dex14

Season finale next week.

The Bus

Casting news today:

DWilson

I meant to go back and check but I deleted the episode: What was the television show that Paige and Elizabeth were watching, that Paige sort of apologized for?

blairwitchfan

General Hospital

Deftones

Shit looks like it hits the fan in the finale. I will say I wasn't really liking the whole befriending of the asian family. The payoff took too long. I mean for the show, it makes sense, since that seems to be the main plot point. But over the course of the season, it just seemed like too much time getting there. My only real complaint this season.

Toonview

The payoff was never the main point of that plot line, the affect it had on Elizabeth was what they were attempting to get across. That they wove it together with the biological plot line and the larger spy issues was just part of the whole tapestry of the show. We are supposed to feel Elizabeth's betrayal in a way we didn't feel when she killed that black woman she was handling a few episodes ago. Spending a lot of time time over a long period of time was the mechanism for that.

Elizabeth and Philip are playing long games here, as are the show's creators.

coli

I like where Paige confronts her mom about killing someone and not even flinching or having any emotional response. Hey Paige, you just got a a window into your moms soul!

I still think Paige is going to somehow start to be interested in getting into the 'family business' next season. At some point, they have to either have Henry find out or Paige tells him as that sets up a whole other dynamic on the show.

PhantomStranger

I would guess Paige eventually blabs to Henry or her new boyfriend, Matthew.

So did Oleg tell Stan because he truly cared about preventing the spread of biological weapons, or he wanted to prevent his lover from getting assigned to Africa?

Interestingly enough, there are still a couple of Roy Rogers' restaurants left around the DC area.

Astrofan

This episode showed Henry starting to wonder what's really going on in the family.

Rex Fenestrarum

Right. Phillip's had serious doubts for some time now - if not about the nature of the Cold War itself, or the superiority of the American system over the Soviet system, then at least in the "safety and future of his family" sense. He genuinely loves his kids, and doesn't want them to go down the same path he did, and have to deal with the same nightmares he has. Elizabeth, on the other hand, has always been the ideological ice queen, the woman who would shoot her own father in the face if Mother Russia ordered her to. The whole point of Young Hee was to finally crack that facade. Elizabeth is dedicated to her work, but she didn't realize until Young Hee came along that she's lonely. She has no friends. Young Hee was the closest thing she'd had to a "genuine friend" that we've ever seen. And it really affected her, having to destroy the family like that. The thing with Martha, too: at least three times this season, it looked like Elizabeth was gonna bust out with "Bitch, that's MY MAN!", as she finally discovers that she loves Philip.

I really like William, and can't wait to see how he ends up next week.

Has anyone heard any casting news about Frank Langella? They really "Chekhov's gunned" his health in this episode. I wonder if that means Claudia will come back, or if we get an all-new handler next season.

Astrofan

The great Margo Martindale will always come back.

davidh777

That made me sad just reading it.

MikahC

I was hoping "Sonny Conrinthos" of this forum might be a watcher of The Americans because he might remember what I'm about to say a little better than I do. One of the things that made me smile about Paige (and Elizabeth) watching that particular episode of General Hospital is I think that plot line with "Grant Andrews" involved him being a sleeper Russian spy. I thought that's what Paige was apologizing for.

Astrofan

Don't worry; she's a fictional character.

creekdipper

Liz was okay with forcing an elderly woman to commit sucide, but losing her shopping buddy is going too far.

Apparently. Teenage girls are not known for keeping secrets.

Henry will just go back to playing video games, though, so he's safe.

It is funny to see Paige confront Elizabeth with the lies, half-truths, and avoidances. You'd think that Elizabeth would explain to daughter about plausible deniability to protect the children in case the spy cover is blown & arrests are made. At least that would be somewhat the truth & would give a good reason for hiding the details from Paige.

When Paige asked if Mom had killed before, the long pause was answer enough. Funnier was when Paige asked, "How many times," and Elizabeth had lost count.

She should have just said, "Somewhere between five and fifty."

Raul3

Love this show. And all the comments in the internet.

You need a little bit of intelligence and to pay some attention to like this show. Do that and it's one of your favorite shows. And then, there are people really inteligente, and that pay a lot of attention, rewatching each episode, etc. and write great posts, articles, or even essays about the show.

