‘The Americans’ review: Sixth and final season is as excellent as ever

WHAT IT’S ABOUT It’s 1987, and the United States and Soviet Union, headed by Mikhail Gorbachev, are about to continue nuclear disarmament talks in Iceland, but there’s internal division inside the Kremlin about how these will proceed. Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) have set aside their plan to return home to Moscow, but Philip wants out of the day-to-day work of spying. It’s all on Elizabeth and to a lesser extent daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) who are drawn into a complex set of operations related to something called “Dead Hand.” The sixth and final season will air over 10 episodes.

MY SAY United they once stand, divided they will likely fall. After five seasons, “The Americans’ ” final chapter appears to revolve around the simplest of twists, and most obvious of them, too. Over five seasons of operations, surveillance, espionage, murder and (of course) wigs, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings worked as a team. But they are a team no longer, and if a house divided against itself cannot stand, how long then can a marriage? Or a life itself?

Viewers got a foreshadowing of this discord in the fifth-season finale, “The Soviet Division,” when Elizabeth advised Tuan (Ivan Mok) — the teenager who posed as their son in another operation — to get a partner. Without one, she said, he would be doomed, because the job demands two people, each watching the other’s back.

But tragedies require myopic protagonists, and Elizabeth is myopic when it comes to her own counsel. She’s now a solo act, blind to the noose tightening around her own neck. She’s hanging on to a dying ideology and dying empire. In just under five years, the Soviet Union will begin to dissolve, but she has no way of knowing that, and it wouldn’t matter much if she did anyway. By this point — 1986, on the eve of the Reykjavik Summit and the Cold War thaw — she’s a part of the past. That’s who she is and who she was always supposed to be. It’s not that she won’t change, but that she can’t.

“Dead Hand,” the title of the sixth-season premiere, refers to a particularly horrifying Soviet-era secret weapon that Elizabeth must help preserve, but it also refers to the dead hand of the past that now guides her. You can almost hear the strains of the Soviet national anthem play out in her head as she offs some other innocent who stands in her way: “Unbreakable union of freeborn republics, Great Russia has welded forever to stand!” You almost feel sorry for her. Almost.

Showrunners and creators Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg always had huge ambitions set against the quiet, almost breathless, life of the Jenningses. Those begin to come into sharp focus as the sixth season gets underway. This series was superficially spy vs. spy, or superpower vs. superpower, but more fundamentally about human identity and the components that make up identity. Its brilliant and shockingly original twist was how it flip-flopped the Americans with the Russians, and how the fundamental human need to locate one’s soul was always mangled by the core drive of human institutions to mute that. It never took sides because in the agnostic world of “The Americans,” there was no side to take: Both were guilty, both equally screwed up, both in some fundamental way the same.

And so this great show soon ends. How? There will be surprises, but also tragedy, because all of this can only have a tragic outcome.

BOTTOM LINE As the Cold War begins to thaw, a deep freeze descends on the Jenningses, while the consequences seem inevitable. Or do they? As always, excellent.

By Verne J Gay

Verne.Gay@newsday.com@vernejgay

Verne J Gay is the television critic