Season 2, Episode 13: Echo
ARRRRRRRE YOUUUUU READDYYYYY TOOOOOOOOOO
BE EMOTIONALLY DEVASTATED?????????
I hope so, because that’s pretty much all (“all”) you’re going to get from this episode!! Spoilers abound! Buckle in! Are you ready???
image: Philip in disguise (with a blond ponytail, sideburns, and mustache) in a car with John Carroll Lynch as Fred, saying “You look ready. Are you ready?”
This episode starts at 11, with Poor Fred going on his shoe mission, with the encouragement of E&P, who seem to have developed some real affection for him. Fred heroically “succeeds” (as in, he gets the Jennings/Russians what they need) but gets shot in the process, and dies in police custody. The scene is brilliantly intercut with Paige at the peace protest (with a needle drop to ‘Twilight Zone’ by Golden Earring) and less brilliantly with Stan’s marriage troubles.
Sandra, like literally everyone in the show, is a better counterintelligence agent than her husband, the counterintelligence agent (would their couple name be Standra? Thoughts?) and asks him what’s wrong, to which he tells her essentially to fuck off so he can sulk over the kitchen sink about how he has to steal a floppy disk to save the woman he ACTUALLY loves (“loves”).
Quick note: Elizabeth and Philip have a Discussion in the car during Fred’s mission about Paige and what they’re going to “do about her.” The storytelling in this show is just SO DAMN GOOD (sry have had a lot of wine while listening to Carole King, so) that their two major concerns this season — solving Emmett & Leanne’s murder and We Need To Talk About Paige — have slowly been on a collision course and this is one of the last moments before they realize it, and they also talk about their own childhoods, which always makes me emotional.
Okay let’s just get the How Foolish Was Stan Beeman This Episode? out of the way because I am honestly incandescently angry with him and I hope he never sleeps well the rest of his life. This guy had a SHOT, FREE AND CLEAR to save Nina, and he elected NOT TO. He taped a whole fucking floppy disk to his chest and then at the very last minute was like “sorry baby.”
image: Arkady standing outside in the dark saying “Are we known to keep our word?”
HOT!!!!
image: Stan and Arkady outside in the dark. Arkady says “And…don’t tell her “I love you” so much.”
Am I currently writing fanfic about an imagined highly-repressed-but-very-charged relationship between myself and Arkady?? I’m not nOT doing that!!
Interestingly (to me at least), Stan’s task in this episode — to steal something at great risk to himself — is quite similar to Fred’s, and y’all know how I love a ~PARALLEL~! They’re both technically successful, and they both make a sacrifice, but Fred’s is himself, and Stan’s is Nina [tellingly, in their late night meeting Arkady asks Stan if he really loves Nina (my theory is that he’s trying to reassure himself that this will work and Nina won’t have to be put on trial) and Stan SIMPLY DOES NOT ANSWER. GRRR.]
Speaking of sacrifice, Paige has gone a’protesting and she is now hyped up on INJUSTICE! Which, good for her!
image: Paige walking away from the refrigerator in the Jennings home, holding a can of soda and saying “We were peaceful.”
image: Paige in the Jennings home saying “But the police — you should have seen them.”
Paige said abolish the police!!!
Because Philip and Elizabeth are playacting normie moderate suburban parents, Paige gets a little preachy about civil disobedience (again, good for her!!), which elicits a very fun line from Elizabeth:
image: Elizabeth in the Jennings home saying “We know what civil disobedience is.”
And some rueful antagonism from Philip:
image: Philip in the Jennings kitchen holding a glass of wine and saying to Elizabeth “If she said one more thing about nonviolent resistance,”
image: Philip in the Jennings kitchen holding a glass of wine and saying to Elizabeth, “I was gonna punch her in the face.”
And speaking of Philip and children, Clark has to pick up last week’s Talk with Martha about kids, which is, as is typical, painful. (Speaking of reproduction, I think a lot about the Jennings’ contraceptive situation. My theory is that they both had their tubes tied after Henry, which has got to be The Way, right?? Do they go to a special KGB doctor to get screened for STIs??) Maybe it’s because the first time I watched it I was just so constantly tense about the idea of Martha figuring shit out, or maybe it’s because I just have even more affection for Philip this time around than I did the first time, but his manipulation of her in these conversations is just so much more painful to watch. The longer the show goes on the more you get a sense of how this type of manipulation and secrecy wears him down, though even as I write this I feel conflicted for defending the person objectively being a real jerk to his “wife.” It’s very complicated, and Martha says it best!
image: Martha saying to Clark “Let’s have some wine, huh?”
Okay NOW let’s get into the real bones of this thing!
