A Lonely Existence: On The Americans, Season 4, Episode 6

In those moments when Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) is an effective FBI agent, it’s because he has good instincts about people, and is able to perceive what motivates them. What they want and need. He seems incapable of understanding himself, but he often understands what drives others, and it’s this perceptiveness that makes him rightly suspect that his coworker Martha might be leaking information to the Soviets.

It’s her loneliness that makes him suspicious.

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And it’s not that I think what Martha did was okay. But I understand it. Because loneliness changes you. It requires you to actively do this without much reinforcement from the world around you…

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…and that is a struggle at times. Finally someone comes along who Martha wants to love and who wants to love her. That is powerful. Maybe Martha failed to maintain a belief in the value of her own love. Maybe she felt she had to do more to hold on to Clark because she had learned and internalized that she herself wasn’t enough. But given the life she’s lived, I can understand that.

Later in the episode, Stan tells his boss…

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And it’s so awful in its reductive simplicity. She may have done a bad thing but she’s not “bad” at all. She’s lonely. And this coming from Stan of all people. Stan who failed love in the season two finale…

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…setting in motion the events that would lead to Nina’s execution.

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What Martha has done to hold on to love may be “bad.” What Stan did when he failed to hold on to it was far worse.