This is part of a series of occasional looks at “The Americans,” the Soviet-spies-in-the-eighties drama. There are spoilers.

“ARPANET—the scientist mentioned that, what is that?” a K.G.B. agent who goes by the name Philip Jennings asked his controller, on “The Americans,” on FX, last night. His controller tells him, “It’s an advanced processing system,” and adds, in response to a blank look, “It has to do with computers.” She has instructions from Moscow for Philip to bug it. The show is set in 1982, and the bug she brought him is a briefcase-sized computer, complete with keyboard: “Once you’ve attached it to the … thing, it takes thirty seconds to transfer.” Philip thinks it’s big for a bug—“the size of a rat.” Then he gets to reading the instructions.

Almost every character on Wednesday’s episode of “The Americans” was on a mission to crack one electronic system or another—ARPANET, a polygraph, an electric fence, an early video-game console. Philip also needs a security passcode, which his confederate, a heavy-drinking, Hitchens-like crypto-Marxist neocon named Charles Duluth, finds for him, in a minor homage to “War Games,” on a scrap of paper in the wooden desk drawer of a certain Professor Thane Rosenbloom. (“The Americans” does a pretty good job on names.) The actual computer he bugs is a dull-looking cabinet, but he does get to flip lots of glowing switches on an alarm-system board to get in.

Meanwhile, Nina Sergeevna Kirolova, a K.G.B. triple agent (played by Annet Mahendru), has a lesson in using her body to hack the polygraph test that Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), the F.B.I. agent who thinks he’s controlling her, needs her to take. An almost touching period detail is Nina’s initial terror about the polygraph, which she assumes is infallible (“I might as well hang a guilty sign around my neck”). We have thirty years of detective shows on her, so for us the polygraph is an old and somewhat discredited instrument. Oleg, a new K.G.B. officer, tries to convince her that being a machine does not make it smart: when a camera takes a picture of you smiling, he asks her, “Does it know if you are happy?” Nina passes, after Stan and the F.B.I. polygraph operator study her results with a dated reverence and officiousness.

And Elizabeth, Philip’s partner (whose cover is as his wife; they are played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), is trying to fashion Lucia, a young Nicaraguan agent, into her means for getting to the control panel that will switch off the electrified fence at a military base. The problem is that Lucia, who earlier killed a Congressional aide she may have loved, now has to let live Captain Larrick, an American SEAL she wants dead—she blames him for the deaths of hundreds of Nicaraguans in the U.S.’s efforts to prop up the Anastasio Somoza regime. (“She runs hot,” Elizabeth tells Philip—another unwieldy spy engine.) Luckily or not, the Captain has to run off to mine Managua’s harbor.

Philip and Elizabeth were sent to the United States as young adults, trained to pass themselves off as Americans. They have two children, Paige and Henry. One of the show’s standing questions is the balance between pretense, earned tenderness, and raw need in Philip and Elizabeth’s sexual relationship. Last week, we were given a cruel (if not final) answer when Elizabeth tried to get Philip to sleep with her while inhabiting one of his false identities, Clark; as Clark, he had seduced a secretary at the F.B.I. named Martha, and married her in what Martha believed was a genuine wedding ceremony. (There are a lot of hard-to-gauge marriages in this show.) Martha had told Elizabeth, whom she thinks is Clark’s sister, that he is “an animal” in bed, and Elizabeth asked to see what that meant, perhaps thinking it would expose some real part of him. Philip responded with a flash of sexual brutality that seemed to shake them both. Another source of trouble was that Paige, their older child, was investigating and lying to them. But she has now found a youth church group, and rather piously pledged her honesty. She may be not Paige the Spy but an ideologue, like her Soviet-loyalist mother. This is one of the many points where the show, quite wonderfully, goes for painful family drama over the absurdist comedy potential of a couple of suburban K.G.B. agents. The terror is not children we do not recognize but ones who are just like us.

Henry, a ten-year-old with “Star Wars” sheets and a love of hockey, had seemed more or less exempt from those suspicions, though he lied with ease for his sister. He has a telescope; last time we saw him with it, he was searching for the North Star. Now he is tracking the movements of the father and son next door. When they are gone, he breaks into their house and parks himself on the couch, joystick in hand, in a video-game glow. He is in. And he has the technology he desires.

Why isn’t Philip as excited about ARPANET as Henry is about Asteroids? Even in the early eighties, would a K.G.B. agent—one who spent the show’s first season trying to get to the bottom of Reagan’s Star Wars program—be as puzzled about the point of ARPANET as Philip turns out to be, and so skeptical about its value? The network belonged to the Pentagon, though it let universities in; Defense Department communications are what the Jenningses hack for a living. One appreciates the shout-outs to computer history; when Philip asks Rosenbloom if the defense and scientific communities share a network, Rosenbloom sighs and says, “For now.” (The Defense Department would section off the classified MILNET in 1983, leaving ARPANET, newly equipped with TCP/IP protocols, to evolve into our Internet.) The other questions that he and Charles—he is pretending to be Charles’s journalistic colleague— ask Professor Rosenbloom, though, seem more like those one would hear in 1975, the year the Times ran a report about a Senate hearing on ARPANET. (An Assistant Secretary of Defense—in real life, not on the show—told the Senators, that year, “Let me emphasize … that it contains no sociological or intelligence data on personalities, and that it is a marvel in many ways. But it does not fit the Orwellian mold attributed to it.”) By the end of 1982, Time magazine had made [The Computer](http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1982) its person, or thing, of the year (it was a better call than You), and the Commodore 64 was on the market. Maybe Philip’s attitude will change, in a future episode, when he buys one for Henry.

The episode is less satisfying as a look at the route to Edward Snowden and mass surveillance, in part because of Philip’s diffidence. The marvel and the Orwellian anxiety are both missing. This is, again, strange, given that the show has set him up as the K.G.B. agent most in tune with American culture. (When his controller shows up for a parking-lot meeting wearing a babushka, he tells her, “You look like a spy in an old movie.”) By contrast, Oleg, newly arrived at the Embassy in Washington, calls ARPANET “the future.” As Philip is installing the rat-bug on the network at the computer lab, a young man wanders back into the lab, and Philip kills him. Watchers of the show know that Philip has killed a lot of people, often with less cause. And yet, this is the murder that gets him wondering why—“For some ‘X’s and ‘O’s?” The tech guy, he says, was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” But being a young computer scientist, logging into ARPANET in the early eighties, would strike a lot of people as being in just the right place at a somewhat wondrous time. If Philip finds ARPANET boring, it may not be because of the era but because he is getting tired of being a spy.

“The scientist” who mentioned ARPANET to Philip was a Russian-Jewish physicist he’d abducted in an earlier episode, who was temporarily snatched back by the Mossad—for whom he had, with a timely touch of Jonathan Pollard, been spying on America—and then bundled onto a ship, after Moscow traded fifteen hundred exit visas for refuseniks for him. The scientist’s last gambit had been to offer Philip his services as a spy for the K.G.B. if he was only allowed to stay in America. Then, Philip was impassive. Maybe he counted on the interrogators in Moscow getting the passwords and protocols out of the scientist anyway, some old-fashioned way—or, maybe, with a polygraph. All machines can be cracked; you just might be disappointed by what you find inside.

Read Emily Nussbaum on “The Americans,” and Amy Davidson on last season’s finale