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.

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

* Season One
* Season Two, Episode One: “21”
* Season Two, Episodes 2-5
* Season Two, Episode 11: “Under God’s Power She Flourishes”
* Season Two, Episode 12: “To the Lost”
* Season Three, Episode One: “Resolution”
* Season Three, Episode Two: “Spaghetti and Coffee”
* Season Three, Episode Three: “Bone for Tuna”
* Season Three, Episode Four: “Blue Bell Boy”
* Season Three, Episode Five: “You’d Be Surprised”
* Season Three, Episode Six: “Ging Gang Goolie”
* Season Three, Episode Seven: “Sunday Best”
* Season Three, Episode Eight: “The Pony”
* Season Three, Episode Nine: “The Milkmaid’s Lot”
* Season Three, Episode Ten: “A Man, a Plan…”
* Season Three, Episode Eleven: “Two Imposters”
* Season Three, Episode Twelve: “Margate Sands”
* Season Four, Episode One: “New York Sour”
* Season Four, Episode Two: “Resignation”
* Season Four, Episode Three: “Acres of Diamonds”
* Season Four, Episode Four: “All In”
* Season Four, Episode Five: “Erlkönig”
* Season Four, Episode Six: “The North Star”
* Season Four, Episode Seven: “William Wilson”
* Season Four, Episode Eight: “The Old Ship of Zion”
* Season Four, Episode Nine: “Marriage and Hunting”
* Season Four, Episode Ten: “White Horse Pike”
* Season Four, Episode Eleven: “Havre de Grace”
* Season Four, Episode Twelve: “Farewell Daddy Blues”

* As I sat down to write this I thought it would be worthwhile to do a quick re-read of the reviews I wrote last season. There weren’t many; this isn’t a show I felt compelled to examine week after week, even though I invariably enjoyed myself. That changed with the final two episodes, which were haunting, nihilistic, exceedingly well-made even by Boardwalk Empire‘s big-budget standards, and deeply, batshit weird. The penultimate episode in particular developed its own syntax of dialogue and editing the way a great film does, while the finale was the equivalent of chopping your arm off, fully expecting a new arm with superpowers and three-foot claws to grow in its place. The skill, audacity, and brutality had my expectations high for this season premiere.

* Imagine my disappointment when we open with Terence Winter’s fanfic version of the coin toss scene in No Country for Old Men: “If I wrote it, he’d’a BEAT the guy to death with those sunflower seeds!” It turns out that if you rupture the tension by allowing it to vent through violence, you turn the scene into sort of a turd! The rote retread of another, better scene, coupled with the depressing addition of a cute little dog barking in anger and confusion as someone kills her daddy, was a “Man, have I been wasting my time with this shit all along?” moment — a moment many other critics have had, by the look of their tweets and headlines last week. (It didn’t help that we got another warmed-over, dumbed-down cover version of a famous scene from a crime-cinema landmark later on, when Agent Van Alden served as Enzo the baker to the Irish gangster-florist’s Michael Corleone as he bluffed Al Capone out of attacking.) If, as it seems from his position in the credits and the promotional materials, Bobby Canavale’s dyspeptic Chip Rosetti is going to be this year’s Jimmy, I felt like we could be in for a long season indeed.

* But as I went through those reviews I was struck by this passage, which I remembered in terms of the general sentiment since it’s something I think and talk about often regarding genre art but which I’d completely forgotten writing in the context of this show:

I think that when genre material gets sufficiently dark or weird, when its tropes become a form of sinister spectacle rather than just hitting the marks required by convention, that’s a depth all its own — a way to communicate the emotional and philosophical themes more commonly articulated by plot and dialogue, if at all. Boardwalk Empire the balls-to-the-wall engine of gorgeously shot death that perverts and slaughters its characters in periodic fits of nihilism is saying at least as much as some theoretical Boardwalk Empire the meticulously drawn character study, or Boardwalk Empire the rigorously developed allegory for contemporary political issues.

