LAST EDITED ON 05-17-18 AT 01:40 AM (EST)

I wanted to post this somewhere, and the third-from-last episode just ran tonight without knocking out my theory as to how the FX TV show "The Americans" will end. It's still just a theory, and I've been waiting for it to be proven wrong, but it hasn't happened yet. So here goes (and I know how few people watch this show, but here goes anyway):

The show has done a lot of looping back to season 1. We had Stan re-create his search of the Jennings' garage in "Harvest". We had a Gregory mention with Curtis in "The Summit". But what if the show wants to recreate the really iconic moment from the pilot for the finale?

In the pilot, Philip, Elizabeth, and Rob are trying to kidnap the Soviet defector Timoshev. Before Philip and Elizabeth capture him, he stabs Rob. They don't want Rob to die, but they can't actually take him to a hospital because they'll get captured, so they drive to a hospital and dump him on the front lawn, then take off. They end up killing Timoshev when it turns out he'd raped Elizabeth while she was in training, but their objective is not to get caught. When Joel Fields came in to write an episode, he based it around Rob's death (the episode "Gregory").

So here we are two episodes from the end, with a bunch of questions unanswered, but one important one: who's going to die? But what if no one has to die, the way Rob did, if someone is willing to take that person all the way into the hospital at the risk of being caught? I feel that this whole season to this point has been to set us up for that. I think Philip is going to end up taking a wounded Stan to the hospital to save his life, because Philip doesn't want to be a part of more deaths. I think Philip is going to offer Elizabeth a chance to escape before he does it ... and I have speculation for the rest of the ending but it all seems a little too speculative to discuss here (such as how Stan gets wounded).

We shall see.