P&E receive a signal that Larrick isn’t in Nicaragua anymore, which rightfully spins them into a panic. They take the kids on a “surprise vacation!” (which would fully have worked on me as a lie as a child, and probably now as well) to a motel close to the cabin where Jared is sequestered. (Meanwhile we find out that Jared’s foster mother called him in missing YESTERDAY and the FBI is just finding out NOW??? jesus christ they really do suck at this!!)
Elizabeth has a heart to heart with Jared, starting with a line that is technically very simple but carries so much weight to it: “This is what I really look like.” She tells him about his parents, fulfilling the promise she made to Leanne, which she thought she’d need to break for Jared’s sake, which felt like giving up on telling her own children who she really was.
image: Jared and Elizabeth walking through the snowy woods, holding bundles of sticks.
Cradle me like a bundle of sticks Elizabeth!!!!!
Then Larrick shows up to ruin it all, having already kidnapped Philip. BUT THEN, Jared pulls out a gun (which almost feels hinted at by Philip’s discovery of Martha’s (incredibly ill-advised!!) gun earlier in the episode), shoots Larrick enough for P&E to take him out, but is also shot in the throat by Larrick. And as Elizabeth and Philip try to stop the bleeding, the truth comes out: Larrick didn’t kill Emmett and Leanne and Amelia. Jared did.
Through tortured, sputtering confession, Jared tells Philip and Elizabeth how Kate had recruited him, how he loved her (and she allegedly “loved” him), how she’d told him about their greater purpose, and how when he’d told his parents that day at the hotel his father insisted he wouldn’t be joining them. How he murdered his whole family in anger, cleaned himself up to go down to the pool, and returned to “discover” them. And then he dies.
It’s a deeply devastating season conclusion, and on a rewatch I thought it would be recognizable throughout the season, seeded in with hints like mystery-box television (and movies and books) has trained me to look for. But this show isn’t a mystery-box. It’s not interested in rewarding you for “figuring it out,” because there’s no reward for figuring out a teenager was a victim of grooming and as a result murdered his family. It’s just tragic.
That tragedy, however, has been a part of the season from the beginning, and brings those “two major concerns” I mentioned above to their point, sliding one over the over like a set of lenses. One of Jared’s final, choked lines, “Kate told me who I am, who I really am” reinforces a fear they’d been acknowledging—that Paige’s idealism and drive could be seized upon and weaponized by the wrong influenced—with a fear they hadn’t considered: that that influence could be the organization they’ve dedicated their lives to. Philip and Elizabeth, desperate for answers, meet up with Claudia:
image: Claudia, Elizabeth, and Philip walking together outside.
Recent Emmy nominee Margot Martindale!!!!!!!
Claudia explains to them that the Center has been wanting to train up the second generation, to prepare them for jobs in the CIA and FBI, jobs that would never be approachable for Philip or Elizabeth or Leanne or Emmett with their forged documents. The Center had told Emmett and Leanne to do it, and they’d refused. (Here’s a sting as well: since the first episode, there had been a drop of poison in our idea of Emmett and Leanne, set there by the moment Emmett forces Philip to use Henry during a hand-off and Philip’s indignant, “we don’t use our kids” and bolstered by the knowledge that Emmett had used information about his son as a connection point with Fred. And yet we find out that ultimately they wanted the same things as Philip and Elizabeth, and that they died for it.)
So The Center sent in Kate, who “recruited” (I repeat: groomed) Jared, which would have been sad and disturbing even if it hadn’t had such obviously disastrous consequences. Claudia insists that she didn’t know about this, and that she wouldn’t have allowed it—which Elizabeth uncharacteristically says she believes—but then tells the Jennings that Paige is next, and that not complying is not an option.
The Americans at its best rarely ends an episode, or a season, on a plot cliffhanger. They end on emotional cliffhangers, and this season is a perfect example. After telling Arkady in no uncertain terms that the Jennings’ will walk for good if The Center approaches Paige:
image: Arkady pretending to read a magazine in a bookstore while Philip in disguise walks away
My two best boys in the best kind of place!!!!!
Philip returns home to find Elizabeth seriously considering bringing Paige in. She doesn’t seem happy about it, but she’s not only accepted the inevitability, she’s found a way to make it good for Paige, pointing out that she’s clearly looking for something bigger than herself, something to give her purpose. Their uncharacteristic positions from last week have reversed, settled back to their regular course: Elizabeth is steely and resolute, Philip unsettled and emotional. It’s heartbreaking to see!
image: Philip looking confused and saying “We swore we would never—”
image: Elizabeth looking sad but resolute
And that’s how the season fucking wraps!!!! The final scene of this fucked up season is them sitting down to their fucked up dinner!!!! I love this show!!!!!
I’m nearing the email limit length (which is ABSURD because I meant this to be a quick thing????) so I’m not going to blather about the upcoming break, but I take a month off between seasons of this show and I’m going to continue to do that, so…see you in a month!!!
