More than this, the design of the credits and their movement present forms of identity (national and personal) as layered constructions built up through personal and political ideologies across two nations in conflict. The principal characters, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), occupy the dual roles of unremarkable US citizens (small-business owners and parents to two children) and Soviet KGB officers; throughout the series the dangers and difficulties of their work, complete with multiple identities and disguises, are interwoven with the intimate dynamics of their relationship, alongside their role as parents. The credit sequence acknowledges the multiplicity of these identities through its series of collaged images that present parallels between American and Russia, and juxtapositions of what we might take as an authentic image (from their legal form of identity – a section of their passport) with a politically idealised image (taken from a piece of propaganda). Keri Russell's credit is introduced with a frame that situates the US Marine Corps war memorial in Arlington (also known as the Iwo Jima memorial) alongside the Worker and the Kolholz Woman memorial in Moscow, both sets of figures collectively raising objects (the national flag; the hammer and sickle), followed by a portion of Elizabeth's Russian passport next to the woman from Aleksander Rodchenko's ‘Books Please!’ poster. Matthew Rhys's credit follows footage of an American boy swinging a baseball bat, which cuts to a young Russian boy learning to use a scythe in the fields, and then to Philip's Russian passport beside a male figure from a US Second World War bonds poster. The rapidity of editing impresses a density in the combination of images and imagery, which create a collection of possible meanings that gather rather than replace one another. It also is difficult to grasp all the associations and connotations being built into the overlaps and apposition of the collage, just as it will prove difficult for the characters to manage these differing layers that construct their identity. Fittingly for a television programme centring on spies, the placement of the English-language credit gestures to how an outer surface can obscure another layer of identity, though it is difficult to tell in the credit sequence, as in the series, which might be the preferred or authentic surface (the Russian or English name; the passport or the propaganda), or whether these amount to the same thing. The layering of images further hints at the complexity of the relationship between the two nations, pointing out their perceived opposite ideological impulses, as when an image of Santa Claus with a small child is overlaid with a photograph of Karl Marx, alongside their direct parallels, as in the placement side by side of reworked versions of Russian and American propaganda posters of a woman holding her index finger to her lips in a silencing gesture.¹ The images chosen for the credits thus intertwine the personal and the political, conflating the individual with the national, the authentic with the iconographical, and hint at the ways their combination might not sit comfortably on top of or alongside one another.