Look at those veins! That's Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) from a recent episode of FX's The Americans. She is obviously enraged at something or someone - but what, or whom? A little backstory for those not following this excellent show set in the early 1980's:
Elizabeth and her husband Philip (Matthew Rhys) are Soviet deep-cover spies. To all the world they appear to be a typical American middle-class couple living in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. They infiltrated the United States as a young couple in the 60's and began building a life, a cover, and a family. They had two children, Paige and Henry, who are teenagers when the series begins. Paige and Henry were born American and, at least at the beginning, have no idea about their parents' true identities.
Much of the show's tension arises from Philip and Elizabeth's struggle to maintain the facade of a normal life while carrying out various operations for the Sword and Shield of the Party, the KGB. These operations involve late-night assignations with various agents and assets, high-risk infiltration of sensitive installations and frequent violent confrontations with anyone who gets in their way. Both have had sexual affairs outside of marriage, with the full knowledge of the other. Philip actually had a bigamous union with a second wife. All of this activity has to be kept secret, not just from the outside world, but from the two American teenagers living in their home. And, to top it all off, their neighbor across the street is an FBI agent who hunts Russian spies for a living.
During the last season, season 3, the inevitable cracks that result from this kind of stress began to manifest themselves in the life of Paige. At the invitation of a friend, Paige becomes involved with a church youth group and begins to attend Bible studies and Sunday services. Eventually she professes faith in Christ and becomes baptized.
Elizabeth's first instinct is to put an immediate halt to Paige's spiritual exploration. Of the two, she has always been the True Believer, totally dedicated to the state and the party. Philip, on the other hand, has displayed signs of wavering or going native. He occasionally breaches the idea of defecting or running but Elizabeth won't hear of it. But Elizabeth is eventually persuaded that forbidding Paige's religious life would provoke a rift between them that would be personally painful and professionally unhelpful.
For at the same time that Paige finds herself drawing closer to God, the KGB is hoping to bring her into its fold. Philip and Elizabeth's handler tells them that the Center, the colloquial term for KGB headquarters, has hit upon the idea of recruiting the children of its deep-cover agents as "second-generation illegals." It has a vision of a vanguard of Soviet agents with impeccable genuine American identities. The first step is for Philip and Elizabeth to bring their daughter into the fold. In the series premiere, when it appears the FBI is onto them, Elizabeth's greatest fear is not death or prison, it is that her children will learn her secret and despise her for it. Now she has to face that fear head on and tell Paige the truth.
Well, not the whole truth at first. Don't tell her about the sleeping around and the murders and the lives ruined. Instead, tell her that your job is about preventing war and stopping the United States from exploiting third-world countries. Tell her it's actually not that different from the nuclear disarmament campaigns that her church is involved in.
Unfortunately, and ironically, for Philip and Elizabeth, they raised a daughter who is constitutionally incapable of deceit. And in the last scene of the season 3 finale she is seen on the telephone telling her pastor that her parents are Russian spies. And, because she is so honest, she tells her parents that she told her pastor. And the pastor turns around and tells his wife. The pastor assures Philip and Elizabeth that he will respect the confidentiality of Paige's disclosure but the Center isn't willing to take that on faith (pun intended).
The Center's first plan is to arrange an "accident" for the pastor and his wife but that has to be scrubbed at the last minute when a crisis interferes with Philip and Elizabeth's alibi. (And for those who watch the show, the phrase "going to Epcot" will forever have sinister overtones.) Besides, Paige is honest but she's not naive. If anything happened to the pastor it would be difficult, if not impossible, to convince her the Russians had nothing to do with it.
Since the pastor and his wife can't be eliminated, they have to be monitored. And that's Paige's new assignment. But she doesn't like it and begins to balk at spending so much time around them. That's when Elizabeth really lays into her as seen in the picture above. She's had it with Paige's whining. Furthermore, the whole situation is Paige's fault because she didn't think before taking action that risked the destruction of ... their family.
The family. Not the mission or the operation. Not the party, the state, the proletariat, the revolution or the Socialist International. All the things that Elizabeth has dedicated her life to. She's worried about her family. Could there be a more bourgeois sentiment?
As a young girl, Elizabeth would have been raised to venerate Pavel Morozov, the teenage boy who turned in his own father for anti-Soviet activities and was later murdered by his relatives in revenge. The lesson is clear - the state is everything, family is nothing.
To be fair, Elizabeth had spent the better part of twenty years pretending to be a typical American woman and explicit appeals based on Marxist-Leninist ideology would never prevail against the American-born and -raised Paige. Nevertheless, in an apparently unguarded moment, with anger rising and veins bulging, the vanguard of the proletariat, the hero of the Soviet Union, the sword and shield of the party is, in the end, a mother, fighting for her family.
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