The Americans is still the best show on television

The first episode in the show's final season delivers

Keri Russel and Matthew Rhys.
(Image credit: Patrick Harbron/FX)

In the fifth season finale of The Americans — one of the best shows in the history of television — Elizabeth gives Tuan, a young Vietnamese agent who works a mission with her and her husband (and fellow spy) Phillip, a dire warning: "You're not going to make it," she tells him.

It's a bizarre and solemn scene, but I didn't know what to make of it at the time. In fact, the Tuan subplot, which involved Elizabeth and Phillip pretending to be Tuan's doting suburban parents, puzzled me all season. It certainly bore some worrying parallels to their total disregard for Henry (their actual son), but I thought the storyline was building to a crisis that never came. We got a crisis, certainly: Tuan persuades the target's son to attempt suicide, and this turns out to be the incident that finally breaks Phillip. But an attempted suicide isn't that bad for a show that boasts a significant body count. I expected more. After all, historically, those who work with the Jenningses don't fare too well. Neither do sons. So I spent the season worrying that some terrible harm would come to Tuan, or that — in an alienating and irreversible turn — either Elizabeth or Phillip would kill him.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.