The Americans 4.03 “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow”

Episodes of The Americans often have titles that not only tie in denotatively to something in that particular episode, but that have thematic connotations as well. Thus, I was intrigued when I saw the title of episode 4.03: “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow.”

The denotation of the title, of course, is the EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida (a suburb of Orlando). The actual full title for the EPCOT acronym is Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. However, when he was alive and planning EPCOT, Walter “Walt” Disney often interchanged the words community and city—and it is quite possible that had Disney lived to see his true vision of EPCOT realized, the final name for his project would have been “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow.”

In this episode, Elizabeth and Philip are told by their handler, Gabriel (Frank Langella), that they will be going on a family vacation to the EPCOT Center while “The Center” (the name for the KGB’s central headquarters in the Soviet Union in Moscow) sends agents to assassinate Pastor Tim and his wife. (Pastor Tim is the nondenominational minister of the church that is attended by Elizabeth and Philip’s daughter, Paige, who told the minister that her parents are spies from the Soviet Union.)

Philip is worried that if Pastor Tim and his wife are killed in an apparent “accident,” Paige will believe he and Elizabeth are responsible for the deaths. However, if the entire family is in Florida at the EPCOT Center, Gabriel believes that the most Paige will ever do is wonder if her parents played a role while knowing they could not have actually killed Pastor Tim.

So . . . that is the denotation of the episode’s title—a reference to one of the two amusement parks that comprised Walt Disney World in 1983 (the year in which the series is set). However, there really didn’t seem to be any thematic connotations for the EPCOT Center in this episode—at least not until I realized that the EPCOT Center amusement park is not what Walter Disney originally had in mind when he began developing the concept; it’s what the Disney Corporation turned the concept into after Walter Disney died.

Even though Disney referred to his project as the “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow,” the episode’s use of City in the title could be an allusion to Disney’s original plan for his company’s Florida property—to create a utopian city with a population of 20,000 residents that was meant to influence city planning in the United States and the rest of the world.

However, he wasn’t able to get approval from the State of Florida to begin building his utopian model community unit he first built an amusement park similar to the Disneyland amusement park that opened in Anaheim, California in 1955. That Florida amusement park became The Magic Kingdom at Disney World, and it opened in 1971—five years after Walter Disney died. Thus, he was never able to develop his utopian city that would have based on Futurism concepts.

Regarding his original vision for EPCOT, Walter Disney said:

EPCOT will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing, and testing, and demonstrating new materials and new systems—and EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.

When I began to think of Walter Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow as his vision of a utopian city of tomorrow that would promote “the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise,” the thematic elements of this episode finally revealed themselves to me. The most obvious element to look for is some sort of utopian vision of the future, and that part of the theme showed up in the opening scene in which Elizabeth and Philip paid a visit to Pastor Tim in his church office. They went there to gauge the minister’s attitude about Paige’s revelation to him, and to discover if he told anyone else about them being Soviet spies.

It is near the end of their conversation that the utopian concept is alluded to by Elizabeth as she tries to sell Pastor Tim a view of them that he might be willing to embrace:

Elizabeth: You know . . . what we do . . .  isn’t so different from what you do.

Pastor Tim: I know what spies do.

Elizabeth: Is that . . . the word that Paige used? (pause) One of the things we do, like you, is work to end the nuclear threat that hangs over all of us.

Philip: When we were hired, we were called “Peace Workers.” (pause) We develop relationships with people from both sides who wish to diffuse the tension between our two countries.

Elizabeth: We fight for justice; for equal rights for everyone no matter who they are or what they believe.

Pastor Tim: Unless they’re religious. (Elizabeth looks concerned.) Jewish dissidents . . . trapped in the Soviet Union; Catholics in Poland.

Elizabeth: Our country isn’t perfect . . . neither is this one.

A vision of a world free from the threat of nuclear destruction, and one in which justice and equal rights for everyone prevails is a typical utopian concept during the latter half of the 20th Century, but Pastor Tim’s response points to the basic problem of creating Utopia—on whose vision of a “perfect society” is Utopia based? Adolf Hitler was attempting to create a utopian society with his vision of his Third Reich as “The Thousand-Year Reich.” Obviously, one person’s Utopia can become another person’s Dystopia.

