Author: Daniel D’Addario / Source: Variety

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read until you’ve watched the series finale of “The Americans.”
From the beginning, “The Americans” was a show about two people trying to pull off a balancing act at a precarious time in history — playing at being a typical suburban family while maintaining a complicated loyalty to the USSR.
In the show’s final episode, the ruse fell apart — and, in a twist, Mother Russia won out over real-life family ties. Philip and Elizabeth Jennings managed to survive the episode by fleeing back home to a Russia they barely recognize, in the process abandoning their son and getting abandoned by their daughter. That they survived a show that seemed set on killing them surely surprised many fans; that the final moments we share with them is spent in grim contemplation of a life of isolation and regret was, in the end, no surprise at all.In the run-up to this episode, the walls had seemed to be closing in on the Jennings, as Stan Beeman had moved from suspicion to near-certainty that his neighbors were subverting the state, and Elizabeth had definitively broken with the Centre that had given her and her husband orders for the show’s entire run. With their most concrete existential threat to date and no one left to give them orders, Philip and Elizabeth were, suddenly, entirely improvising. A debate early in the episode about what is to be done with Henry — ”His future is here,” says Philip — sets the tone. For seasons, the show’s spies have existed in the uneasy understanding that tough conversations would happen someday, and have pushed them off. They’d finally arrived.
Henry was hardly a pivotal character, but his abandonment represents the show’s mercilessness with Philip and Elizabeth. It’s almost certainly the “right” decision to have left Henry in the only place he’s ever known as home rather than escaping with him to the Soviet Union, but, in making it, both parents show off their character defects — Philip’s lack of courage masquerading as a sort of pragmatic humanism, Elizabeth’s grim determination even to plans she doesn’t quite understand. (“We cannot take him!” Elizabeth practically spits at daughter Paige, later, having fully committed to a plan she’d rejected at first.) That we can be quite this engaged with characters this challenging is part of “The Americans’” genius.
Part of why we root for them is because their problematic qualities make them so marvelously good at their jobs — “The Americans” was perhaps the most developed yet version of the TV trope of the antihero whose failings fuel his or her genius, in part because it had two antiheroes whose flaws and whose gifts complement each other. Watching Philip and Elizabeth operate together on Stan as he…
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