Scene after scene transpires as a discussion about togetherness—as eternal ideal and currency.
The episode feels less like a continuation of this season’s efforts up to this point than a tangent.
The Americans Recap: Season 4, Episode 8, “The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears”
The notion that one can simply pick up the pieces and move on is the season’s central illusion.
The episode is, in one sense, a portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“The Rat” reaffirms one of the show’s central ideas that all of us are, to a certain extent, hiding in plain sight.
The episode establishes the rifts in the show’s key relationships through a series of skillful compositions.
If the episode can be said to have a central thrust, it’s an interest in bruising the characters’ convictions through a series of unexpected developments.
The Americans is as full of formal coups as any of its more flashy brethren.
It prepares the characters to reel in the big fish they’ve been tracking lately, yet never quite assuages the niggling feeling that these efforts will become a tangled mess.
A morass of lies, betrayals and undetonated bombs, “Divestment” isn’t about civil disobedience but vengeance plain and simple.
The Americans traditionally finds suspense in the slow, summative effect of its wary glances and closed doors.
A master class in suspense, not only of spies caught in a tightening net, but also of characters whose choices begin to feel less like liberty and more like entrapment.