Episode Report Card Joe R: B+ | 11 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Philadelphia Freedom
By Joe R | Season 1 | Episode 3 | Aired on 02.13.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Remember poor Hotski, a.k.a. Robert, the Directorate S agent who died of a stab wound in the season premiere? Philip ends up getting a coded message that could only have come from Robert in the newspaper, scheduling a meeting. The Jenningses have to figure out what's up, but they can't go themselves, so Elizabeth gets in touch with Gregory, a young black radical she recruited (and fell in love with) some years back. Gregory and his team stake out the meeting -- as do the FBI -- and it turns out, Robert had a secret wife and baby in Philadelphia, unknown to Philip and Elizabeth.
The Feds are assuming the wife -- Joyce Ramirez -- could be Directorate S as well, while the Jenningses need to find out what she knows, and in an exciting little setpiece, Gregory's team engineers a pickup of Joyce and her baby right under the Feds' noses. He brings her to Philip and Elizabeth, who say they're here to protect her. Joyce thought Robert was a drug dealer or something, and she's freaked out to learn he's dead. Privately, Gregory opines to the Jenningses that they can't trust that she doesn't know about them, and they should kill her, if only to tie up the loose end. This consultancy gets complicated by the fact that Gregory outright tells Philip that he should let Elizabeth go, as she doesn't love him. (Elizabeth has already told Gregory she IS developing feelings for Philip, however, so this move is shady as hell.)
Meantime, Philip decodes a message from Robert (a name and a phone number) and takes it to meet his handler, only his old handler, Gabriel, has been replaced by a woman Philip refers to as "Granny." She's played by Margo Martindale, so she's already my favorite. Seems tough as nails, too. She tells Philip that Robert had been working on a lead to get intel on a weapon the Americans are working on that will threaten the Soviet nuclear arsenal. That's what the name and number are about. Philip makes contact and goes to a meeting with a shadowy guy and his two thugs. The two thugs won't stop menacing in Philip's blind spot, so he beats the shit out of them, before exchanging a briefcase of money for a briefcase full of plans for an anti-ballistic missile device.
In the end, Philip and Elizabeth win out and they don't kill Joyce and the baby. They instead hand her over to Granny, who's going to set them up in Cuba, where they can live out the rest of their days on a white sand beach. PSYCH! You idiots. Of course Granny is going to kill Joyce, and indeed, by episode's end, the baby ends up back in Russia with Robert's parents (but of a downgrade from the white sands of Cuba, eh?), and Joyce ends up in a parked car in Philly, dead from a "drug overdose."
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously: A whole lotta hoo-ha was put into putting a mic into a clock. Also, a lot of attention is paid to Cuteski's demise, so expect that to be a thing, not to mention the incredibly random choice to include the part about how Agent Stan plays not hockey but racquetball, which I can't imagine would end up being important, unless...
Currently: Stan and Philip are playing racquetball. Certainly glad we got that "previously" clip about this, or else we'd have spent the full hour wondering what this odd game played inside a glass sweatbox is called. All kidding aside, I like the unshowiness of racquetball as a symbol of '80s-ness.Everybody was doing it back then! Coke and racquetball, that was the 1980s. Like any TV show worth its salt, The Americans is not content to simply show two men playing a game. They have to use the game to tell you some very ham-handed truths about our characters. So we get Stan spelling out his strategy of patience and waiting out his opponent until said opponent makes a mistake, while Philip displays an anything-to-win attitude that includes firing a ball into Stan's back and calling for a forfeit win after Stan gets an important page on his beeper (Philip/Anyone Born in the 1980s: "Do you sell drugs? Why do you have a beeper?") and has to leave early. Poor Philip. Hockey doesn't reveal character this way.
That page was to get Stan's ass back to the office, where Agent Chris is waiting to accompany him to meet with his brand new informant from last week, Nina. She tells Stan that the KGB had an agent get killed the same night that Timoshev vanished. This is good info. Of course, Nina already wants to talk extradition plans for her, but Stan tells her to slow her roll quite a bit. That part comes way down the line, after she gives up way more than this. "The day you forced me to work for you," she tells him, "my life got very scary." He's like, "Hey, I didn't tell you to start stealing fancy foodstuffs from your government." He pledges to protect her if she makes herself "worth protecting." So she gives him details: stab wound, died at a local hospital, and he was Directorate S. "I have value," she tells him. "You'll see." Boy, between Nina and Lady Undersecretary last week, this show is really lining up the beautiful young women on the periphery who are basically guaranteed to get killed by season's end.
After the break, Agent Stan, Agent Chris and various other agents are presenting what they know to Agent John-Boy: they've got a photo of Cuteski's corpse from the hospital; he came in with no identifying information. Stan says they've sent the photo out to police departments across the country, but without any information on the guy, it doesn't sound too promising. Plus, a Directorate S agent isn't going to have a police record, come on. One of the unnamed agents suggests DMV records, but Chris scoffs at the idea. "What are we supposed to do, send his picture out to every DMV in the country?" Agent John-Boy gets pissy at this and says that's exactly what they're going to do. He says to tell the DMVs that overtime is approved and they expect their people to work around the clock until a match is found. Oh, man. Sooooo '80s. "Overtime is approved."