I don’t know if you follow The Americans, F/X’s intense if implausible take on deep-cover Soviet spies in the U.S. during the Reagan Administration. There are several things in the show that are particularly entertaining for me—for example, the spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Mathew Rhys and Keri Russell) live with their two kids in Falls Church, Virginia, where I grew up,1 and they own and operate a travel agency located off Dupont Circle in DC, which is where I live now.
I also found it particularly entertaining that the Jennings spend a good part of Season Three trying to obtain information on the theoretically game-changing “stealth” technology being developed for the B-2 bomber back in the eighties. I imagine the Soviets did spend some time and money trying to steal our stealth secrets, and, to the extent that they did so, that surely represents the only ROI that the U.S. got out of that multi-billion dollar boondoggle—somewhere in the neighborhood of $75 billion to date for an aircraft that had no mission when conceived.
By 1980, the U.S. had the capacity to destroy all major targets with ICBMs in a matter of minutes, but Air Force brass hats (all former pilots, of course) refused to imagine a U.S. deterrent that didn’t feature long-range bombers streaming across the Soviet Union. The B-2 was designed as the unnecessary replacement to the equally unnecessary B-1, and neither have in fact replaced the “ageless” B-52, which went into production in the 1950s, when we actually needed a strategic bomber.
What about the “prayer”? Well, that’s Pastor Tim, the idealistic rev who’s captivated the Jennings’ daughter Paige (Holly Taylor). Since The Americans still has two seasons to run, what ultimately happens to the rev (who knows the Jennings’ secret) is anybody’s guess.
Afterwords
Since both the B-1 and B-2 were built, essentially, to spend money rather than win wars, it’s no surprise that both have proved almost useless against real targets. I’ve previously bitched about their costly redundancy here, as well as their thrice-misbegotten successor to be, currently known, for some obscure reason, as the “LRS-B”, for “long-range strike bomber.”
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Unsurprisingly, the show does not get into the issue that would occur at once to someone like me, whether the Jennings live in the actual city of Falls Church (very small) or the larger “environs.” The show doesn’t bother with authentic location shots for either Falls Church or Dupont Circle, so an actual resident can’t get his bearings. Sometime in the third season the show did feature an authentic Don Beyer Volvo ad on the radio, which was pretty funny for anyone who grew up in the real FC. ↩︎