“Balls-to-the-wall engine of gorgeously shot death that perverts and slaughters its characters in periodic fits of nihilism” is as good a way as any to describe Boardwalk Empire when it works. The “periodic fits” thing is key, because this is a far less rigorous show than any of the truly great TV dramas. Its bursts of brilliance are just that, bubbling up from a cauldron of gorgeous clothing and thoughtful lighting and sumptuous sets and giallo violence and a suite of the strangest gangster performances of the post-Godfather era.

* This means you have to put up with some imbalances as the contents shift during takeoff: building up Manny Horvitz as a macher (up to and including a giving him a hand in Jimmy’s death) only to ice him in the season premiere; inexplicably delaying Richard Harrow’s vengeance against the guy for a year and a half even though Richard as we know him would have murdered literally everyone involved in Jimmy and Angela’s deaths before the following weekend; weathering whatever dull do-gooding conscience salve they’re making Margaret apply to herself this season (temperance! Catholicism! prenatal care!); airing a premiere with no Eli or Chalky or Junior Soprano Van Buren; etc.

* But it also means this show has an easier time stumbling into weird little treasures, like Jack Huston’s Richard Harrow or Erik LaRay Harvey’s Dunn Purnsley or Paul Sparks’s Mickey Doyle, that normal shows have to strive for, if they ever even get close. (Paz De La Huerta was just a little too close to the sun.) That’s what you watch for.

* Anyway, the only thing I can really think of to say that doesn’t pertain directly to that Grand Unified Theory of Boardwalk Empire for Better and for Worse is that I’m glad Nucky and Margaret are going full Lockhorns. Nucky’s cool-customer asshole persona, the one that coldly orders a man’s execution while walking out of a room, doesn’t do much for me; we’ve seen that a million times, and it’s Steve Buscemi’s least convincing look. (Although you can make the argument that that’s as it should be, since it’s probably Nucky’s least convincing look, too.) Angry asshole Nucky, on the other hand, is really something — vibrant and frightening and unpredictable. His contretemps with Margaret have historically been where that side comes out most reliably, and I’ll be glad to see it more often, especially in contrast with his new iceman approach to gangstering.

* Oh yeah, one other thing: Nice fakeout, making it look like Van Alden was going undercover to investigate a bathtub gin maker as a kind of vigilante, but then revealing that nope, he really is a door-to-door salesman now.

* Anyway welcome back Boardwalk Empire, the most decadent show on television.

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.

For my review of last night’s Breaking Bad finale, please visit Rolling Stone. Terrific episode.

Over at Rolling Stone, I updated my list of Walter White’s worst moments — now including Season Five — in anticipation of tonight’s Breaking Bad half-season finale.

For my review of last night’s Breaking Bad, please visit Rolling Stone. I was, like, oddly unfazed by this one?

For my review of tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad, please visit Rolling Stone.

For my review of tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad, please visit Rolling Stone.

I can’t remember the last time I was this badly upset by a television show.

For my review of tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad, please visit Rolling Stone.

For my review of tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad, please visit Rolling Stone.

For my review of tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad, please visit Rolling Stone.

For my review of the season premiere of Breaking Bad, please visit Rolling Stone. I’m as happy with this as I’ve been with anything I wrote for RS; I got a chance to say some stuff about the show overall that I’d been thinking about for a while. Hope you dig it.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be covering Breaking Bad for Rolling Stone this season. I’m starting out with a list of Walter White’s 10 Lowest Lows. I got to say a lot of stuff I wanted to say about the show in this thing, so I hope you dig it. The King is dead, all hail the King!

Been thinking about this show some. Mostly because it’s very funny, and I like thinking back on it and going “Haha, that was funny!” But aside from that:

* The AV Club’s Todd Van Der Werff argues that Girls suffers for not falling into the currently acceptable molds for “great television,” i.e. the rapidfire single-camera sitcom mode established by Arrested Development or the alpha-male-dysfunction drama mode established by The Sopranos, with a particular emphasis on how the latter template has hampered the ability of prestige shows based on women to connect with critics or audiences. This seems more or less indisputably true to me.

