It's been nearly a year since I've posted here. This past year has been an unbelievable and at times surreal experience. I became so overwhelmed that I failed to recap the last few episodes of last season's shows. It was hard to separate the events on the show with the swirl of news. Could our fictional characters ever imagine the relationship of leaders within an American campaign and now Forty-fifth Presidential Administration? Surely it would have been beyond the wildest hopes of any former KGB agent, even Vladimir Putin. Themes explored on the show, bugging offices of high-ranking officials, poisoning people with strange biological weapons are now daily news from around the world. It really seems that we are a strange new Cold War, with perhaps the cooperation of our very own Manchurian candidate.
All my life I've been a news junkie, but these days I feel more like a news zombie. Our divisions and assumptions about each other and those in power have never been more in question. As a child of the 1980s, the Americans used to provide me nostalgia and context to the political climate of my early years. I remember how we were brainwashed to hate and question everything Soviet or Russian. The show provided an illustration of how Soviet operatives would have viewed our government and propaganda of that era.
In my high school years, I studied the Russian language and culture. (Not very successfully, thinking I would never have to use it!) In my senior year of high school, we hosted twins from our sister city Irkutsk in Siberia. This personal exchange eviscerated and enforced many of generalizations we held about Soviets. The teens did everything in their power to appear unimpressed by the excess in our culture until finally admitting a deep love of Mickey Mouse. They were lousy at Monopoly but better at English and math than I could ever hope to be. The came from a family of successful scientists and were excited to go into the science fields themselves. (Not as ordered by their government like I had understood the Soviet model worked.) I was embarrassed how little we really knew about what life in the Soviet Union was like beyond images of bread lines and lack of personal freedom.
What I've always found so interesting about The Americans is that it humanizes the efforts of those on both sides of the Cold War. Then as now, there has always been a divide between the shady efforts of spies and the common people in both countries. However, the Russian ability to distort and create propaganda about the West remains, especially under the leadership of Putin and the RT news agency. RT and other media tools have helped Russia import their worldview to the people all around the worlds are far more sophisticated than any Cold War efforts. It causes us to doubt their interference, especially when the U.S. President echoes Putin's assertion that any interference in Western elections or murder of former spies is "fake news."
I am looking forward to seeing how the show will commence. Elizabeth and Phillip have finally decided that it was time to return home as a family. However, at last, they had a lead on the direct line to the CIA operations in Moscow. (A holy grail of their spy career.) It appears that this last important and dangerous mission will likely expose them their neighbor, family friend, and FBI agent next-door Stan. I'm not expecting a smooth road to wrap up all the dramatic threads of the series. Nina's storyline ended in a brutal and abrupt manner. Will Paige or Henry be endangered before the end? How many innocent people will suffer on both sides? It's the realism and moral ambiguity that continue to surprise viewers and make for a show that's almost as crazy as our present-day world.
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