The episode tightens the vise around the characters as if to test their instincts.
The situation is now so grave one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The episode’s most obvious sign of desperation is its reliance on slide shows to orient viewers.
The show understands that in the wrong hands, belief, whether ideological or supernatural, may be no more than a kissing cousin to the violence it justifies.
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.
Trust, you might say, is simply the time we spend waiting for the other shoe to drop, and in The Americans, it always does.
A morass of lies, betrayals and undetonated bombs, “Divestment” isn’t about civil disobedience but vengeance plain and simple.
The second half of “Born Again” features a number of tautly composed images that jostle against each other as if conflicting emotions.
Professionals in the art of reading people are most vulnerable to misapprehension when their judgment is clouded by the personal.
“Baggage” uses Philip and Elizabeth’s respective reactions to Annalise’s death as an entrée into the subject of childrearing.
Throughout The Americans, there’s an ever-present sense of an unwieldy narrative arc being perpetually built up, which has become a noticeable trend in primetime television.
It puts more focus on delivering a jokes, imitations, zippy repartee, and sight gags than its plot’s familiar machinations.
The film is just a stunt or, more specifically, a calling card, but that might be enough for anyone who’s ever wanted to kick Mickey Mouse square in his padded, pious balls.