Opinion | The brilliant way The Americans used its time-jump

This post discusses the fourth season of “The Americans,” including the events of the May 11 episode, “The Day After.”

The most shameful thing I did involving pop culture this year didn’t involve failing to walk out of “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” It didn’t even involve binging on old episodes of “Entourage” during a particularly stressful time. Instead, I went on vacation, and when I got back, I failed to immediately catch up with “The Americans,” which in its fourth season remains one of the most extraordinary programs airing anywhere on anything that might be considered television.

But now that I’ve atoned for that sin, I’m glad that I returned to write about the show with “The Day After.” If the initial pitch “The Americans” made to viewers was the seeming disconnect between deep-cover KGB agents Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings’ (Keri Russell) work as spies and their cover as a suburban American family, the show was quick to make clear that this was no “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”-style caper. Philip and Elizabeth could be physically, emotionally and morally injured by their work, and however competent they were, the world is a risky and unpredictable place. Their agents, including Gregory (Derek Luke) could die. Their plans could fail.

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The first eight episodes of this season of “The Americans” were preoccupied with wrapping up the biggest blown operation Philip and Elizabeth have tackled so far, as Philip’s false marriage to FBI secretary Martha (the magnificent Alison Wright) unraveled under scrutiny from the Jennings’ neighbor, FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) and his partner, Dennis Aderholt (Brandon J. Dirden).

But if Martha’s extraction and exile to the Soviet Union examined what happens when the Jennings’ work becomes operationally untenable, “The Day After” begins a phase of the show that explores whether Philip, Elizabeth and other characters on the show can return to their moral high-wire act after their handler, Gabriel (Frank Langella) gave them a break that lets their family experience a different kind of life.

“The Americans” has always been finely attuned to the ways in which coercion creeps into its characters’ private lives like cancer. And while the early seasons of the show involved the Jennings throwing off the conditioning that had prevented them from having a real marriage, the remission that followed that marital chemotherapy hasn’t lasted. At the beginning of the series, Elizabeth worried that Philip was too enamored of America; by  “The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears,” she was afraid that he had really fallen in love with Martha, to the extent that he might want to leave America to be with her in exile.

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If “The Day After” makes clear that while the Jennings have built a marriage that could survive Philip’s feelings for Martha, it also explores the extent to which that love has compromised their ability to do some of their work.

Philip and Elizabeth have both seduced targets during their time in the KGB. And while some of those liaisons have been morally queasy — especially Philip’s emotional affair with a teenager (Julia Garner) — I’m not sure any seduction feels sadder than the one Elizabeth fakes with with Don (Rob Yang), whose wife Young Hee (Ruthie Ann Miles) Elizabeth befriended as a potential source.

It’s not simply that Don is a decent man; Philip and Elizabeth have destroyed decent people before. It’s that while their friendship — like Elizabeth’s marriage to Philip — began as an operation, Elizabeth’s affection for Young Hee was real. “I’m going to miss her,” Elizabeth told Philip tearily after she returned home. Becoming more emotionally open has made Elizabeth a better wife and person, but it’s also opened her up to new kinds of pain.

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In a similar way, Philip’s relationship with bioweapons scientist William (a perfectly cast Dylan Baker), who like the Jennings has been undercover in America for years, has been tainted by a moment of real intimacy and friendship. Philip confessed to William that he was getting Martha out of the country to protect her. And Williams, who has worked with exceptionally nasty pathogens for his entire life, suddenly sees the possibility of acting in a moral way (he also craves even the temporary freedom the KGB granted Philip and Elizabeth when Gabriel sensed that they were dangerously overextended).

“I was thinking about not telling the Center about this,” William tells Philip when he reports that his lab is working with a new hemorrhagic fever. When Philip protests, William points out that Philip acted in accordance with his conscience. “It was the right decision,” William pushes Philip. “I’d like to make the right decision. . . . Nobody needs this.” And even if the darkest scenarios are possible and America is planning to use the fever as a weapon rather than developing vaccines for it, William confesses, “I don’t trust us with it,” because the Soviet Union’s scientific infrastructure is crumbling. Once he’s back in touch with his moral sensibilities, William can’t help but see a whole new set of realities.

The same thing is happening to Oleg Burov (Costa Ronin), a once-arrogant KGB agent who has been ground down by his brother’s death in Afghanistan and the execution of his lover (Annet Mahendru), who was killed though she had been told she would have a chance to redeem herself. Having lost his illusions about the Soviet Union’s moral authority, Oleg is acknowledging its technical weaknesses, telling his colleague Tatiana (Vera Cherny) about a false alarm that nearly resulted in a Soviet nuclear launch: “It turns out it was sunlight reflecting off clouds that the detection system registered as missiles.”

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Oleg, William and the Jennings grew up inside of the Soviet system. They devoted their lives to it. And whatever disillusioning experiences they’ve had along the way, they have deep foundations for their beliefs and years of investment in that system to try to justify if that belief seems to falter.

It might have seemed last season, when the Jennings told their daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) what they really did for a living, that they were setting off a bomb that would make it operationally impossible for them to continue their work. But as “The Day After” reminds us, “The Americans” is always playing a longer game than that. Instead of immediately blowing their cover and forcing the family to flee, Paige’s attempts to be a good daughter — if not a good Soviet spy — have stretched the Jennings’ already-tenuous moral justifications of their work to a breaking point.

“That’s why your mother and I do what I do, to keep things like that from happening,” Philip tries to reassure Paige after they watch “The Day After,” the television movie from which the episode takes it name, which depicts a nuclear apocalypse. “Do you really think it makes a difference?” Paige asks, hope flickering briefly. “I don’t know,” Philip tells her, honestly, unable to quell Paige’s fear of nuclear war. “I just hope we’re all together when it happens. And quick,” Paige tells her father. The genius, and the tragedy, of “The Americans” is that their suffering is likely to be slow, even if it’s not the suffering Paige imagines.

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