The very very good tv critic Alyssa Rosenberg celebrates Homeland‘s Emmy rampage last night in light of the show’s real-world, current-events relevance, something the other shows lack. That’s true as far as it gets you, which isn’t very. I’ve been saying for tedious years now that the reason The Wire has come to be regarded as the best show of the New Golden Age over, say, The Sopranos is because everything The Wire has to say, it actually says. On both a thematic and a narrative level, The Wire is about the failure of American government and law enforcement. Since many or even most critics writing for mainstream publications use allegory as the great legitimizer for genre art, this is catnip. You don’t even need to do the high-school English-essay amount of interpretation necessary to figure out whether the zombies represent consumerism or the amphibious monster represents American intervention on the Korean peninsula or whatever — all you need to know is how you feel about the War on Drugs, compare it to how David Simon feels about the War on Drugs, and call it a day. I realize I’m being reductive and unfair, there’s more to The Wire than an editorial cartoon, there’s breathtaking breadth and (the final season aside) depth to what he and Ed Burns did there, but yeah, pretty much that’s what’s going on.

Homeland, to its credit, is a much weirder show than The Wire — things happen that don’t need to happen, that communicate on a level deeper and more inscrutable than the immediate needs of the plot or the politics — and weirdness is where greatness lies. I don’t think greatness lies in condemning our army of flying killer robots or the ubiquitous surveillance state, necessarily. I think bravery lies there, for sure, even just in terms of the personal standing of the cast and crew; think of how many people in the Emmy room last night have done volunteer stuff for the Obama campaign, and then think of well-deserved teeth-grinding contempt in which Homeland holds the Obama drone-strike campaign, for example. But I think we get into trouble if we applaud art for echoing our current-day politics because it lets us off the hook.

To me, as ameliorative and bracing as Homeland‘s critique of Terror War is (it is after all a point of view I fully share, urgently share even, given my Damascene conversion years back), it comes much more alive when connecting the workaday lies we tell our loved ones every day, the secrets we keep from them, and the lies and secrets that end up getting people killed. It’s about cultivating deception as a habit of thought, and the short distance between cutting people out of your personal reality and a willingness to create a reality without them in it at all. Watching Carrie and Brody conduct their self-destructive secret lives while putting up a front to those who care for them is the meat of the show, for me, not the op-ed stuff.

So that’s why I’m not happy that Homeland beat Mad Men or Breaking Bad, or maybe even Game of Thrones — on an apples-to-apples basis those shows have more meat (to mix my food metaphors) even if no scenes take place in CIA headquarters. They also didn’t take a nosedive in the final third of the season and reveal an inherent structural limitation that would’ve left them better off as miniseries than as ongoing serials, and making the Vice President an asshole can’t get you past that either.

Below are links to all my posts on Homeland, to be updated as the series progresses. I hope you enjoy them.

* Season One, Episode One
* Season One, Episodes 2-5
* Season One, Episodes 6-9
* Season One, Episodes 10-12
* Homeland is the new The Wire: thoughts on allegory and topicality in fiction
* Homeland Season Two Cheat Sheet
* Season Two, Episode One: “The Smile”
* Season Two, Episode Two: “Beirut Is Back”
* Season Two, Episode Three: “State of Independence”
* Season Two, Episode Four: “New Car Smell”
* Season Two, Episode Five: “Q&A”
* Season Two, Episode Six: “A Gettysburg Address”
* Season Two, Episode Seven: “The Clearing”
* Season Two, Episode Eight: “I’ll Fly Away”
* Season Two, Episode Nine: “Two Hats”
* Season Two, Episode Ten: “Broken Hearts”
* Season Two, Episode Eleven: “The Motherfucker in the Turban” / “In Memoriam”
* Season Two, Episode Twelve: “The Choice”
* The 12 Best Moments from Homeland‘s Bad Season 2
* Season Three, Episode One: “Tin Man Is Down”
* Season Three, Episode Two: “Uh… Oo… Aw…”
* Season Three, Episode Three: “Tower of David”
* Seven Ways to Save Homeland
* Season Three, Episode Four: “Game On”
* Season Three, Episode Five: “The Yoga Play”
* Season Three, Episode Six: “Still Positive”
* Season Three, Episode Seven: “Gerontion”
* Season Three, Episode Eight: “a red wheelbarrow”
* Season Three, Episode Nine: “One Last Time”
* Season Three, Episode Ten: “Good Night”
* Season Three, Episode Eleven: “Big Man in Tehran”
* Season Three, Episode Twelve: “The Star”

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.”

