Spoilers for last night’s The Americans below:
The Americans killed off a major supporting character last night, but that wasn’t the most daring thing about “Only You.” At this point, really, killing off significant characters is pretty much the price of admission for a cable drama of a certain level of ambition.
What was distinctive, and fascinating, and sad, about the end of Gregory was how it came about. There were no fireworks. Nobody ran or screamed or fought back. There was no excruciating execution, a la Big Pussy on The Sopranos. There was no Breaking Bad-style derring-do in which Walter White raced to engineer some way to divert the authorities and stave off a reckoning. It was simply a gradually dawning realization that this way the way it needed to go down.
It began, with Granny’s announcement and machinations, as essentially the world’s crappiest HR downsizing meeting. The evidence in Amador’s killing pointed back to Gregory’s people, and it could not be permitted to point further. The KGB had planted evidence to in Gregory’s home to ensure that, but look on the bright side: it would relocate him to Moscow, give him a decent but not luxurious stipend, and essentially retire him in an entirely strange land. (“We’re not monsters,” she might have said, as Stan did when lying about Vlad’s death.)
And Gregory accepts this. Because he’s committed. It’s in the job description. Yes, he resists going to Moscow and clings to the idea that he could get plastic surgery and start over in Los Angeles–he knows nothing from living in Moscow, there aren’t a hell of a lot of black Muscovites, and, though the episode does not delve into it, Russian society is not without its race issues either. But he does not see any injustice in this. On some level, he must know that, yes, an L.A. move could work for him, but there would be a slight risk, and taking any risk in his interest is not in Granny’s job description. There’s nothing to be done. Nothing personal!
Where it does get personal is in his goodbye with Elizabeth, whom he clearly still loves and who loves him. There’s no acrimony there, either, only heartbreak and frustration. He has to be who he is, he says. (Who he is, we should remember lest we get too sentimental, is also the kind of guy who decides to suicide himself by taking as many unsuspecting cops as possible with him.) And before leaving, he asks Elizabeth to remain who she is–and not to go back to Philip, but to find someone who will love her for her “commitment,” not in spite of it.
Can you say he’s wrong? I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t a kind of 500 Days of Summer dynamic on The Americans. That is, as in that breakup movie, we’re set up to root for a certain romantic pairing because that’s what we’re led to expect from the situation. 500 Days of Summer played against our expectations of romantic comedies–that love would win out, despite the character’s protestations that she didn’t want it–and made us see that, in this case, that particular relationship really wasn’t meant to be.
In this case, the audience is conditioned to see if Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage can work because, well, he loves her, and he’s fighting for love, and you’re not supposed to be against love, right? I certainly don’t know where this story is going, and it would be unlikely for The Americans to split its two lead characters up entirely. But in an episode like “Only You,” The Americans invites us to at least consider the possibility that Gregory might be right. Philip’s situation might be sympathetic, and yet he could still–through no fault of anyone’s–just not be right for the woman he was set up with.
All this makes the climactic scene, with Philip, Gregory, and Elizabeth together, impressively complex and sad. Elizabeth is the committed one, but not completely: true commitment to the cause, and Gregory knows it as well as she, would demand she pull the trigger and kill him there. (How does she know the police won’t take him alive?)
Philip, meanwhile, has to confront the fact that his estranged wife is saying goodbye to the man that she has loved more deeply than she ever loved him. He watches this man kiss his wife goodbye, and his response is to attach a silencer to his gun–not to avenge himself on the man who cuckolded him, but as a gesture of caring for Elizabeth (“You shouldn’t have to do this”). Philip is ready to kill Gregory for Elizabeth, and he lets Gregory go for Elizabeth.
Does this mean that Philip is, or can ever be, as right for Elizabeth as Gregory was? Maybe not. Is it possible, contra the title “Only You,” that there can be more than one right person for her, in different ways? Maybe. This episode didn’t answer the question. But it was another powerful, emotional demonstrated that there is more than one way to be committed.