Elizabeth meets with her CIA contact Patrick McCleesh to gather information before the summit and has to sneak into the State Department (where she claimed to be employed) to have lunch with him.
Later, when Elizabeth meets Rennhull to get the radiation sensor, he refuses to cooperate, and she again threatens to reveal his prior contact and sets up a fallback exchange date.
When she jumps him, he fatally shoots himself through the jaw, splattering blood and brains over her face just as Paige breaks lookout cover and runs to her mother's aid.
In its original American broadcast, "Tchaikovsky" was seen by an estimated 616,000 household viewers and gained a 0.15 ratings share among adults aged 18–49, according to Nielsen Media Research.
Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gave it 91% "Fresh" ratings and average rating of 7.87 out of 10, based on 11 reviews, with consensus reading "Tchaikovsky slows the momentum of its predecessor while threatening to push the conflict between family, career, and personal conviction to a breaking point in the lives of The Americans' core characters.".