Something I think I forgot about last week that was quite striking in today’s context: The Americans deals in blood and literal vomit. Death, sex, blood, vomit. It is never just remotely thematic and literary (although it is always that as well): it is deeply visceral. You can smell the sweat.

On a more serious note:

Superficial aside: I laughed out loud when Paige beat that guy up.He got what he was asking for. Paige’s fight training comes in handy. Your average teenage girl would not have faired so well.

Aside:

The beginning scrambling around in pitch black cages shooting people, and everyone’s face looking like a death mask....a dark vibe.

These folks are far gone.

Larger point, beyond the specifics of this one episode:

Smoking Sofia Kovalenko is the best.

I always enjoy the moments on the Americans when classic family dynamics are perfectly captured but in this bizarrely heightened context.

Classic opener.

To make an analogy:

I think Elizabeth is coming to a crossroads as the series finishes.

According to the podcast they were doing X-ray scans of diplomatic pouches. This meant they couldn’t read documents but they could see the outlines of small devices that might be hidden inside, but without breaking the seal.

IMO his struggles at the agency seem to reflect that this is simply not his forte. He is not a “natural” businessperson.

It is well established that Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1994.

I said exactly this on twitter recently.

I was just going off of wikipedia.

Yeah as i was (more than) hinting this ep did not initially hit me in the gut (well except for that last scene) in the way some of the strongest episodes usually do...but the more I thought about what was going on the more I got out of it. A different kind of enjoyment.

I was going more on just the evidence of this one episode and what the writer’s were talking about on the podcast this week, depicting Phillip as a rather bumbling business person.

Phillip is more sort of “trying on” the role of American now, seeing how it fits. It fits awkwardly but it’s not actively destroying his soul as his previous incarnation was.