The Americans on FX

A friend of mine argues that the FBI really had nothing on Martha and that she just needed to keep her cool in order to go back to her regular life and her job. That doesn't seem at all plausible to me - and certainly nothing that the Center/Philip/Gabriel, etc would go along with. Thoughts?

 

She was going to have a pretty tough time explaining why she was married to a guy who didn't exist.

 

Has your friend been watching the show? She was cooked if she didn't either turn on Phillip or escape to Russia.

Thinking back on it now, I really expected more fireworks from the end of the Martha storyline than just a quiet ride to a grassy runway, and I don't mean in the murder/shoot out/car chase sense. I thought Phillip's connection to Martha and her departure was going to be the catalyst for him pushing further away from the center and push Paige further from that life, a position he was taking last season. Unless she comes back, which I still doubt, it seems all Martha did was get the family a seven-month vacation by pushing Phillip right up to the edge, with a little help from Elizabeth and a whiskey bottle to the dome of her source.

I'm going to be interested to see if Martha, even in absence, continues to affect the plot or if she just served as a good time to reset and refocus.

 

Your friend is an idiot. Or at least incredibly wrong here.

The moment they found out she was having regular contact with a man who didn't hold up to a background check, she was toast.

 

I still think it was funny that she never realized -- or was willing to acknowledge -- that the marriage to Clark/Phillip was a sham.

 

The only thing I'd say about Martha in that vein is it was pretty convenient for Stan to develop an intuition about her. Once they started looking into it she had no chance, but I don't recall any great sign that would have led Stan in that direction.

 

I think it was always willful naivete for Martha for pretty much everything involving "Clark." She was a rube, sure, but she wasn't completely clueless. It would have been easy for them to write her as a total moron, but I thought they did a good job of portraying her as someone torn between "doesn't know" and "doesn't want to know" without having her ever actually say anything like that.

But yeah, her telling him to "not be alone" before she got on the plane was awkward.

 

That's a good point. It did seem like one day Stan just said "Hey, what about Martha?" But this is the same guy who was searching his new neighbor's garage in the first episode, so he has a history of following random hunches.

 

I think he felt the suicide wrapped up the spying too neatly and was on alert to see if someone else could be involved.

Martha had this shady/secret love life that should have drawn anyone's interest.

 

I guess you could chalk it up to Stan remaining unsettled about Amador's death, but I don't recall anyone in the office knowing anything about Martha's love life -- shady, secret or otherwise -- until Stan decided she was suspicious.

 

It was a combination of her reacting weirdly to the suicide, the suicide being too convenient and out of the blue, and her acting weird by the copy machine right before the copy machine count was off.

 

I think Stand was curious about her personally before all this (maybe as a potential girlfriend?) so his radar was more tuned to her.