The Americans Season 2, Episode 2 “Cardinal”
Written by Joel Fields & Joe Weisberg
Directed by Daniel Sackheim
Airs Wednesday nights at 10pm ET on FX
With everyone reeling from the climatic events of “Comrades”, there really isn’t a lot of progress made in “Cardinal”; in the narrative sense, this hour represents the time in between chess moves, with each side re-gathering and assessing their current situation. However, there is a lot more at stake than a few glass game pieces, a fact “Cardinal” refuses to shy away from, forcing Elizabeth and Philip to face the one fear they’ve never experienced before: fear for the lives of their children, now undeniably a part of the shit storm that ended the season premiere.
There really isn’t much going on but some table-setting in “Cardinal”; Paige is growing more suspicious (even calling to look up the name and address on one of her mother’s postcards), Nina is growing more conflicted with her feelings and her mission, and there’s a new, young agent in town smoking crack with a congressional aide. And that is fascinating enough – but “Cardinal” takes the dramatic tension a step further with the undercurrent or paranoia Elizabeth and Philip are feeling, every scene full of nervous glances around the neighborhood, point-of-view shots that make the most inconspicuous things (a person walking down the street, or a construction crew working on the side of the road) feel life-threatening. The Jennings are in uncharted territory for the first time; their decisions have put the lives of their children in jeopardy, a danger they can’t see or hear, much less explain to their children at any point.
The side effects of the massacre they (and their comrades’ son) walked in on in the premiere are already taking hold: Philip’s paranoia nearly gets him killed, when the KGB sends him to the home of Emmet’s agent to find information. Look how sloppy and rushed he is: despite his very cool, Rust Cohle-esque style, his carelessness (he’s not even wearing gloves!) when going through Fred’s house is quite obvious, particularly when he hears a car pull in the drive way and he makes a desperate grasp at opening the hidden lock box he’s discovered in the floorboards. The shock he receives is a symbolic one; a reminder that a single mistake, one overlooked detail, and his entire family could be dead. Shit, he’s lucky Emmet’s informant doesn’t shoot him on sight – something we as an audience know won’t happen, but still a moment packed with tension, given the infinitely raised stakes of this second season.
That paranoia really drives the otherwise quiet proceedings in “Cardinal”, giving the most mundane events (like driving to the movies to see Raiders of the Lost Ark!) a kinetic tension: the end of “Comrades” not only forced Elizabeth and Philip to face the absolute worse case scenario of their career path – it exposed an unseen vulnerability in both characters, a weakness that no amount of training or experience could prepare them for. We’ve seen the two of them scramble before when a mission goes sideways – but that mission was never an unseen enemy knocking at their front door, the one variable the Jennings family was never prepared to face (as Elizabeth points out to her husband midway through the episode). Where the first season of The Americans saw calm, collected characters executing plans (like moves on a chess board, another allusion to the chess table Philip passes in the home of Emmet’s agent), season two of The Americans has smashed the board and shattered the pieces, sending its array of characters into an anxious spiral – a new sense of tension “Cardinal” latches onto in fascinating fashion, and refuses to let go.
Other thoughts/observations:
– the most fascinating part of all this? Nobody knows what happened. There’s still no information as to what happened and why – the KGB’s best guess was Emmet’s agent, which was squashed pretty quickly by Philip’s visit.
– Martha wants to apply for a new position in a different department… what happens when she gets a job that makes her of no use to “Clark” and the KGB?
– Nina has to describe her “visits” with Stan in explicit detail… I bet it sounds awkward as hell, even in Russian.
– who is “the walk-in”? The FBI certainly wants to know: the last walk-in to the Soviet embassy gave them their trigger mechanisms for nuclear bombs.
– Oleg is slightly misogynist and doesn’t have respect for authority… big surprise there.
– in this week’s hilarious Martha subplot, she wants to get a gun. “I don’t want to be a victim!” she yells at ‘Clark’.
– “Your revolution is beautiful,” Elizabeth tells the young agent she helps near the end of the episode, a nice nod to the larger political climate of the world in the time of The Americans.
– Stan’s taking his buddy on a bachelor party trip, and where do they go for their tickets? The Jennings! Any significance to the clock he notices on the wall? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
— Randy