"Paul Levinson's It's Real Life is a page-turning exploration into that multiverse known as rock and roll. But it is much more than a marvelous adventure narrated by a master storyteller...it is also an exquisite meditation on the very nature of alternate history." -- Jack Dann, The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History

Thursday, April 26, 2018

The Americans 6.5: Common Denominator and Collision Course



The common denominator in tonight’s episode 6.5 of The Americans - another perfectly powerful episode - was ... sex.

It not only was the subject of the delightfully drunken conversation between Claudia, Elizabeth, and Paige.  Sex also motivated two major developments in the story. First, Elizabeth sleeps with Philip as prelude to persuading him to set up Kimmy to be jailed in Bulgaria. And then Philip in turn sleeps with Kimmy to convince her to leave Greece to meet him, so that Elizabeth’s plan to get Kimny in a Bulgarian jail as a way of getting leverage on her CIA father can happen.

But that doesn’t happen, because Elizabeth’s killing of Gennadi and his wife with their seven-year old son in the next room makes Philip realize that he draws the line at targeting or in any way utilizing children, which Kimmy still is to him even though they just slept together.

I’m expecting, however, that the end of Philip and Kimmy will not be the most significant fallout of Elizabeth’s murder of Gennadi and wife. Stan genuinely liked Gennadi. He won’t rest until he finds out who killed him. And that  hunt will lead to Elizabeth, given that that FBI agent caught a glimpse of her, thinly disguised, the time she unsuccessfully tried to kill Gennadi earlier in the episode.

Stan and Elizabeth are now on an irrevocable collision course, and it’s hard to see how both of them will make it out of this final and superb season alive.







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