I like: Messier seasons often do things to us that neater seasons don’t, maybe because we’re too busy dog-paddling through the soup of odd choices to stand back and admire the storytellers’ exquisite judgment. Season five of Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields’s series was my least favorite overall: My current ranking from greatest to least is 4, 3, 2, 1, and then 5. A few of the subplots felt needlessly repetitive and drawn out, though not unnecessary; there’s a difference between a slow burn and running out the clock, and I’m not convinced that every decision here was in service of the former. There might’ve been 9 or 10 solid episodes’ worth of story, but not 13 — an assertion I’ve never made about this show before. (Intriguingly, season four didn’t technically have enough story to fill 13 episodes, either, but they got around the problem by capping their ongoing arcs in episode eight, fast-forwarding a few months, and starting the next leg of the journey with five episodes to go.) There were moments when it felt a bit too much like a TV show dealing with TV-show problems, like how to integrate Stan into a series that’s become increasingly Jennings-centric, and what to do with the Jenningses’ other child, Henry (Keidrich Sellati), who rarely seemed like more than an afterthought even during the early years. (The solution to the Henry problem — boarding school — would’ve seemed like an obvious narrative patch if the writers hadn’t brought it around again in the finale, in a wrenching scene that finds Philip telling the boy that he can’t go because it would split the family apart. That the family requires unity because it may be relocating to Russia is a topic that dad isn’t prepared to broach.)

​

Still, The Americans’ ability to focus every scene and subplot on a single guiding idea every season paid off in a big way here. Season five of this show was about the psychic price of reflexive loyalty to the tribe, and what happens when you wise up and realize the price is too high. At times, it reminded me of the sixth and final season of The Sopranos, which began with a mob soldier announcing that he wanted out, and hanging himself after being told he couldn’t quit, then continued with its mob-boss hero getting shot and realizing, probably subconsciously, that he couldn’t leave either and was probably too lazy (in every way) to try anyhow. The last few episodes of David Chase’s series were about luck running out, often bloodily, for some characters, while survivors made peace with their delusion and mediocrity and shambled on. The moment when Philip and Elizabeth realize they can’t leave the U.S. because an eavesdropping target has been given a major promotion is staged like a soft-spoken, let’s-just-talk-it-out moment, but it’s so unsettling in light of what’s come before, for them and for other major characters as well. “I’m tired of feeling ******,” Stan confesses to his new girlfriend, explaining why he wants to transfer out of his division and get away from all the spy stuff. (She tries to talk him into staying, of course.)
Two, season-long organizing metaphors were about corruption in all its forms: governments producing genetically modified diseases to destroy their enemies’ food supplies, only to see them turned against them; and the Soviet government punishing a potential whistle-blower, and intimidating KGB operative turned anti-corruption investigator Oleg (Costa Ronin) to protect their rotten status quo. “These people. They’re more powerful than you think — more powerful than KGB,” another reluctant source, a food distributor, tells Oleg. “They control all the food everywhere. They make deals; they take care of each other. Everyone needs them. Even the party.” These machines run in perpetually reinforcing cycles. They grind up anyone who tries to stop or even pause them. And even those who would seem to have a vested interest in defying their inevitable patterns end up embracing them instead, often out of self-preservation or simple reflex. “Your lives are mechanically programmed,” Philip’s EST instructor tells his group, and the key to enlightenment “is knowing the truth … accepting that you are a machine.”
One of the Jenningses’ many targets, a traitor who lured Russian soldiers to their deaths during World War II, got out, in her own way, and lived a long, peaceful life until Philip and Elizabeth tracked her down. Philip hesitated to pull the trigger, so Elizabeth did the deed, killing both the woman and her innocent husband. Elizabeth has always been the more patriotic and cold-blooded one of the pair, but even she began to soften and express regret and fear toward the end of the season. In the penultimate episode, she resists Philip’s instinctive rush to stop a source’s troubled teenage son (and an asset cultivated by their fake son Tuan, played by Ivan Mok) from attempting suicide — which theoretically might have sent his mother back to Russia, with or without him, one element in a complex plot. But in the finale, she speaks to Tuan — who wrote a negative report on the Jenningses, excoriating them for acting on “petty bourgeois concerns” — in language tinged with regret, caution, and traumatized wisdom. “It’s too hard, the work we do, to do it alone,” she says, urging him to pressure his handlers to send him a mate. “One day, it will come crashing down. You need someone, a partner to do this with, to get through it with.” A mate is a person whose job it is to give a damn only about you. Not the state, not the party: you. That’s why Philip took her to that warehouse to get properly, formally married, to assert that their loyalty to each other was stronger than the claims of their masters.
“If you didn’t have to serve your country like this,” Paige asks her mother, “what would you want to do?”
“I’d want to be a doctor,” she replies.
Good luck with that.

 

Two weeks from today until it’s back.

 

Well, this is escalating quickly.