* And it reminds me that one of the funniest and most subversive things about Girls is how it depicts boyfriends as lunatic aliens, the way most sitcoms depict girlfriends. Between Hannah’s (until recently) gruesomely insensitive Adam and Marnie’s (until slightly less recently) well-meaning but obliviously overattentive Charlie, it’s like a satire of how women in comedies are made the butts of jokes if they’re not goldilocks—not too needy, not too independent, just right.

* What’s more, it’s not done with the usual “am-I-right-ladies” tone of fake-empowered commiseration that you find in shows where the hot, smart woman is married to the fat, dumb man, or in commercials where the husband’s idiocy is remedied by the wife’s shrewd use of Product X. My own wife has always described this dynamic as a bone thrown to women in hopes they won’t notice what a condescending snowjob it is: “Sure, girls, we may only make eighty cents on the dollar, but even though it has no effect on our standing in society whatsoever, we’re secretly the smart ones!” Nope, as hapless as they are, the women of Girls are the alphas of the story in the sense that they’re unambiguously the protagonists, the drivers of the story, and the bad behavior of the guys is something they put up with out of choice, not because that’s the way the world must needs work. The narrative could, and did, find a way for Hannah and Marnie to no longer be long-suffering, something unimaginable in Home Improvement or that Excedrin commercial where the guy destroys his deck furniture with a power washer.

* Girls is also just a very funny, brutal, and gross sex comedy. From Hannah asking a one-night stand if she’s tight like a baby, to her leaving the bathroom to find Adam heedlessly jerking off, to (my favorite) the exquisitely explicit and mortifying scene in which Marnie re-breaks up with Charlie after cajoling him back into a relationship right in the middle of cowgirl, you’d have to turn to an alternative comic from the ’90s to find anything else as intent in delving into sex’s wettest, squishiest, most embarrassing places within a recognizable milieu of unhappy young people. The fact that it has no nasty misogynistic aftertaste just makes it all the better.

* None of this is to say that that material can’t be alarmingly, almost frighteningly powerful, too. Adam’s mortifying, self-lacerating monologue from that two-man show hit awfully close to home, for example — I mean, there is no doubt in my mind that I viewed my success with the opposite sex during my late teens as vindication that I wasn’t the ineffectual loser that bullies and popular kids had made me out to be. (Though in my case the “I’ll show YOU” element was never directed at girls, only the guys with whom I was locked in illusory competition for coolness via sexual proficiency.)

* One Girls criticism I never see anyone (except Douglas Sherwood) make but for which it’s wide open: Lena Dunham seems never to have struggled like Hannah. They’re the same age—Hannah’s unemploy[ed/able], Dunham’s on HBO. You could argue she and the rest of the show’s quite successful young writers and actors are condescending to their characters. I wouldn’t buy it, necessarily, but it’s better than “HBO hired her because her mom’s Laurie Simmons.”

* I’ve never had a problem with the way the show inserts genuine pathos into the cringe comedy and social satire. For one thing, that never seems to bother anyone when NBC’s Thursday night line-up does it, so why should it rankle here? As long as both aspects are finely observed and portrayed — as long as it’s not the sitcom equivalent of The Host — tonally shift all you want.

* That said, the big argument between Hannah and Marnie in the most recent episode was the first time I felt like however proficient they are with the comedic material, they might not quite be up to the big drama moments. Admittedly it suffered from apples-to-apples comparisons with some of the all-time greatest scenes in history, though: Don vs. Peggy, Tony vs. Carmela, Walt vs. Jesse. It’s almost unfair.

* My one quibble with Van Der Werff’s post is when, in a passage on how the show’s detractors come up with new reasons why it’s not any good every week depending on what’s the softest target, he says “One week, it’s the idea that the show’s ‘not funny enough,’ whatever that means.” I think it’s really easy to understand what that means: I laughed five times total during the first two episodes, and that’s not funny enough for a comedy. But it got much funnier, and now I laugh at it as hard and as often as I do anything else on televison.

