Via: Tuned In
Spoilers for last night’s The Americans follow: I didn’t have time to write a full, proper review of “Trust Me,” mainly because I’ve been on deadline writing a full, proper midseason review of The Americans for the print TIME magazine. But this installment was so good that I wanted to get something on the record before you all forgot about it, so here’s a quick, unpretty hail of bullets: * You knew, I knew, everybody knew well in advance that Elizabeth and Philips abduction was a ruse by the KGB. This was not a failure of storytelling; if the producers wanted us to think anything else, they would not have kept cutting to scenes at the FBI, where Stan and his colleagues were entirely unaware of what was going on. But that freed us to focus on how the faux-kidnapping unfolded, and how it played out afterwards. * One of the things that struck me most in that regard was Philip’s terror when the interrogation started. Or rather, Philip’s “terror”: clearly he wasn’t reacting genuinely but playacting how innocent, American travel agent Philip Jennings would behave if he were nabbed off the street, shoved into a van and tied up in a dark room. His commitment to character is complete, and as with a lot of things on this show, there was a parallel to Elizabeth in “Comint,” who took a beating from a perv and escaped only by screaming—because she needed information from him and because her “character” would not be able to snap his neck. * Elizabeth fights with a knife, again, because that’s what you do on The Americans. Spy dramas have a lot of hand-to-hand combat, of course, but the violence on this show feels staged to be especially intimate—lots of face-to-face cutting, brawls in close hallways and close-up shootings. The Americans wants you to see its face when it kills you. * Speaking of hand-to-hand combat: I didn’t dislike the kids-in-peril subplot as much as some other critics did, maybe partly because I liked the
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: March 7th, 2013
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