Elizabeth
and Philip Jennings have sported a lot of great disguises over the
course of “The Americans,” but in the Season 4 finale, “Persona Non
Grata,” Philip wears one of my favorites: hair brushed back, wire-rim
glasses, saggy mustache, the beaten visage of a J.C. Penney men’s
outerwear model who’s just been laid off. I think of this disguise as
“Sad Walter White.”
The
parallels between the Jenningses’ story and Walter’s in “Breaking Bad”
have been on my mind this season. When FX announced that “The Americans”
would end after two more seasons, I thought that setting an end date was a good idea,
partly because, much like “Breaking Bad,” it involves an intimate
cat-and-mouse game and has a sense of compounding dread that can’t be
spun out endlessly.
There
is, however, a core difference between the two dramas. “Breaking Bad”
explored the idea that Walter’s crimes, however costly and evil, brought
him for better or worse to his authentic self. “I liked it,” Walter confessed to Skyler in the finale. “I was good at it.”
“I
liked it” describes pretty much no one’s relationship to his or her job
on “The Americans,” no matter how good he or she is at it. American or
Soviet, they are weighed down by their work, tired of the compromises,
resentful of systems that use them in the name of a larger cause.
“The Americans,” the masterly, melancholy fourth season proved, is more like “Breaking Sad.”
Certainly William (Dylan Baker)
doesn’t feel self-actualized, not as he lies alone, disillusioned,
dying in an isolation chamber as he is literally eaten from the inside
by the product of a mission he didn’t believe in: The biological agent
he was smuggling for a government he doesn’t trust to use it.
His
F.B.I. captors, watching him from behind protective glass, may be on
the winning side of history. But they haven’t felt especially victorious
either, as they’ve been humiliated by the discovery of a bug in their
offices and haunted by the sense that whatever cases they win are
symbolic at best. A plot is discovered, a diplomat is banished and the
process grinds on.
Season
4 finds the Cold War at a point when, as on a serial cable drama, the
end is in sight but it still promises plenty of heartbreak before we get
there. (The season spanned from just after Ronald Reagan’s “Evil
Empire” speech to the 1984 Super Bowl, whose broadcast included the Apple Macintosh ad in which a young woman hurled a sledgehammer through a video image of Big Brother.)
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All
this adds a note of gloom even to the tensest moments in this drama:
Pursuer or pursued, no one’s heart is entirely in this spy game. Philip,
always ambivalent, finally says this to himself flat-out through the
coded message of his EST session, where he vents about work at the
“travel agency”: “You don’t want to make arrangements for people you
don’t know and don’t give a [expletive] about.”
The
EST meetings, which seemed like a quirky period detail at the beginning
of Season 3, have grown into a kind of “Americans” equivalent to Tony
Soprano’s sessions with Dr. Melfi. But there’s a sense that, while it
may make Philip feel better to talk, Western self-help doesn’t have any
concrete answer for him. Like Dennis’s offer of a Coke to the dying
William, it’s a palliative better suited to first-world problems.