* 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.

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

* Now’s as good at time as any to say I’ll be covering Homeland Season Two for Rolling Stone, I guess. That also makes it a pretty good time to watch Season One, for the very first time.

* Homeland is, in its way, part of a genre that’s very near to my heart: haunted suburbia. Alyssa Rosenberg once made this exact point about the show, in fact. The pilot episode’s winter-gray palette of cloudy skies, streets lined by leafless trees, dingy snow on asphalt driveways, people looking out windows into backyards and so on was all awfully familiar to me, and I’m the sort of person who…I don’t know, feels there’s probably something awful beneath the familiar. In the Washington suburbs that’s literally true, of course, since decisions to kill people are made in homes and offices like these all the time. I’m happy to see a place like that played as a source of dread.

* What a terrific germinative moment for this series: A condemned man who’s killed hundreds of people whispering a pivotal, lifechanging, potentially catastrophic phrase into the ear of his wild-eyed nemesis as she’s forcibly whisked away. We don’t hear what he said. We can only take her word for it. It turns out that she was right, but by hiding the actual sound of his voice from us the show lets us know that she will always be second-guessing herself, always have that wide-eyed look of “Did I just hear what I think I heard?”

* Another great nightmare moment: Carrie in the briefing room, fear creeping across her face while everyone celebrates. To be Cassandra, to be Kevin McCarthy in in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that’s bad juju.

* The final moment that sold me: Sergeant Brody crying after he finishes beating his partner to death. The worst thing about torture is the breaking of people, and even if Brody’s al-Qaeda brainwashers were able to put him back together in a new and terrible shape, he’s still broken. I like that the show allowed for that moment, showing he’s not the smirking villain he appears prepared to become as he stares at the Capitol dome in the distance — he’s a man who just did the worst possible thing the old version of him could ever imagine doing, and there’s enough of the old version of him left for the new version to be sick about it. (Which is still the case as he throws up while his plane prepares to land in the States, come to think of it.) Actor Damian Lewis has the look of a character in a just-okay network cop show, and I’ll fully cop to responding to actors on a purely surface level first and foremost, so he had the most work to do of anyone on the show to get me invested. He certainly did in that scene.

* The funny thing is that even aside from my own aesthetic biases, it seemed like he’d have the toughest role of anyone in the cast regardless. Since it appeared as though the show would be about figuring out whether or not he’s a double agent, I figured that I’d spend an entire season poring over this guy’s every facial expression, every movement, every blink. Instead the show does the big reveal almost immediately. That really surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Resting the show on an out-and-out mystery puts too much pressure on that mystery to deliver its resolution and then go no further. They’ve got a lot more flexibility with Brody’s true nature out in the open (for us at least). And this is not to say that Brody might not harbor some doubts about his mission, which will help the character maintain some air of uncertainty.

* This is going to sound weird, but was I the only one who caught a Stephen King vibe from this? In Brody I saw echoes of that manchurian-candidate Dead Zone character; in the treatment of the ‘burbs I saw Derry and Jerusalem’s Lot and any other place pervaded by evil and reluctantly, frantically protected by the one person who can see the forest for the trees.

* Very, very excited to be watching a Great TV Drama with a female antihero protagonist. Excited it’s Claire Danes, too, whose face seems like it was carved out of marble to play exactly this kind of high-stakes, high-strung operative at the end of her rope.

* I’m also excited to be watching a war-on-terror show that, despite being more explicitly about the war on terror than any other, seems at least somewhat determined to play that conflict as a nebulous and shadowy one, in which secret societies meet in secret rooms to determine the fate of millions, on either side. Everyone’s so busy refining genre art down into mere allegory that they forget you can also inflate allegory into genre art.