Spoiler

I wish Phillip had decided not to sue Kimmy before having sex with her...

Last nights episode was particularly sweary...have they said **** before, let alone twice in an episode.

My theory right now with Elizabeth - working with a terminally ill woman, smoking all the time, cyanide pill - is that she'll find out she has cancer and top herself. But maybe that's too obvious.

The FBI getting hot on the tails of The Illegals could lead them to Elizabeth and Philip, but I think it will end up with Stan's wife being the one caught.

 

Spoiler

The parking garage scene was brilliant. And the ****ing show even got me to feel sorry Paige in the end, I never thought that would happen.

And what a thing for Phillip to drop on Stan as the last thing he ever says to him! Correct or not, that seed with fester and probably end up ruining Stan's marriage.

I hope that Oleg didn't spend too long in prison. Hopefully only a few years until the soviet collapse. Or sooner, if his dad has a little influence with Gorbachev, despite Oleg not being KGB.

I do wonder about Phillip and Elizabeth. Would they have enough goodwill to get some protection, or will they end up getting the Nina treatment?

One thing that was strange was the number of montages! I think there were three in the episode.

Anyway, sad to see it go, it's been near perfect for me.


Прощай, Филипп и Элизабет

 

Spoiler

I knew Stan was going to let them go! I knew it!

I kind of wanted an epilogue, but I also liked the ambiguity of the main characters' fates.

 

I had stroganoff and borscht with my family, then I watched the finale and cried several times. What an ending. What a show.

 

Saw the finale last night, and I'm still processing it.

I did like it, was blown away, and was totally surprised. But the thing that surprised me the most was the fact that Fields & Weisberg didn't take the "easy" way out and just toss out fanservice to the viewers. The entire episode I was expecting something "big", but it happened in a way I didn't expect and still floored me.

And I agree with above, the ambiguity was great. Not many finales leave me wanting another 15 to 30 minutes of the show, but this one did. Can't remember the last time when a final episode left me wanting more, but Fields & Weisberg did it.

Damn shame this show didn't get better ratings. I blame America's disinterest in history.

 

I think there are a lot of things that could explain its low ratings (besides the oversaturation of the television landscape).

1. It didn't hold the audience's hands. Following what's going on is simple enough, but you have to be paying attention the whole time. Another low-rated FX show that got miraculously renewed, Legion, is similar in that respect. A lot of people who watch it complain that it's hard to follow, but it really explains everything and is understandable if you pay attention.

2. The protagonists are "bad guys." They're not only Soviet agents posing as Americans, they also hurt and kill people who may not deserve it. The show is also heavily sympathetic toward their motivations-- primarily that the KGB is full of people who lived through WWII and are terrified of that happening to them again. Thinking of communist Russians as complicated human beings is still a bit difficult for American audiences especially with Russophobia continuing to be stoked by other media.

3. Subtitles.

4. Realistic, disturbing violence.There is no fist-pumping action. Even Elizabeth's mercy kill of that artist was drawn out and horrible.

 

I agree with Guy, we are smarter than most people. Just don’t tell the rest of the JC. Or poor Martha.

 

I know I'm really dating myself here, but I can remember when The Joshua Tree was released back in 1987. I remember when "With or Without You" was a big hit, on both popular radio and MTV. So even though I've known that song for over 30 years, I don't think I'll ever hear it the same way after viewing the finale. I had hoped they'd use "Games Without Frontiers" by Peter Gabriel again over the closing scenes, because it would've been a nice bookend to the finale of the first season. But this was much better.



And I'll post this here if anybody's interested:

https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/the-americans-insider-podcast-for-episode-610-start.html

 

I am iffy on the finale. It was excellent closure for Paige who has been struggling to find herself, and an ironic ending for Stan who was so lost in every way (between the collapse of his marriage, years of nasty undercover work prior to this series and being so heavily played by Philip and Elizabeth and maybe even Renee), but for our bad guys to get away.... hmmm.

In Stan’s case that pivotal plot point worked, a continuation of his failures, but for our bad couple, IDK.

What I saw I really enjoyed; This series was tense, well-written and brutal. I liked seeing both sides too. So I understand the choices the creative team made on every level. Very clever. Did I like all of it? No. I am okay with that.

 

The finale heavily alludes to what is coming. It's not exactly subtle what with their last stop before crossing into Canada being a prominently featured McDonald's. It just stops short of one of them erroneously commenting that it will be the last time they will see one. Philip and Elizabeth are probably not going to be happy a few years after the series ending. They are not able to stop the coup attempt, which happens in real life in 1991, is stopped by the people, and is the death knell of the USSR. They will see everything they fought and sacrificed for come crashing down, and they will see their country plunge into economic and political turmoil for a decade. Life in the Russian Federation today is still not as economically secure as it once was. They may not be dead or in prison, but with everything that has and will happen they might end up wishing they were.

On the bright side, Paige and Henry might be able to visit their parents post-collapse. That is, if they want to.