Emmy Episodes: The Americans

It’s always my policy to watch every Emmy-nominated episode each year, which leads me to sample a handful of shows that I don’t tune in to on a regular basis. For the third year in a row, I’m making a special effort to spotlight each of those installments to offer my perspective on shows that I don’t review each week.

The Americans: Season 6, Episode 8 “The Summit” (B-)

This episode felt less accessible as an irregular watcher, with more antics about the Soviet Union and its increasingly unstable state taking over as more holes are felt in the operation of the spies back home. Philip telling Elizabeth that he reported on her elicited a predictably angry reaction from her, but what Claudia told her at the end of the episode suggests that the way he’s been going is where she’s headed too, and now Elizabeth needs Philip’s help. I hadn’t made any mention of Miriam Shor’s bedridden painter Erica and her husband Glenn, played by Scott Cohen, since I didn’t know what their relevance was, but Elizabeth quickly and coldly took care of that by killing her with a paintbrush, which was not a particularly pleasant thing to have to watch. Her seduction of Jackson the eager intern went well at first, but he panicked in a very problematic way when he realized that what he was getting for her really wasn’t above board. Most disconcerting for this spy couple is something that Elizabeth doesn’t realize is happening at all, which is that Stan is extremely close to being able to prove that Elizabeth is a Russian agent, with the fact that she smokes all the time being her most damning identifier. I’m eager to get to that point, though I expect that we might have to wait until the series finale for the inevitable confrontation. Just two more episodes to go until this show is done for good.