Season 3, Episode 5: Salang Pass
It’s a rewatch newsletter, spoilers may occur.
This week on The Americans, I’m thinking about….flashbacks?
This is more of a structural one than a thematic one, but the “spy sex school” flashback is one that has lived on in my head, and I remembered it as actually being more central to the plot of this episode than it actually was. (What that says about me, let’s not speculate.)
I love this show, and I think nearly everything about it works incredibly well……except for the flashbacks. I actually think flashbacks rarely work well in TV dramas, and often become a fallback for plot or characterization the writers don’t feel able to accomplish with “present” storyline. In my rewatch, I’ve noticed that The Americans leans on flashbacks a lot in the first season, and then they start to ebb. It makes sense—that first season is working really hard to show us why Philip and Elizabeth’s building connection is a significant change from what came before, and as the show goes on they need that less. But I’m unconvinced that they needed it in the first place, partly because Rhys and Russell are so skilled at portraying the tension between their past and present within the present.
Maybe the thing that bugs me about flashbacks is that they often feel like an exercise in cleverness rather than depth. Theoretically, they’re about enriching our perspective on the characters in the present, but they can’t help but call attention to the trick of it, which isn’t where The Americans shines.
I’m also thinking about flashbacks because I’ve been watching a lot of Golden Girls lately, which doesn’t use flashbacks at all. Obviously they’re very different shows, and flashbacks aren’t generally a convention of multi-cam studio audience comedies, but I’ve been struck by how nearly episode includes a scene of the girls reminiscing and sharing stories from their lives with each other. Those scenes aren’t just entertaining, they remind us that how we tell stories about ourselves and the people we know says just as much about us as the stories do themselves.
Maybe that’s why in the second and third seasons of The Americans, flashback more frequently takes the form of memory. The show is very clear that it’s not just us seeing these flashbacks, it’s the characters themselves, which gives us an insight into how they’re processing their experiences. I still don’t think they’re the most compelling part of the show, but I like that they’ve leaned in this direction.
What I don’t like? Two episodes in a row without my husband Arkady!! Hopefully this will be remedied soon, or I riot.