Astrofan

As one of the inteligente I also like the watching the occasional old in-and-out, and a bit of the ultraviolence.

coli

A sign of a great show is something that needs to be watched more then once. As much as everyone says its 'The Golden Age of TV,' I believe there are only a handful of great shows (The Americans is one of them) as most are entertaining, but nothing more then that. Every episode of The Americans has a theme between the main characters and sometimes it takes a 2nd viewing to pick it up.

My only nitpick with the show is I don't think it is vigilant with the styles from the 1980's the way Mad Men was with the styles of the 1960's.
I look at Keri Russell's hair, and she would have had a much different hairstyle in the early 80's. The 'Feathered-Back' parted in the middle look was the in-look at the time, as her hair is very modern. I also see alot of the houses in the show and the insides look very modern too. Most people in the 1980's still had loads of wallpaper, and nothing neutral in the house like today.

Mad Men really did a great job as EVERYTHING on the show was from that specific time period. It's a tiny nitpick with The Americans, but I have to say part of me is glad they aren't married to every 1980's style because it was an ugly era for hair!

coli

Here is a Heather Locklear hair style from the mid-80's:

uteotw

Yeah, I didn't know what to think about that. I thought Elizabeth would have faked being really broken up by it (and made up a low kill number), but I guess she's purposefully trying to put more of the truth out there and just see how it goes over?

SUCH a great show--looking forward to the finale.

Rex Fenestrarum

I feel ya. I was a huge fan of Mad Men, to the point of writing 10,000 word episode summaries on my blog. In the summaries I tracked down as much of the pop culture stuff from the show as I could as in, "In this episode, Don went to the movies to see [movie]. [Movie] came out in [year] and was directed by [director] and starred [stars]. It's relevant to this episode because [reason]". Stuff like that.

I not sure that any show will ever strive for the same level of "factual accuracy" that Mad Men had. This is a show that not only used real ice cubes in drinks (as opposed to acrylic cubes, which many shows use), they actually went to the trouble of tracking down 1960s-era ice cube trays for scenes in people's homes, and contracted with an ice company for "historically accurate" ice cubes for restaurant and bar scenes. This is a show that, days before filming the pilot was due to start, scrapped the 300 fluorescent bulbs they'd ordered for the Sterling Cooper set because they weren't "historically accurate" enough, and Matt Weiner was worried that the colors wouldn't be represented accurately on film. This is a show that tracked down actual 1960s bras and panties and carefully disassembled them and made dozens of copies, so female characters would have accurate panty lines. This is a show where, when a character jiggled some change in his hand to sort it, the foley people used actual silver coins to make the sound effect, even though 95% of the audience would never notice the difference.

The lack of accuracy in The Americans really bothered me at first, especially since I was coming off Mad Men. It seems like, in a lot of the early episodes of The Americans, the camera would stop on a particular object, like a rotary phone or an Atari 2600 or an old car as if to say "See! it's the early 80s! We can't afford to go all out like Mad Men, but we're gonna emphasize the stuff we can afford". Lots of people complained about home decor and (especially) Elizabeth's clothing (which seemed both "too hip" and too "more like 1987 than 1981", especially for a suburban mom in DC).

For some strange reason, this stuff just doesn't bother me much any more. I guess I'm too firmly immersed in the story to notice the little things. Which is just as well, I suppose. Aside from obvious cultural queues - showing Reagan speeches on TV, or everyone watching The Day After - the show seems to exist in some kind of nether time between 1977 and 1988 or so.

mugwump

I was wondering if he would uncover something in the garage while looking for that AV splitter but that would have been really out of character for Henry.

Astrofan

I have no idea why it would. FWIW, http://www.vulture.com/2013/04/18-ma...-internet.html. And who cares, simply do the best you can. How many shows have a pre-21st century character say a person, or thing, has "gone missing"?

Deftones

I that initial thought myself.

Rex Fenestrarum

Some of those anachronisms were unavoidable, though. Like the "Saturday Night Football" one. According to the original script, Don was supposed to be watching a Rangers game (which actually happened on the night in question). But, the producers said that, at the last minute, the NHL asked for a ridiculous amount of money to use a 10 second clip of that particular game. It was either too late in the year for baseball (or the NY teams weren't in the playoffs that year, I forget), so the effects team cobbled together a generic "football" clip at the last minute.

Your list also admits that some of the anachronisms were debatable, while others were also unavoidable... like the IBM Selectric typewriters. Weiner apparently had staff look for typewriters that predated the Selectric, but could not find enough that were "modern enough" to be in the office, but also in good enough condition to look "new".