Spoiler alert: If you have yet to watch the season finale of The Americans, which aired Wednesday, May 30, and you don't want to be disappointed, read no further. Or wait until you've seen the finale, then come back. This post reveals many of the details of the final episode.
The Americans concluded Wednesday night with a devastating finale that surprised just about everybody — most of all, actress Keri Russell, whose character, Soviet super spy Elizabeth Jennings, ended up not taking a cyanide pill or being gunned down in a shootout, as so many viewers assumed she would.
"God, all of it surprised me," Russell said last week in a conference call. "I had no idea that they would pick such an emotional route of devastation with the kids. I did not see the Henry aspect coming at all, and that was just devastating to me."
Matthew Rhys plays Philip Jennings, Elizabeth's Americanized husband. Henry is one of the couple's two children. The other is daughter Paige, a secretive KGB agent in training.
Henry never knew what his parents or sister were up to, and when he's told near the end by FBI agent Stan Beeman, played so affectingly by Noah Emmerich, you can see the toll it takes on the kid emotionally, as he stares with a stunned expression at the ice of a hockey rink.
Henry is the deepest collateral damage inflicted by the writers in wrapping up the sixth and final season of The Americans, which ran for 75 episodes. The Jennings family would, in the end, be torn asunder: Henry learned his parents were, of all things, Communist spies, who fled in panic to the motherland, leaving him alone and abandoned at his cushy private prep school with only good neighbor Stan to take care of him. So much for the pretense they put on for years, living as quintessential suburbanites in sleepy Falls Church, Va.
And yet, the writers managed one more twist. Without letting her parents know about her own cleverly conceived plan, Paige flees the train before it leaves the United States and enters Canada, with Mom and Dad en route to Moscow, which they left so long ago. It is 1987. No one in the show knows the Soviet Union will crumble and die by the early 1990s.
And, of course, no one in the show has the foggiest notion of the role Russia would play in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which Russell admitted had at least made the show immensely topical in its final season. The more we know about Russia, the better.
"You're watching this couple go through the series," Russell said, "and you're rooting for them, but you want them to pay in some way for what they've done and they chose the most painful way for them to pay. They took their kids away, and it's something I could not have seen coming at all, and I just think it was so ... They've already lost Henry, and you can't imagine they would take Paige too, and she chooses to stay behind, and you're just like, 'Whoa!' As a parent, as a mother, it was just like too much."
For Russell, who spent time growing up in Coppell and whose parents still live in Texas, The Americans was a welcome departure from the woefully shallow roles so many women are offered. A much younger Russell played the title character in the TV series Felicity, and she starred in the movie version of Waitress, opposite Andy Griffith, but The Americans was a new and lasting high. Her co-stars on The Americans included multiple Emmy winner Margo Martindale, who grew up in Jacksonville in the Piney Woods of deep East Texas.
"A lot of times, the female part is like the doting wife or the comforting wife, so it feels incredibly satisfying ... I just relished it," Russell said. "It was a real treat to get to do this job."
The mother of three children, Russell deemed the finale eerily perfect because it stuck the Jennings parents with "such an emotional way to make them pay. One could have died or could have gone to prison or something, but to take your kids away is pretty hard core."
No one, she said, "thinks you're going to have your kids taken away."
Russell called the ending of the show an "appropriate heartbreaker," and it was one eagerly anticipated by many Americans.
There were many riveting scenes, but one of the most riveting is the one in which neighbor Stan, pointing a pistol at his three startled neighbors, finds and confronts Philip, Elizabeth and Paige in the basement of a D.C. parking garage.
"We shot that all in one day," Russell said. "I want to stay it took about nine hours. We shot in the same garage, just standing there."
She applauded the work of Rhys and Emmerich, saying, "Credit to Matthew and Noah. I can't remember the page count on that, but it had to be like a nine-page scene and just so many monologues. They came in and just killed it. I mean, they knew every word and just kind of did it right there. And it was amazing to watch." That, too, proved to be a twist in the storyline. Russell loves the fact that "Stan doesn't turn them in. That's the complication that [the writers] present so well: There is no bad guy, there is no good guy." She called it "bittersweet — or just bitter." And, of course, she loves the ending. She then offered her own ending.
For everyone who "has written such thoughtful and beautiful things" about the show, and for the millions of loyal fans ensnared in its six-season grasp, here and around the world, this is her final wish:
"I hope you guys are satisfied with it," she says. Because she is.
