Season 3, Episode 10 - Stingers
Spoilers ahoy for both The Americans and, surprise surprise, Teenage Bounty Hunters, a fantastic show you should watch on Netflix immediately!
This week on The Americans I’m thinking about layers of secrets and lies.
Not a surprise, honestly, though this episode actually kind of crept up on me. I thought it happened a few episodes from now, which is probably how Philip and Elizabeth felt when Paige confronted them at the kitchen island, demanding to know “the truth.” She lobs a number of suggestions at them, from the witness protection program to adoption, to aliens. With the possible exception of aliens, none of the options she’s come up with are as absurd as the truth, a reality her parents find themselves facing down as they try to explain.
Elizabeth reaches for purpose (“we’re here to help our people”) and Philip for function (“[We get] information. Information they couldn’t get in other ways”) and leave it to Paige to say the most concise—and absurd, and truthful—word herself. She seems more upset about the lie itself than the secret the lie was concealing, and when she attempts to storm out she learns it’s a lie she must join. Or.
I love how even in this moment you can see him trying to figure out how to lie again, just a little bit, to try not to give his daughter more than she can handle, the reality that “jail” is a nicer, less honest way to say “tortured for information, potentially to death, potentially to execution.”
This moment the following morning, though, is the one that’s really been on my mind, and that connected the story to Teenage Bounty Hunters for me.
Paige asks her parents to speak Russian. She doesn’t elaborate on her curiosity, or explicitly say “Prove it,” but her demeanor does. Elizabeth says, “We love you very much,” translated by Philip, and Paige has no more questions that morning. And part of me wondered if Paige might be wondering if the story they told her was a mask, a cover-up for something they to hide even more, something even less bearable.
In the final episodes of Teenage Bounty Hunters we learn a lot about the mother of twins Blair and Sterling [the titular teenage bounty hunters], gradually unpeeling an onion of lies covering secrets covering more lies covering more secrets. We learn that the reason she doesn’t talk much about her past is that she’s still grieving her parents’ death. But actually that she’s a fugitive. And then that she’s a fugitive for bombing an abortion clinic, which turns out to be a cover story for the fact that she actually has an identical twin sister who actually bombed the clinic. This is a lot to take in, but none of it is as earth-shattering as the final reveal of the season (and, unless Netflix gets its act together, series) [seriously go watch it NOW before you read on]: that Blair and Sterling aren’t twins at all. They look at each other, devastated, and the credits roll. [p.s. my friend Hannah and I will be writing about this soon on Pop Culture Pen Pals!]
The rest of the season, rest of the series really, will include a lot of Paige grappling with which secrets, lies, truths, reveals, and choices are bearable, all the way up through the finale.
Some bits and bobs:
