FX's The Americans began its fifth and penultimate season two weeks ago.  By way of background, the series, set in the 80's, follows the lives and adventures of two Soviet illegals.  Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings are KGB officers who don't work in the embassy under diplomatic cover or enjoy diplomatic immunity.   They pose as an ordinary middle-class American couple with two teenage children.  They run a travel agency but they're real job is carrying out dangerous clandestine operations on behalf of Communist Russia.

In this season the KGB suspect that the United States are plotting to attack the Soviet Union's wheat crop by breeding a variant of sitodiplosis mosellana, the wheat blossom midge and sowing the eggs among the wheat fields.  The midges will hatch and destroy the crops.

I don't know what the show runners have in mind for this story line.  It could be the Department of Agriculture is breeding pests to study how to protect wheat.  But the two agents, as well as their handler, Gabriel, clearly recognize that Soviet agriculture is seriously vulnerable to sabotage.  Gabriel points out that the Soviet Union has to import half its grain from the United States and their allies.

In last night's episode Phillip and Elizabeth travel to Oklahoma to investigate the lab where the midges are bred.  They drive through miles and miles of wheat fields.  Sitting in their motel room, waiting for night to fall, Phillip says that the fields remind him of home.  "We've got this, too," he says.  "Why can't we grow enough grain ourselves?"

Throughout the series, Elizabeth has been the true-believer, never doubting Communist dogma, at least outwardly.  She is not nearly bothered as Phillip by the people they kill and the lives they destroy while carrying out their missions.  Phillip, on the other hand, is more courageous at facing uncomfortable (or inconvenient?) facts; like the fact that Russia, once the bread basket of Europe, cannot feed itself.

The show has drawn criticism for attempting to portray Soviet spies in a sympathetic light.  But every once in a while it illuminates the failures of socialism, like it did last night.