The Americans Season 5
Overview
This is the quietest, saddest season of The Americans, and that's saying something. Philip and Elizabeth spend most of it running a teenage asset — Tuan, an orphan the Centre has planted inside a Soviet defector's family — and watching a kid eagerly do to another household what was done to them. Meanwhile Paige, now in on the secret, is being slowly pulled into the life: self-defense lessons with her mother, hushed meetings with Pastor Tim, and a faith that's starting to crack under the weight of all the lies. Back in Moscow, Oleg Burov, home from America and working food-supply investigations, learns just how rotten the system he serves really is. The big spy plot involves grain — reports of an American bioweapon aimed at Soviet wheat that turn out to be something very different — and it leaves Elizabeth questioning the mission in a way she's never allowed herself to before. There's no huge explosion this year. Instead the show just keeps tightening the screws on a marriage, a family, and two people starting to add up what all of it cost them. If season four was about cracks appearing, season five is about everyone finally looking down at them.
