“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.
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.
The situation is now so grave one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The Americans is as full of formal coups as any of its more flashy brethren.
Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are such superbly articulate and specific performers that it’s hard not to empathize with their characters.
Creator Joe Weisberg and executive producer Joel Fields discuss season four of The Americans.
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.
Indeed, it’s another faintly electronic rhythm, this one a music cue, that sends this dazzling season of The Americans hurtling toward its conclusion.
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.
In The Americans, of course, protecting one’s family and serving one’s country are consistently at loggerheads.
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.
The second half of “Born Again” features a number of tautly composed images that jostle against each other as if conflicting emotions.
“Salang Pass” deploys its constellation of ruses and false identities to examine the question at the heart of The Americans.
Professionals in the art of reading people are most vulnerable to misapprehension when their judgment is clouded by the personal.
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.
“Baggage” uses Philip and Elizabeth’s respective reactions to Annalise’s death as an entrée into the subject of childrearing.