SPOILER ALERT
* You might have noticed I didn’t put the episode titles in the header for this post, as has become my custom. That’s because the title of Ep 10 is “Representative Brody” — yup, that’s a spoiler right there in the name of the episode. (The others were called “The Vest” and “Marine One,” just for the record.) I found myself struggling with this kind of shit throughout this final run, and often due to people who should know better, like the people who named the episodes, or the network, which thought it would be a good idea to put a spoiler-filled ad for the Homeland Season One DVD/Blu-Ray box set as the first thing you see when you fire up an episode of the show on Showtime On Demand. I fucking saw his hand on the bomb detonator before I watched the, like, third episode! And of course I knew he ultimately lived to co-star in Season Two. And thanks to smart alecks who think it’s a good idea to drop lines like “In Homeland‘s literally shocking season finale” amid articles that aren’t in-depth discussions of Homeland that I’d therefore know to stay away from, I had a pretty clear idea of where Carrie was headed, too. Irritating. I know that many pro TV critics have developed callouses where their sensitivity to spoilers ought to be, but for those of us who aren’t inundated with screeners for every show, who don’t watch every show, it’s hella annoying — more so, Showtime, when it’s you doing it!
* Anyway, perhaps you can tell from my tone, but I found this final stretch of show deeply frustrating. Not just due to the spoilers, mind you — I am capable of getting past that kind of thing, thank you very much, as anyone who’s ever heard me talk about Twin Peaks, A Game of Thrones, or the first three or four seasons of The Sopranos can tell you. Ultimately it’s the execution that keeps you coming back (though contra my “who cares about spoilers” critical brethren, I firmly believe that what a show chooses to withhold, and when it chooses to reveal it, and the experience of encountering that reveal in that moment, is a part of the execution, not a stunt), and, you know, Homeland remained a well-acted and tense and thoughtful show. But it was a well-acted and tense and thoughtful show that was hamstrung by it structure in several ways.
* First, in order to keep the focus on Brody and Nasir’s unknown endgame, it had to downplay the severity of everything else. America’s first-ever modern-day suicide bomber blows up a plaza in downtown DC, killing a Saudi diplomat among four other people, injuring dozens including several spooks, in the middle of an operation that brought said diplomat to that location with the knowledge of 16 government agencies on the intelligence side alone, and the very next day a smiling Sgt. Brody announces his candidacy to the fawning press? I didn’t buy it any more than I bought that the entire country wouldn’t have flipped the fuck out. Same with the sniper attack, which wasn’t even an hour old before the Vice President, who was covered in the blood of one of his oldest friends and biggest supporters, was crackin’ wise and characterizing the day’s events with “What a fuckin’ day.” That it was, sir! Finally, no one seemed to give another thought to the fact, the fact, that the world’s most wanted terrorist has a mole inside the homeland security apparatus. It all rang false emotionally as well as politically.
* Second and more fundamental is the issue of anticlimax. Everything builds to a bomb that doesn’t go off, carried by a criminal that doesn’t get caught. That level of narrative blueballs is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to endure over the course of multiple seasons — it was hard enough to watch the half hour or so left of the finale as it was. You start to wonder if this isn’t one of those shows whose concept can’t really sustain year after year of material.
* That’s to say nothing of the fact that given what we know about the Vice President and his cronies, if this were a slightly less civilized show like Deadwood or Game of Thrones, we’d be cheering for whoever blew him up.
* Speaking of which, more or less: I’m glad Carrie noticed that a surgical sniper attack on the President or Vice President isn’t the usual terrorist style; as I said before, it’s practically honorable, having a highly trained soldier kill one military leader instead of inducing some teenager to blow up a marketplace or whatever. But also as I’ve said before, Abu Nasir displays an almost supervillainous ability to further his master plan. He turns not one but two highly trained Marine snipers? Partners, no less? He sustains them with a multi-person network located within the United States, consisting of diplomats, moneymen, hitmen, willing American accomplices, bombmakers, goons, and on and on and on? If he can get all those people into place you start to wonder why he hasn’t already acted. Even if all he wanted was vengeance, at this point he probably could have had it and then some.
* And that Twilight Zone ending! The moment Saul mentioned the death of Nazir’s son to Carrie, I literally stopped and wrote down exactly what was going to happen: “The son’s name is Isa, and she’ll remember Brody shouting it in his sleep, and then zzzap.” When the nurse told the sister “It’s the anesthetic, everyone does it” I made a wah-wah-wah sad trombone noise, it was so corny.
* I mean, nothing but love for Claire Danes’s performance of Carrie’s mania. This was a side of that character that had to stay pretty much hidden for the entire season, and then suddenly Danes had to dig down and fish this whole new personality out at the drop of a hat. She was riveting, and the sequence in which Saul works with her color coding and produces the clue that could crack the case because that’s how much he loves and respects her even when she’s crazy was breathtaking. Patinkin was strong throughout these final episodes too, with his quiet anger at Estes and his palpable discomfort with discovering how helpless and in need Carrie really is. It was smart of the show to save the Carrie-Dana get-together for the climax, since it’s always fun to force two characters who’ve never interacted together at a big moment. The time-lapse image of Brody just standing there looking at Little Round Top in Gettysburg was good and creepy. There was a beautiful shot of Walker in the apartment he broke into, setting up his sniper rifle against the nighttime skyline of DC while the woman looked on, tied to the chair. “There’s no time, Saul…It’s high purple…” is a great line, Carrie’s “I am the one who knocks” or “It will shock you how much it didn’t happen.” I did a lot of fun guessing as to the identity of the mole. It’s great that the real villain is “drone strikes.” But ultimately I felt like they slapped a “to be continued” where god and science demanded a “the end.”
