Previously on “The Americans” (FX), the K.G.B. sleeper agents Philip and
Elizabeth Jennings sought to undermine the American empire, and
succeeded—as characters created by Joe Weisberg—in demolishing
distinctions between the domestic drama and the international thriller.
(Warning: this piece will contain spoilers aplenty.) The events of the
fifth season ended in 1984, with the husband (Matthew Rhys) quitting the
spy game. At the beginning of the final season (which premières tonight), set in 1987, he has fully become Philip Jennings, who operates
Dupont Circle Travel with the ambition of a good bourgeois. Meanwhile,
his wife, Elizabeth (Keri Russell), is still spying, and she’s become no
one at all. It’s not exactly true that Philip has come in from the cold,
but it’s clear that Elizabeth is the cold itself.

Bitterly shivering at her own essence, she gives the appearance of being
homeless in her own body. Philip frowns acutely while Elizabeth smokes
many more cigarettes than usual, staring nowhere, hunched and hugging
herself for stability. Scraped raw by her job, sustained by a talent for
brutality and a trust in the culture of Mother Russia, she is strung
out, impatient to the point of operational sloppiness. One early murder,
though conceivably defensible as a standard procedure, nonetheless has
the tenor of a thrill kill. Her daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), remains
committed to becoming a sleeper agent herself. Thus, Elizabeth’s
parenting now combines cultivating a predator and grooming a victim.
When Paige, who’s been doing independent reading on the spy trade, asks
whether honeypots are really a thing, Elizabeth tells an assuaging lie.
A mother’s work is never done.

It is the eve of a summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev. Soviet officials have come to town to discuss a
nuclear-disarmament treaty, and Elizabeth is assuming the disguises of
her craft—the masks under which her face went missing—at a violent pace.
Beneath a frizzy wig, she impersonates a home nurse for the wife of an
American negotiator; behind foxy, blocky spectacles, she bats eyelashes
at a bureaucrat to gain gossip from Foggy Bottom; styled as a bohemian
traveller, she goes to Mexico on a hard-core, deep-state deal. A faction
of Soviets believes that Gorbachev might negotiate away an apocalyptic
gizmo still in development—one that would annihilate the United States
if the Soviet Union were already destroyed in a nuclear attack. Would
Elizabeth please keep an eye on Gorby’s favorite foreign-affairs
officer? So that the military can stage a coup, or what have you, if
need be? The military man who inveigles Elizabeth on this count gives
her a jewelry box, containing a pendant necklace. The pendant contains a
suicide pill, maybe; “The Americans,” menacing as ever in its reserve,
won’t spell out whether it’s a charmed totem or a cursed amulet.

This turn of affairs stimulates a return to America by the former K.G.B.
agent Oleg Burov (Costa Ronin), who leaves a cozy life in Moscow to urge
Philip to watch Elizabeth. In turn, the F.B.I. agent Stan Beeman (Noah
Emmerich), who had quit counterterrorism for a quiet life investigating
homicides, receives the assignment of checking in on Oleg. Thus does the
show get the band back together, with a keenly felt sense of summation.

Does Philip have the stomach for this sort of domestic disturbance? His
new posture around the house is that of a worried man eating a lonely
sandwich at the kitchen island. He has thrown himself into work too
aggressively, expanding his office to the detriment of his cash flow.
The financial situation somewhat disturbs the bursar’s office at the
boarding school where his son, Henry (Keidrich Sellati), has enrolled,
either because his parents wanted to support his dreams or because the
writers’ room needed a place to shunt him. Endeavoring to motivate his
employees, Phillip plucks a book from his office shelf—“Success Through
a Positive Mental Attitude,” a self-actualization manual first published
in 1960—and is inspired to deliver a rousing speech to his embarrassed
office. His impulse to turn to the text springs from the same place that
led him to EST. His optimism and self-reliance and bounding trust in
personal transformation are, as we’ll discover, very American. So is his
belief that he can get away clean.