I’ve joined The Mindless Ones for their review of Mad Men‘s Season Five finale. I was super-flattered by the invitation — these guys have done some really remarkable writing about that show over the course of the season.

* “This program contains brief nudity.” YES.

* Don has a toothache. Very “Test Dream.” Perhaps that’s the best way to understand “The Phantom,” from the seen-and-not-seen title on down: an experiment in investing a “real” episode of television with the nervous energy of a dream. Don’s repeated hallucination of Adam was the most obvious element, but there were also a series of gestures of finality that made it seem like various characters were waking up from the events of the season. Megan gets her “big break.” Pete gets the Manhattan apartment he wanted. Roger’s on top of the world again, smiling naked at the skyline, the trickster god triumphant. The agency is flush and ready to expand. Don has his rotten tooth removed, and in the end seems ready to get back up to his old tricks thanks to the most portentous cut to black since The Sopranos. Were Beth and her ECT-induced memory loss — her feelings and actions washed away, leaving her resplendent in recuperation and ready to face a new day — the key? Was it all a dream?

* Pete grabs Beth’s scarf as it trails behind her luggage on the train. Oh, Pete, you hopeless romantic, you. Everything that makes you happy slips through your fingers.

* Now that we know what Harry was asking Joan about in the elevator, I have to give the “Next week on Mad Men” from last week props for a terrific fakeout. Who can blame anyone for assuming Harry, that grinning dope, would be the one to ask Joan about how she got her partnership?

* Adam???

* “I’m so bored with this dynamic.” Right on, Sal. I wonder how much longer Don and Ginsberg will put up with each other.

* Pete’s absurd high-backed leather office chair.

* “Don, I give you my proxy—I’ve got things to do.” “We can do that?” Has there ever been a group of businessmen less interested in being businessmen?

* So Beth is a sick person. I get it now — the joyless simulacrum of pleasure in lieu of pleasure itself.

* I’m not the only one who thought Glen’s the heavy breather on Megan’s phone, right?

* Pete’s plan is to escape to L.A., like Don did. Something about tragedy and farce?

* A door in a dark place Beth wants to go through. Resonant image, man.

* Pete says suicide is “for weak people, people who can’t solve problems.” So that’s how he’s dealing with Lane’s death. I actually did more thinking about Pete’s reaction over the past week than I did about anyone else’s. Surely his feelings toward Lane were mixed, to say the least, after the humiliating beating the buttoned-down nebbish doled out to him a few months back, although it sure seemed that Pete’s horror and sadness over his death were real. How do you deal with the death of someone within your circle who you’ve come to dislike? It isn’t easy, though in my experience the dislike doesn’t change much, except as a marker of the waste inherent in death. That’s how I spent the little time I had dealing with this person? But if Pete feels that suicide is terminal weakness, and a terminally weak man beat him up, what does that say about Pete?

* “I thought you hated advertising.” If you were wondering how Don had really processed Megan’s departure from the agency for an acting career, look no further. “Well you certainly don’t think it’s art, and you’re an artist, aren’t you?” Nasty, man, and targeted not only at her insecurity about who she is and what he does, but implicitly at his own, too.

* Megan gets her own chance to broadcast her deepest problems with their relationship, after she gets hammered. “This is all I’m good for,” she tells Don as she tries to seduce him, and it’s not clear if she’s sarcastically referring to how she thinks he sees her, or how she sees herself. (Answer: C) Both A and B.) Then more shots at Don, alleging he wants her to fail so that she can be the proper homebody he supposedly wants her to be. I’d say that this isn’t true, that he always works to temper his initial unpleasant reactions to news of the demands of her career in a way he never did after fights with Betty, and that after he sees how fucked up she is over her failures he goes ahead and gets her the commercial gig after all. But is that because he truly values her happiness, or simply the peace and quiet that goes with it?

