SPOILER WARNING

* Can I level with y’all? I’m not sure five minutes of this entire show have gone by since Brody knelt in prayer that I didn’t think “Aw gee, it sure is a shame they didn’t wire that garage! Too bad the one thing that’d end the story instantaneously happens in the one place the other characters can’t see it happen!” It was a real tactical blunder on the show’s part to call attention to its own plot’s blind spot like that. Either don’t have Brody pray at all (I’m sure he can get the equivalent of a papal dispensation from the relevant al-Qaeda affiliated clerics), or have him pray someplace where it’s safe to do so for reasons other than “whoops,” but whatever you do, don’t have your antagonist do something that would lead to his defeat by your protagonist if he did it in any other room in the house but the one you end up writing a gaping loophole for him to do it in.

* This is in no way the only fairly inelegant bit of plot-necessitated writing in those first few episodes. Saul’s meeting with the judge he blackmails into issuing a FISA warrant for Carrie’s cameras felt like a show within a show called Infodumpin’ with Mandy and Michael. It came complete with a spinoff series: the later exchange between Carrie and her sister, which went something like “I can’t tell anyone about those antipsychotic pills I’m taking or–” “–or they’ll revoke your security clearance, yeah, I know, you’ve told me this many times over the years I, a licensed psychiatrist, have been providing you with these pills, but I’ll repeat it myself for emphasis this time.”

* And occasionally the heavyhandedness came gratis, with no plothammers attached. The scene in which Carrie’s boss David and that unctuous general bigfoot Mike into encouraging Brody to play the hero and thus help them continue the war, or else they’ll reveal Mike’s affair with his wife, felt like action-movie-bureaucrat-villain territory; the vice-presidential advisor with the ludicrous Southern accent was even worse. Shooting a dear to death for trampling tulips in the middle of a dinner party and in front of your own son was maybe a little much too, though it probably wasn’t as bad as punching a reporter in the throat mere seconds after being asked by said son what it’s like to kill someone. And frankly, after Carrie’s harem-girl asset gaver her “I’m just a girl from Sandusky, Ohio” speech, I was almost glad to see her go before we had to hear any more “Jack & Diane”-level backstory for her.

* But there you go, I think I just listed all the weak moments, in total. It’s tough to even classify what happened here as growing pains, since these same episodes contained remarkably nuanced and complex writing about the issues at stake here. Here’s the best way to characterize many of my positive responses: “Man, how interesting!”

* To wit:

* I like how we hear “Is it true you’re going to reenlist?” from the camped-out reporters before either Brody or we had had so much as a single thought about this. Those politicians sure work those phones fast.

* I like how palpable Brody’s disgust with bromides like “Thank you for your service” is, and that it seems to have little to do with the fact that he’s now secretly working to kill people who say shit like that. He genuinely can’t stand the idea that what happened to him, either before or during captivity, is anything to be thanked for.

* I like that the main character’s main action for a third of a season is to sit and intently watch a TV.

* I like how Brody’s rant to Mike about not taking orders from the brass to sell their “bullshit war” is, when you think about it, his last act of patriotism. He of course needs to step up and sell the bullshit war in order to pull off his new mission — he needs to play the good guy to be the bad guy — so a refusal to say “I’m proud of what we’re doing over there” on TV is also a refusal to be a terrorist.

* In other words, Carrie has the right of it: The show’s main innovation with regards to Brody is to examine the idea of terrorism being a difficult choice even for a convert to the cause. Damian Lewis is being asked to portray a lot of complex emotions and ideas, bringing each facet of them to the fore (i.e. his face) at rotating moments depending on Brody’s needs or lack thereof in those moments. There’s really no other character on TV quite like him.

* It was really, really sad watching him crawl into the corner and stay there for hours, no matter what he’s going to end up doing. This was someone’s little baby once, you know? And some other people, who were also someone’s little babies once, hurt him so badly that he has to sit in the corner of his bedroom for hours and hours to feel safe. Nothing better illustrates the nature of our beshitted world, a world that does this to some mother’s son, than torture and its after-effects.

* The Muslim dawn prayer as the definitive sign of monstrousness. Just putting that one out there.

