It pulses with relevancy in a time when debates over authoritarianism, protests, and the necessity of radicalism are convulsing America.
The episode feels less like a continuation of this season’s efforts up to this point than a tangent.
The producers of The Americans are more than aware that they’re playing a very, very long game with their audience.
The latest episode of The Americans is practically a treatise on the psychodynamic theory of guilt.
The episode thrillingly and daringly comes close to completely pressing down on the reset button.
The episode is unique in the canon of the series for the sterling self-reflexivity of its sense of humor.
The attention to behavioral detail that goes into any given episode of The Americans is unlike that of any other show.
The latest episode of The Americans thrillingly plants the seeds of a whirlwind of emotional reckonings.
“Amber Waves” is an immediate reminder that The Americans is an edifice brilliantly constructed of contrasts.
Joel David Moore’s film is too often distracted by irrelevant emotional grandstanding.
The film is premised on a radical act that it buries beneath a grueling avalanche of quirk.
The series proves once again that action need not be explosive to be effective.
The real danger in the world of The Americans is that one fails to notice they’re being crushed.
The episode frames its constituent parts as opposing forces, but in the end each element contributes to a coherent, if half-hidden, whole.
Having been told so many lies, Paige has now become the teller, her parents’ child after all.
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 tightens the vise around the characters as if to test their instincts.
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.