* At least now we can see why he has the problem he has with her acting career, particularly as it takes on a more commercial manifestation: He now cannot help but see her as a product to be sold. Watch his face curdle as he watches her test real, the smoke in the air solidifying the beam of light from the projector and literalizing the male gaze like it’s one of Cyclops’s force blasts. (The circle on the chest of Megan’s dress is the bullseye.) He goes from pride and enjoyment to…bleh, something’s wrong with this. Of course, what’s wrong is that he’s watching her in the conference room where he’s no doubt screened a million ads for a million products. “Megan Calvet” is just the latest thing he needs to figure out how to sell. This circles back to his reaction to her performance of “Zou Bisou” in front of their friends and coworkers — he didn’t want them to have access to her, and to his relationship with her, in that way. (Note how the sophisticated, sexy “European-ness” of “Zou Bisou” has now been transformed into a comical, over-the-top mirror image for the commercial.) It circles back to his reaction to her departure from advertising — he wants her to be in the elite, the people who are in on it, the salesmen, not for her to be the thing being sold. It circles back to his reaction to Joan’s indecent proposal, and to his worst-ever insult for Betty a season or two back, and to paying a prostitute to hit him in the face, and to Lane’s wife use of brothels as the coup de grace in her dressing down of Don when he visits her to drop off the check — because of his mother, he is horrified by the idea that a person can be bought and sold.

* About that check: I think Don really does think he’s done something kind for Lane’s family, and not in a self-congratulatory way, either, but because he wants to be kind to Lane’s family. He and Joan don’t even bring it up for a vote, not even after Joan says they ought to: He’s going to do what he can to make it up to Lane, and by proxy to his brother. (Ah, proxy: “We can do that?”) For her to throw it back in his face like that must have been genuinely upsetting to him.

* If Lane had been able to hang on for four months he’d have been fine.

* Jeez, Maman is a monster. It’d take an awful lot of work on being deliberately awful for me to get to a place where I’m comfortable dismissing my own daughter as having the artistic temperament without actually being an artist. What a devastating line. If this is secretly Maman’s self-assessment, as Megan alleges when she throws her “the world couldn’t support that many ballerinas” comment back in her face, that only makes it worse, the same way that Don’s self-doubt only fuels the worst elements of his reaction to Megan’s career.

* Just as devastating: Pete, telling Beth/himself that his life with his family is “just a temporary bandage on a permanent wound.” Pete is horrible in many ways, but at that moment could you feel anything less than total sorrow and sympathy for him? How do you get out from under an injury that deep? Say whatever else you want to say about Pete, but it takes strength and bravery to face yourself like that and declare that your whole life is a waste. It’s a courage you don’t really even want to have.

* At least there’s Roger around to brighten things up — the Loki of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce pantheon. Look how happy he is just to have successfully tricked Don and Megan with his Emile impersonation! Watch as he finds the single funniest, smuttiest thing to do or say in any given situation: “What is ‘Regina’?” Witness his triumphant gaze and mighty buttcheeks as acid sends him the message that he is indeed the master of all he surveys!

* Many lovely, haunting shots in this thing. Megan leaving the frame as she turns on the shower, her bright pink robe hanging on the wall like a gun waiting to go off, which it later does. Roger and Megan’s mom on that vast gold bedspread. Lane’s empty red chair looming in the background as Don passes his wife the check. The glory shot of the five partners silhouetted against the window of the new office space.

* “Give me an old fashioned.” Oh, Mad Men! Seriously though, that kind of directness is a lot of fun. If this were an action show they’d make points by shooting people, and if this were a straightforard comedy they’d make points with jokes, and here they make points with symbolism. Why not enjoy it?

* “Are you alone?” I guess it depends. Adam tells Don it’s not the tooth that’s rotten; at just around the same time, Don’s relationship with Megan appears poised to permanently sour. Was it the good part of Don that was removed? Did they take out his sweet tooth instead?