Much like Breaking Bad and shows like it, The Americans has protagonists that are decidedly less than moral. Soviet KGB agents, trained at a young age for service in a super-secret sub-section of the spy network known as Directorate S, they are plopped in an average 1960s American suburb with all the trappings of average, normal English-speaking Americans living an average, normal American life.
As the decades of their lives in the US progress, they've sealed the masquerade by going to such measures presenting to be married and having sex purely to have children as trappings to their disguise.
Our main story takes place starting in the early 1980's when the kids are teenagers and our couple feel more like a real married couple, work as co-owners of a travel agency and seem, at least superficially, to like living an upper middle-class American lifestyle with a nice roomy house, color TVs in every room, even a sporty white muscle car for Philip. And Elizabeth has lots and lots of laundry, since she loves doing laundry;).
But they also happen to engage in bold and violent missions involving sex as coercion, blackmail, breaking and entering, theft, all-round general espionage and, well, murder. And after a long night of do-baddery for The Motherland against the decadent, Capitalist-pig Americans, it's back home to the sleeping, at first unaware kiddies and time to do the dishes.
My favorite episode is probably one of the most poignant at capturing the essence of the idea of these sleeper agents and what they must have to deal with both amongst themselves as a couple of agents, posed as a married couple but endeavoring to actually feel like a married couple and the soul searching they must do regularly within their own sense of being and purpose.
Entitled "Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?" our spy couple break into an FBI-contracted small machine shop business that has housed on its warehouse floor a mail robot (basically an automated moving shelf cart designed to deliver mail throughout the FBI headquarters building) they are repairing. It's the middle of the night so no-one should be there, but, as our couple are working on the mail robot, installing an electronic bugging device in it, someone enters the upstairs loft office area.
Elizabeth goes to investigate and comes across an old lady. The old lady is startled and assumes this might be a robbery, but soon the mood changes as it's slowly revealed, mainly through the chatty, yet calm questioning and story-telling our older woman delivers in speaking with Elizabeth while at gunpoint.
We learn how she and her husband began the small machine shop when they were starting out in life soon after the War. She talks lovingly of her war veteran husband with whom she had been married at a young age, then they drifted apart, got divorced, remarried other people only to eventually, a couple more decades later to reconnect and remarry and stay together in a much stronger, loving relationship until his passing some years before. Now her son runs the business and she suffers from an undisclosed heart condition for which she takes medication and occasionally has insomnia during which she drops into the office in the middle of the night to do the books.
After her protracted yet ultimately captivating and wonderfully delivered dialogue, she asks, calmly enough yet knowingly of Elizabeth "You're not going to let me leave here, are you?" Elizabeth slowly nods needlessly really, as even she can see that the lady already knows.
Elizabeth calmly dumps the bottle of heart pills on the desk and instructs the lady to take them to which the lady complies, slowly plucking one at a time and swallowing each of them down with small sip of water.
Her courage and grace move Elizabeth to near-tears as our fair old mom, yet another in the long, long line of innocent people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, a recurrent dilemma for many a character in this show, dies in her chair.
I know, of course, the title is an allusion to the famous work of Philip K. Dick and I interpret the usage, other than being a witty way to tie in the mail robot's part in this, to a theme in the Dick short story. Like in that, our protagonist spies, at least at first, seem like they believe they are better than the people they live around and that they are doing evil things not out of evil motivations, but out of a cold, disciplined series of actions designed to favor and advantage a better way of life for not just their home country, but for the world.
In other words, the Communist Manifesto of world domination. Global communism, not for power or territory, but for the freedom of the masses of the people of the world, overthrowing the oppression from the elites.
Yet, perhaps first in this episode, midway into the third season, we now see a little bit of guilt and regret creep into the unemotional android-like steel façade of our "heroes."