Awesome / The Americans

• Elizabeth beating down her rapist former captain and kicking his head through the garage wall. Badass to the fullest.
  • Philip killing said rapist with one hand!
• Stan being smart enough to immediately suspect his new neighbors of being KGB agents. His suspicions are allayed when he can't find any evidence, but that fact that he suspected them in the FIRST episode is impressive.
• Philip threatening to kill Gregory if he harms Rob's wife.
• Stan and his partner intimidating the Jerkass studio store employee.
• The fight between Philip and the uncle/brother of a family that he and Elizabeth are using as inside men. The awesomeness is piling up quickly in this show.
• After one of Elizabeth's honey trap targets whips her with a belt during rough sex, Philip's first instinct is to hunt the man down and murder him.
• Elizabeth climbing out of the trunk of a vehicle on a lift in a garage with mechanics and an FBI agent present, and climbing into the trunk of another vehicle also on a lift. When she is driven off with it she just walks out of a federal building by acting like she belongs there.
• Philip and Elizabeth are kidnapped and tortured by what appear to be American government agents who know they're Russian spies. When neither of them crack it's revealed that they are being held by men working for the Jennings' handler Claudia and they were ordered by the KGB to find the mole in DC. They were trying to determine Philip and Elizabeth's loyalty. When they're released, Elizabeth goes berserk and proceeds to give a Curb-Stomp Battle on Claudia, an Old Soldier who survived the Battle of Stalingrad who's left whimpering and bloody on the ground. Philip manages to keep Elizabeth from killing her and she gives her this message:
  Tell whoever approved this that your face is a present from me to them. Show them your face! SHOW IT TO THEM!!!
• Henry Jennings helping his sister escape a creepy guy they met hitchhiking by smashing a beer bottle over the guy's head! At this rate, he'll be ready to join mom and dad in the spy game when he's a teenager.
• In "Mutually Assured Destruction", Philip and Elizabeth are tasked with finding and stopping a contract killer whom the KGB hired to assassinate American scientists working on the missile defense system (Moscow hired the killer, then changed their minds and could no longer locate him). Philip and Elizabeth track the man down to the hotel where he's staying, break into his room, and order him to stop his mission at gunpoint. The man reveals that there's a bomb stuck to the wall where Philip is standing. He then draws a pistol and takes cover in the bathroom. A split-second before the killer can detonate the bomb, Elizabeth picks it up and tosses it through the bathroom door right as it detonates. The resulting explosion reduces the assassin to human hamburger.
• Elizabeth tries to get information from Amador as he lies dying. Amador calmly, but defiantly tells her that she can torture him if she wants, but it won't matter in the end because the USSR is going to lose the Cold War.
• Philip talking down Fred, the man who thought he'd been blown.
• Baklanov's Israeli watchers managing to spirit him out from under Philip and Elizabeth's noses, because Elizabeth was too focused on smashing the guy's arms with the trunk while the woman scoots around and gets into the driver's seat and zooms off.
• Hell, the counter-ambush itself counts. At last we have people who can hold their own against the Jennings.
• Oleg secretly using the information he got about Nina against Stan.
• Larrick takes down Lucia despite getting shot by a tranquilizer dart first. Later, when Lucia makes another attempt, despite being told by Elizabeth to stand down, he strangles her to death while forcing Elizabeth to watch, knowing that he is way too valuable for the Soviets to be killed. After all the shit the KGB pulls on the United States in season 2, it's extremely satisfying to finally watch an American force the KGB to follow his terms.
• In Season 2 the American government pulls off a pretty impressive Batman Gambit. Basically they come up with designs for new submarine rotors that are supposed to be groundbreaking, but are in actuality faulty and dangerous. They then put the plans in facilities all over the country and wait for the Soviets to steal them. The Soviets steal the plans as predicted and hurriedly fit one of their submarines with the new rotor design. The new rotor malfunctions and kills the entire crew of the submarine. After watching the KGB kick America's ass for most of season 2, it was refreshing seeing the US humiliate the Soviet Union like that.
• The Pastor in Paige's church. He forces Philip to retreat simply by keeping calm and saying things he already has faith in anyway.
• Sandra finally has Stan admit he's having an affair. While she tells him outright that she's progressing into an affair of her own and saying it to his face.
• In "Yousif", Larrick shows off how cunning and dangerous he is by tracking down a KGB safehouse, killing the agent stationed inside, and hacks into the telephone switchboard so that he can start tracking down people associated with Philip and Elizabeth.
  • The KGB agent who Larrick kills in that episode gets his own CMOA when he hits the self-destruct switch for the telephone switchboard before Larrick kills him (although it was ultimately a useless gesture, as Larrick was able to repair the switchboard).
• Agent Gaad successfully blackmails the Soviet Union into accepting that the death of Vlad was just a random killing, thereby saving his own career. Then he flatly tells Arkady that if the KGB kills FBI agents, the FBI will retaliate by killing KGB agents. Then later he finds a hidden compartment inside the briefcase taken from Emmett and Leanne.
• Larrick ambushes Kate in her own apartment. He then discovers her cypher pad and decrypts a message sent to her. Kate herself also has a CMOA in this episode: despite being rather inept at tradecraft in earlier episodes, she detects Larrick in her apartment, leaves a hidden message for the Jennings, and resists Larrick's interrogation before he kills her.
• Stan Beeman finally decides not to betray his country for Nina.
• Larrick tracks the Jennings to a KGB safe house hidden deep in the woods. He ambushes and kidnaps Philip, and nearly does the same to Elizabeth. The only reason he fails is because he didn't know that Jared had a gun. Think about it: the Jennings have been killing and pulling off successful missions for two seasons, and Larrick came a hair's breadth away from singlehandedly bringing them down. That's how much of a badass he was. And even after he's been shot, he's still able to shoot Jared as well, and it takes both Philip and Elizabeth to take him out.
• Philip taking what is probably the most insanely dangerous risk possible: meeting with the Rezident, Arkady in public. He does this to show just how serious he is about Moscow threatening his children.
• Stan Beeman and Oleg team up to investigate Zinaida, with Stan rigging her security so that Oleg can secretly intimidate her while posing as a KGB assassin. While Zinaida doesn't break (they didn't expect her to), the entire Rezidentura is then "coincidently" ordered by the Center not to perform any assassinations or intimidations without direct orders, confirming that Zinaid informed them.
• Agent Aderholt finds not one, but BOTH KGB bugs in the FBI office, merely because he is incredibly meticulous in his work. The first because he finds a rattling pen suspicious, and the second because he thoroughly investigates everything Martha was even remotely involved in at the office, leading him to take apart the Mail Robot when he discovers a death that was tangentially connected to it.
• Stan Beeman pulls off a successful Batman Gambit on Oleg, tricking him into incriminating himself on tape and confirming Zenaida as a spy. Even more badass, he goes around Gaad to the FBI director, and gets immunity from oversight when he should have been fired for his actions.
• Two muggers (with "only" a knife) were never a match against Elizabeth.