Not with a bang but a whimper

That's how the third season of The Americans ended. Not the fast-paced nail-biter one has come to expect from season finales of this kind of series, and good on them for doing it. It was by far the best episode of a somewhat disappointing third season. Without giving too much away, the climactic scene has our Soviet-spy protagonists struggling to express their own devastating truths to one another, their words and thoughts instead articulated in inverted form by none other than Ronald Reagan, delivering his "evil empire" speech on TV in the background. Contrived? Yes. Compelling? You bet.