* I guess you know you’ve hit a good stretch of episodes of a TV show when, depending on the point at which you stop writing and start writing, the show you’re writing about could be about something entirely different.
* Anyway, before we get into it, a few stray observations from earlier in the season:
* I’m not sold on the opening credits, partially because I think formless jazz squawking as your theme music is a dropped ball when I could hum you the theme songs of all the other great dramas on TV right now, and partially because I think it implies a ubiquity of Terrorism as a society-shaping force that didn’t exist prior to 9/11. I’m a year older than Claire Danes and when I think back to childhood memories of terrorism and terrorists, they weren’t frightening at all, they were the bad guys in Back to the Future and The Naked Gun.
* I realized I wasn’t as ready as Carrie was to make the leap from suspecting Prince Fareed of direct involvement with Abu Nasir’s terrorist group to suspecting someone else in his entourage because while she bases this decision on how convincingly upset he seemed by the murder of his escort-girlfriend, we in the audience are at this point used to people lying convincingly on any number of levels, not the least of which is the fact that we’re watching actors pretend to be characters who are pretending to be things that they’re not. I don’t know why you’d buy Fareed’s grief on those grounds. (It didn’t help that it wasn’t a particularly convincing performance of grief on a meta level.)
* Brody don’t flail. This isn’t Walter White, careening from calamity to calamity; it isn’t even Don Draper, whose surface cool often feels about an inch deep when he’s provoked. Brody isn’t desperate. He isn’t stumbling and scrambling in terms of his secret mission — he’s gliding, with only garden-variety PTSD and jealousy tripping him up.
* Okay, now on to the events at hand:
* The Rachel Corrie/John Walker Lindh mashup terrorist woman is in a relationship with the other guy — she’s not just his minder! This show’s choice to humanize the enemy at every turn, the same way that our own warriors go home and kiss their wives and hug their kids and mean it, is admirable, but it also makes for some unexpected plot twists.
* “Tell that to the guys in Guantanamo.” They can’t turn themselves in because they know they could easily be tossed into a hole for life with no legal recourse. Fucking Gitmo.
* Aileen is basically Dark Carrie: A pretty-in-a-patrician-way intense motivated blonde making up for the sins of her father.
* Smart writing to have her repeatedly refer to her boyfriend as a “brown boy,” meant to indicate her father’s bigotry but also tipping us off to her own fetishization of that status.
* I think it’s funny that Mexico has its own lighting scheme that repeats across shows — blown out and brown. Is this legally mandated?
* SAUL IS THE FUCKING MOLE?!?! Okay, probably not, but I sure jumped when I saw the polygraph needle go haywire when he was asked about the razor. Clever, clever work on the show’s part, to introduce an entirely new element of uncertainty at the exact moment it appears to be exonerating Brody, and thus challenging us to wonder whether we’ve been watching a different show all along. They got pretty playful about this, actually, the best example being having him shadily insist on personally escorting Aileen back from Mexico, and then revealing that he truly was just the best person to crack her open.
* Saul had great material throughout this stretch. His sad attempts to be happy and enticing in the face of his wife’s determination not to be his wife anymore made me whistle with impressed empathy a few times. My favorite: When Mira describes them as “good friends sharing a house,” listing the separate activities they indulge in, and he responds with a rueful, honest “Sounds perfect.”
* Carrie and Brody: hooooooo boy. Pretty hot sex scenes, though, I’ll be honest with you, particularly that first one in the car in the parking lot. Carrie’s look of “HOLY SHIT” the whole time is a look you like to see! Maybe not for those exact reasons, but yeah, basically on target. And her kissing his scars? Suspecting what she suspects about their end result, yet still being so into him as a person and him as a physical body capable of receiving and delivering pleasure that she attempts to pleasure him through them? If you believe as I do that the key to a genuinely sexy sex scene on TV is people acting on a clear, mutual desire to give and take pleasure from each other, that’s tough to fuckin’ top.
* It was also a terrible idea. Which almost goes without saying, but you think maybe there’s a plan. There’s no plan.
The question was, does HE have a plan? It doesn’t seem like it there, either.