* The well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual and mildly corrupt head of Carrie’s department is a black man about Barack Obama’s age. Just putting that one out there as well.

* Carrie’s closest personal relationships are (or in David’s case, were) with David, Virgil, and Saul — men 15, 20, 30 years her senior. Meanwhile her father has the same mental illness she does. Just putting that one out there next to the other ones.

* Homeland takes place in an alternate universe in which Lawrence O’Donnell bestrides the TV news landscape like a colossus.

* How sure are we that Morena Baccarin is human? How do we know she’s not a High Elf, or a Kryptonian, or an Amazon, or an alien from the planet of people with perfect and I mean perfect faces and bodies? Has this been investigated? Fuck Carrie and Virgil and Saul, let’s get Mulder and Scully on this case.

* Which reminds me: Doesn’t everyone on this show have worse problems on their hands than Sgt. Brody, given that the Vice President of the United States is motherloving Randall Flagg?

* Carrie crying after her asset was murdered was tough to watch — but, I think, vital to the appeal and dare-I-say-it-yes-I-dare importance of this show; her tearful arrival at her sister’s house following her quasi-quitting at Saul’s house even more so. After watching show after show in which deeply flawed men fuck up and/or commit horrible moral or actual crimes over and over again, crying maybe once every two or three seasons when shit gets totally out of control, it’s refreshing and realistic to watch a show in which the protagonist regularly cries when terrible things happen. I do; don’t you? And don’t you think this fact of human behavior should be reflected on TV?

* This isn’t quite on the level of the storytelling sins I listed earlier, but they have a Saudi prince who’s in America all the time on tape talking to the world’s most wanted man, whom no one has seen the better part of a decade. I guess I understand why they can’t make this public, or arrest the prince, but it feels like they should be doing something with this blockbuster piece of evidence. Instead it just kind of sits there.

* There was a great little piece of camerawork in the briefing where Carrie traces the escort’s necklace to a laundromat/Islamic financial institution and everyone is ordered to track its customers: The face of the real terrorist (or whatever he is) pops up just as the camera moves past it and the right side of the frame erases it, for the moment. Carrie and her colleagues live and die on details, and the show gets that, which is why they insert little details like that. Now we know how it feels.

* When Brody took his daughter out to the chainlink fence to see the padlock he and her mom put there years ago, I really thought he was shutting down her obvious attempts to tell him something unpleasant about his wife because he’d figured out what was up, but had forgiven her and wanted the daughter to do the same. But then he spent the next few episodes driving Jessica to the brink by passive-aggressively hinting around about her relationship with Mike over and over again. The jump was jarring.

* Another surprise, though in the opposite direction: We watch Brody’s face nearly the entire time as Carrie bumps into him at his Veterans Anonymous group and then attempts to leave, so if he’s sounding her out to see if she’s on to him, he does a much better job of hiding his true intentions than Carrie herself did. But from what I can see (at least until his cryptic grimace in the final shot of the episode), he was genuinely surprised to see her, and genuinely wanted to talk to her, and maybe even was genuinely concerned for her health. He seemed actually concerned.

* Carrie had a star-crossed relationship with her boss back in the day? Sheesh, lady, don’t shit where you eat.

* Who is this whitebread American woman living with the terrorist professor outside the airport, encouraging him to calm down and lie low? Who was the unaccented American man who tipped them off that Carrie and Virgil were tailing him? It wasn’t brother Max, was it? Dun dun DUNNNNN!

* I really enjoy the post-Cliff Martinez/Traffic score — all those electronic tones ‘n’ drones — though I know that shit’ll date terribly one day. Till then, keep the ominous swells of synthesized sound coming!

* Mandy Patinkin’s finest moment on the show was in his restraint, the way he spit out “I think you should leave now” and then swallowed his words as Carrie stormed out following their big blowup at his house. It works not just because of the contrast with his usual avuncular plainspokenness, but because Carrie has just informed us how dangerous he really is, or used to be.

* “Will he be tortured?” “We don’t do that here.” LOL

Tags: Homeland, reviews, TV, TV reviews

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