‘The Americans’ Season 6 Episode 2 Recap: Hearts and Minds

If there’s a fundamental difference between Philip and Elizabeth Jennings in how they see the world, it lies in how they they value the inner lives of the people who populate it. Philip, who once kept his continued attendance at EST classes private from his wife for some time, is drawn to that interior space. Elizabeth, who once responded to a therapy session she took while undercover with a visible eye-roll, finds the very idea of it suspect.

In his capacity as the head of the family’s travel agency — which is now no longer just a front for him — Philip encourages his employees to take a personal stake in their relationships with clients, which backfires when one treats that relationship too personally and fails to contact Philip about a long-time client’s concerns before the guy leaves. In her capacity as an in-home nurse to a dying woman whose husband is part of the U.S.’s arms-reduction negotiating team, Elizabeth can barely bring herself to care about understanding the woman’s overtly psychological portraiture, let alone actually get anything out of it. “What do you see?” the artist probes, showing Elizabeth her latest drawing and getting almost nothing in return. “What else? Nothin’ else in there?” Eventually the artist forces Elizabeth to try her hand at sketching herself, using a mug as her subject. “A mug isn’t a mug,” she says. “It’s dark and light.” She tells Elizabeth to “just draw what’s dark,” essentially imputing a tumultuous inner life, like the one each of them leads, to this inanimate object. When her handler Claudia asks Elizabeth what the woman paints, she replies “People. Faces. Kind of strange. I don’t know.” She views the entire enterprise of art with contempt: “I don’t know why people spend their life doing that. At least her husband is doing something.”

By the end of this week’s episode of The Americans — written by showrunners Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, directed by co-star Matthew Rhys, and titled “Tchaikovsky,” after the Russian composer the value of whose work it falls to Claudia, not Elizabeth, to convey to Paige — Elizabeth has conspired to prolong the artist’s suffering despite her and her husband’s plan to end her life. She has also discovered that her political nemesis, President Reagan, is losing his own mind to senility. She lies to her daughter Paige about spies’ use of sex to gain information, describing such incidents as a sort of urban legend slash rare mishap springing from the fact that sometimes agents must become very close with their targets. Director Rhys conveys the imbalance of knowledge and power in this scene with a shot of mother and daughter on a hill, the former above the latter.

Elizabeth lies even more transparently about the source of her chain-smoking, hollow-eyed exhaustion and anxiety when Philip asks about it, playing it off as concern about Paige’s slip-ups as a junior agent rather than telling him the truth about her top-secret mission to undermine Secretary Gorbachev’s negotiation attempts, perhaps lethally. And she repeatedly misreads the inner lives of others, from the State Department tour guide whose canny interpretations of the building’s statuary extend to his attention to her absence from the tour group when she goes rogue, to the Air Force general who once volunteered information about Reagan’s “Star Wars” program in order to keep the Cold War in balance but who now wants nothing to do with her demands for sensitive new technology. That particular miscalculation about the mind ends with the general’s mind all over her face.

Elizabeth is slipping, that much is clear. She may even be cracking. And her failure to recognize this, both in herself and in others — like the general, whose recurring nightmares about the last time they worked together should have tipped her off as to the depths of his disgust with their relationship — results directly in her daughter seeing her as a monster in the woods, a bloody-faced slasher straight out of a horror movie.

I’m struck by the contrast between Elizabeth’s actions and not just those of her husband, who’s sensitive to a fault, but those of their counterparts in the FBI, their neighbor Stan Beeman and his former partner Dennis Aderholt. Dennis is now the head of the Bureau’s counter-espionage unit, and he taps Stan to help diagnose the marital woes of their assets Gennady and Sophia, the hockey player the Soviets use as a courier of secret documents and the previously single mother they’d flipped into a source, who connected them with Gennady in the first place. In their quiet voices, they talk about their own divorces; “I’m not a marriage counselor, Dennis,” Stan shrugs worriedly when asked if the Russians’ relationship can be salvaged. They talk about the arrival of Stan’s old friend Oleg Burov in the United States in that same sensitive way; you can tell they really do want him to have left the KGB years ago and be in town for totally benign reasons. “You’re a good friend,” Gennady tells Stan after confiding in him about his marriage, hugging him in the bargain.

In the very next scene Elizabeth dupes the dying artist’s husband into, to paraphrase Claudia, just keeping her alive during the summit. “She’s really gonna suffer now,” Elizabeth says. Oh well.

If I had to sum up this hour-long portrait of how Elizabeth’s studied, professionally mandated distance from the emotional needs of other people — except insofar as they can be instrumentalized and weaponized — is slowly destroying her, I’d do it with an exchange she has with Claudia. Elizabeth can’t help but see how Paige has responded to the woman’s grandmotherly presence in her life. “The way Paige has taken to you,” Elizabeth says to Claudia, “if something were to happen to me at any point…” Your mind fills in the blank before Elizabeth can do so herself — surely she wants Claudia to care for her daughter in the event of her own death — until Elizabeth finishes the thought: “I think you could finish with her.” Just as when she uses her children as a ploy to get the general to let down his guard when he pulls out the gun she’ll eventually use to kill him, the mission is the priority, not the well-being of another person, not even that of her own daughter. It’s clear where that leads them both.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch The Americans Season 6 Episode 2 ("Tchaikovsky") on FX