Tags: Homeland, reviews, TV, TV reviews
As much as Carrie is the anti-Jack Bauer (and “24” vets Gordon & Gansa talk her up as such in interviews), many of the frustrating things you point out here seem directly imported from the previous show, from the shrugged-shoulders response to the threat of moles in intelligence agencies, to the terrorist’s seemingly infinite web of conspirators and backup plans (though in this instance I think Nazir was specifically holding out for Brody to pull the trigger, given that he could get closer to the Veep and co. than any of his other goons, not to mention the symbolic value of a real American hero being the bomber), to the downplayed tragedies on American soil (24 SPOILER ALERT: in one season a frickin’ nuclear bomb went off in California at breakfast time, and was practically forgotten about by lunch). Carrie’s mania aside, her constantly being stonewalled by higher-ups before finally taking matters into her own hands in the last few episodes was straight out of the Jack Bauer playbook.
I just finished Season 1 last night and I agree with you that the season went off the rails in the last few episodes. There were elements of the finale that I liked a lot–especially Brody in the bunker and Danes’ performance of mania and depression (wow, was she great with the mania)–but the more my girlfriend and I talk about the season, the more things don’t quite hold up for me.
The problems all basically come in around the terror plot. There just seem to be too many things that fall too neatly into place, and too many loose threads, for it to be completely satisfying. I mean, looking at some of these things, Abu Nasir is either the world’s luckiest terrorist or, as you say, he has supervillian-level control and ability to project what will happen based on his machinations.
For one, Brody’s role in the plot seems odd. How could Nasir know that Brody would have such regular, close access to the VP that he’d be able to carry out the attack? And there’s no way he could project that Brody would end up running for office (unless Congressman Johnson’s sexting was also some kind of Al Qaeda plot!). That’s awfully convenient.
The Tom Walker plot doesn’t quite add up for me either. Nasir is able to turn _two_ Marines and he uses one entirely as a red herring (and then just–spoilers–kills him off)? Perhaps. But what was the point of buying the house in under the flight path and with a sightline to the landing pads? As Carrie rightly points out, the attack would never consist only of a sniper (and did Brody know there would be a sniper to herd the VIPs into the bunker at all? It didn’t seem like it), so how could that be helpful to the attack? Is it another distraction designed to draw CIA attention away from Brody and the actual attack?
And would Nasir really be satisfied with influencing _policy_? For a guy who’s trying to knock out a big chunk of the government one minute, changing laws and politics seems a drastic change of direction only a day or so later.
All of which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the show. I did, quite a bit. And I’m looking forward to season 2. I just wonder whether terror plots this complicated can be credibly sustained over even 12 hours of TV–to say nothing of a second season. That’s a lot of narrative complexity for the writers and logistical compexity for the characters to maintain.
I think I’ll be talking about this soon at Rolling Stone, but I got to thinking about why I find the coincidences, just-in-the-nick-of-times, lucky breaks/unlucky breaks, and so on so much harder to swallow here than in Breaking Bad, and I think it’s for two reasons. [redacted — saving this for where it really counts!]
In the end, I think Homeland would have been better off, as a unit of story, if it had wrapped up in a single season, with either Brody’s death and Carrie’s failure, or Brody’s capture and Carrie’s success. What they ended up with was neither fish nor fowl.
Yet as you say, I’m still looking forward to Season Two, and have indeed enjoyed what I’ve seen so far, because when you put the plot mechanics aside, the characters are just very well-written and well-acted, it has a lovely somber tone overall, and it actually has something to say about state violence. I just wish they’d found a tighter plot with which to deliver all those goodies.
I haven’t seen enough Breaking Bad to speak to it, but your comment reminded me of something I thought of a few times during my watching of Homeland: the other “realistic,” low-key spy show of recent years: Rubicon.
Both of them are generally pretty restrained affairs that focus on intrigue and implication and interpersonal dynamics (h/t to Carrie’s alliteration from the finale) and focus on the characters’ lives. In Rubicon’s attempt to be smart and “realistic”, _everything_ was so implied and never revealed that there wasn’t enough to hold onto. I appreciate that Homeland gives us more than that, even if it occassionally meant some far-too-obvious writing (Brody stands in front of two hotel room doors just before he’s about to set the attack into motion; Dana mentions that his scars are fading, but of course the internal ones aren’t, etc.). Still, Homeland’s restraint pays off–among other things, it made the suicide bombing so jarring and intense by contrast.
I agree that it would have been a better done-in-one series with a real conclusion at the end of the season–though saying that always makes me think of the Cougarton Abbey part of Community where Britta praises British shows for giving you a real sense of closure. Then I get slightly, just slightly, embarassed to have been so well pegged.
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