PEOPLE Review: The Russians Are Still Here! 'The Americans' Starts a New Season Full of Suspense and Spies

When The Americans premiered in 2013, it came with a built-in ironic kick: Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell), Soviet spies in Ronald Reagan‘s America, couldn’t know that their beloved mother country was headed for what Trotsky called “the ash heap of history.” The Cold War would end, and they’d be left soaking-wet in their own dissolved ideology. Ha.

Now here we are in 2016, with a newly nationalist Russia aggressively pushing out on many fronts under Vladimir Putin.

In other words, never smirk at history. History knows more than you do about blowback.

But one thing doesn’t change: The show is terrific – not just suspenseful, but very smart about connecting the Jenningses to the culture of the times. Philip, for instance, is having trouble shaking distant Russian memories that were stirred up after he attended the controversial human-potential movement known as est. This is both plausible and, because of Rhys’ completely believable air of troubled unhappiness, preposterously, even comically relatable.

That goes for much of the show, in fact: The Jenningses’ foreignness has been so thorough integrated into their middle-class American identities – they’re travel agents, which in itself is something of a joke – that we identify with them and, more often than not, root for them. What if your teenage daughter blabbed family secrets to the pastor, after you had told her in the strongest possible terms that she was not to?! You would be disconcerted. You would be hurt. Imagine, then, that what she blabs to the pastor is that you and your spouse are communist spies. Your immediate impulse might very well be to inform your daughter that she’s grounded, then set about reuniting the pastor with his Maker.

Philip and Elizabeth also have to figure out how to safely handle a vial of biotoxin that lands in their possession – every parents’ worst nightmare. And their neighbor works for the CIA. And, separately and together, they’re given assignments that require them to wear disguises that would embarrass their children, and that seem to embarrass them, too: Beneath their cheap wigs, they often have the look of cats and dogs dressed up by their owners for Instagram.

Meanwhile, poor Nina Krilova (Annet Mahendru) remains the show’s most powerful reminder of the realities of Soviet Russia – the interrogations, the terror, the privation, the Gulag and all that. She also possesses a strange, beautiful romanticism that sweeps through the show like a motif broken loose from a Tchaikovsky symphony.

Russell is beautiful, as well, but Elizabeth’s is a pinched personality, assessing one situation after another with a death stare. Most mother-spies are probably like that.

The Americans returns Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on FX.