* Very nice drunken camerawork as night falls at the cabin. Shifting around unpredictably. Never seen it done quite that way before.
* How much of Brody’s explanation that his big secret is simply that he’s a Muslim convert who’s ashamed of his Stockholm syndrome was actually convincing to me — because it WAS — and how much of it was simply that I wanted to be convinced? — because I DID!
* Something that struck me in the scene where daughter Dana tells “Uncle” Mike what’s what reminded me of how I reacted to the surveillance-footage scenes earlier in the season: When you see people in these everyday domestic environments, during which they’re meant to be totally at ease and not performing for anyone but each other, and their conversations are studded with meaningful pauses–I don’t have meaningful pauses. I endeavor to fill all gaps in conversation with a response. When I don’t it’s because I’m truly at a loss for words, not because i’m thinking real hard. Just a tic of the writing that doesn’t ring true to me is all, brought to the fore by that surveillance-camera format.
* I’m not sure what’s less plausible in a lightning-strikes-twice sense: That Marine sniper partners both get turned by al-Qaeda, or that they both did so well in the wife department.
* In all seriousness, the introduction of Walker strains credulity as much as anything since the “whoops, no camera in the one room wher he’s unequivocally doing something suspicious” gambit. Instead of getting him declared dead and sneaking him back into the country to shoo the president with a sniper rifle, why not just return him home through escape or re-capture and have him kill the President on TV when they inevitably meet-and-greet? Given the tremendous size and exposure risk of Walker and Brody’s support network — diplomats, major domos, royalty, hitmen, roving crowbar-wielding thugs, people with machine guns conducting hits in midwestern hotels, etc. — you’d think they’d want to trim as much of the fat as possible.
* Uhhh…As far as terrorist plots go, assassinating the president with sniper fire is kind of the honorable way to go about it, isn’t it?
* “After eight years, what’s two more days?”
“What’s that supposed to mean, you don’t even care? Because I do.” Great response to that kind of sarcasm from his wife by Brody. Weathering the demands of trauma on this scale has to be a constant process for both of them, his secret agenda notwithstanding, and I bet you the temptation to just shut it down and do the bare minimum effort is as powerful as the ability to shut that down with a well-selected response is rare.
* The Veep political consultant lady’s ludicrous accent disappeared, thank Christ.
* Disgraced congressman “Dick Johnson” – LOL, good one Homeland
* Man did I want Brody NOT to be a terrorist.
* “You’re really fucking something, Carrie, I gotta hand it to you.” I laughed out loud at that line from David Estes, both because of the blunt, disbelieving delivery and because it’s funny to think of the kind of pass you have to arrive at with a coworker to come right out and say shit like that.
* “If there’s another terrorist attack, this country is primed to turn on itself. You and i both know we’re halfway there already.” Indeed we do, Carrie.
* The Isa stuff made me very very sad. Like, it was the trigger mechanism for a sobbing, bawling breakdown I had a couple hours later. That bad. I don’t even care if they stacked the deck by having his last act as a living little boy be singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” We’re killing children with flying killer robots. You can’t be manipulative with facts like that. They are what they are, and you show what you show.
* Okay, so maybe “And they call us terrorists” was a little much, though. And I say that as a fan of “And they call us savages” from Mad Men!
* “Make no mistake.” Ha, what a hateful Bushian phrase to hear in the Veep’s speech following the attack that killed Isa. Also, in what world does the VP give those addresses?
* LOL at Saul and Carrie coming within seconds of seeing Brody at the diplomat’s house. I dunno, Homeland. That kind of credulity-stretching anticoincidence one place where they really shouldn’t stack the deck.
Tags: Homeland, reviews, TV, TV reviews
I don’t think he was veep when he gave the speech about the drone strike. I think he was SecDef at the time, maybe?
Hm, that could be. Nasir described him as the former CIA head and the person most instrumental in the drone strike that killed ISA, but I could have sworn he had a VP seal on his podium when he gave his address about it.
Thinking about it, he’d probably have to have been veep already, given the timeline. I think I was misremembering the former-CIA-chief detail.
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