After learning Pastor Tim told his wife about them being Soviet spies, Elizabeth and Philip need Paige to go to her minister’s office and discuss things with him because they know if the pastor will respond in a positive way to anyone, it is Paige. However, Paige becomes frustrated during her meeting with him for two reasons:

• She feels Pastor Tim violated the trust and confidence she placed on him by revealing her family’s secret;
• Paige knows Pastor Tim’s wife is a notorious gossip who will probably not be able to keep the revelation to herself—which is what has prompted the planned trip to EPCOT and the assassination of Pastor Tim and his wife while the Jennings are in Florida.

The idea of the “ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise” showed up in a few scenes of this episode; the most obvious was when Elizabeth went undercover as a housewife interested in developing her own business as a Mary Kay Cosmetics distributor. Of course, her actual goal is to develop a relationship with one of the other Mary Kay distributors, a South Korean housewife named Young-Hee (which is a given name; we did not learn her surname in this episode).

At this point, it’s not clear why the Soviets are interested in Young-Hee’s household, but my assumption is that Elizabeth’s real target is Young-Hee’s husband, Don. I am guessing he is either a South Korean diplomat or another form of government official, or perhaps he is a South Korean scientist working in the United States in some capacity. In any event, I’m sure the KGB is not interested in a South Korean housewife who sells Mary Kay Cosmetics in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.

As a door-to-door salesman, Elizabeth is a natural based on her extensive training as a Soviet spy. She is used to developing “assets” by manipulating and deceiving high-ranking political and scientific officials, so manipulating a homemaker into buying makeup and perfume comes easy to her. In becoming a Mary Kay distributor who uses her training as a Soviet spy to sell cosmetics, Elizabeth’s undercover role is the epitome of the “ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”

However, just as there is irony in Elizabeth’s utopian appeal to Pastor Tim, there is irony in how a Soviet KGB agent is a natural at succeeding in the American capitalist system.

One other thematic connotation of EPCOT is not associated with Walter Disney’s original concept, but with how the EPCOT was developed after his death—a park that, in part, is dedicated to international culture. A slice of “international culture” is presented when Elizabeth agrees to have dinner with Young-Hee’s family. She is introduced to traditional Korean food, but she is allowed to drink wine with her dinner and eat with a fork instead of chopsticks.

It is with the drinking of wine that Elizabeth connects with Young-Hee’s husband, Don, who is also drinking wine rather than the traditional Korean beverage the other members of the extensive family is having with their meal. Don has become Americanized, and his family members make jokes about his love of wines rooted in Western cultures.

The major bonding point between Elizabeth and Young-Hee’s family comes when she eats a hot pepper that is part of her meal—my guess is that it is a Thai chili, which is common in southeast Asia. It led to Elizabeth participating in what seems to be a tradition with the female members of this family, as Young-Hee and her daughters join Elizabeth in a ritual they call “the Pepper Dance” (which involves jumping up and down and waving a hand in front of your open mouth).

Before I realized how EPCOT is the thematic motif of “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow,” I was prepared to write about how the episode was merely an example of “The Plot Thickens.” However, most of the scenes can be shown to have a connection to either Walter Disney’s original EPCOT concept or the eventual park that the Disney Corporation built.

However, all three episodes of the season thus far have also involved scenes of Nina Sergeevna in prison back in the Soviet Union—scenes that have not yet directly tied into anything that is going on with the characters in Washington, DC. We did get a brief dream of Nina’s in which she was happily reunited with Stan Beeman for a few seconds, but the actual scenes in the Soviet prison have not had strong thematic connections to the other scenes in the three episodes.

What we did learn in this episode, as “the plot thickens” with Nina’s situation, is that she is now facing execution due to her latest indiscretion. In this case, execution is given the euphemistic phrase “exceptional punishment” by her defense attorney.

Perhaps the possibility of Nina being executed will now connect back to Stan’s plan to get Nina released and sent back to the United States; after all, we still have the mysterious file that Stan was given by Supervisor Gaad in the second episode—a file that the CIA had authenticated and that Stan can use.

Or, perhaps Nina will simply be executed and we won’t keep scene-jumping to the Soviet prison for no apparent reason. Only time will tell.