US Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody’s eight-year incarceration at the hands of Al-Qaeda was very obviously no picnic. Not only was he beaten, tortured and given the worst ever Mick Hucknall hairdo, he was also urinated on by Afsal Hamid, someone who resembles Sky Sports’ Guillem Balague after a particularly gruelling night out with Richard Keys and Andy Gray.

This week, Brody is given the chance to visit Hamid by kowtowing CIA idiot David Estes and look his former tormentor in the eye, rather than up at his groin through a stream of piss. Not surprisingly, things immediately go horrendously pear-shaped – but is Brody missing his son’s karate class to throttle a terroristic enemy or slip a razorblade to an ally whose silence must be bought at any cost?

Damian Lewis demonstrates a masterful command of subtlety in his performance as the messed-up marine. When Brody is taken in by the CIA to oversee the initial interview with Hamid, his tension and distrust of the agency – are they asking him for help or do they suspect him of being a traitor? – are played at precisely the right level: visible but not over the top.

Even when blurting out his reasons for wanting to see Hamid in the flesh to Estes or responding with (apparent) rage to getting a globule of terrorist slobber in the phizog, Brody never appears overly histrionic. Whether his character is a treacherous turncoat, a misery-wanking loony or both, Lewis makes him compelling and believable.

Elsewhere in what is a particularly grim episode of torturous interrogation via death metal, bloody wrist-slashing and blatant theft of an old man’s medication, Saul Berenson cracks a dodgy religious joke – ‘You’re a religious man and a torturer; what are you, a Catholic?’ – Jessica Brody gets a haircut and Carrie Matheson’s go-to guys for hi-tech espionage and surveillance, Larry David and Morrissey Virgil and Max, bewilder a secretary as they search suspect university professor Raqim Faisel’s office for details of his real address.

Homeland doesn’t really do light-hearted respite; the tension only relents for a little while near the end, when Carrie – enraged at Estes’s incompetence and Saul’s infuriating calmness – heads for her sister’s house in a state and ends up staying the night, switching from fucked-up in pieces to tucked-up with nieces. Even then, she ends up sat on the stairs in the middle of the night, ruminating darkly about the bad guys. Or maybe she’s so excited about next week’s show, she can’t sleep. It’s understandable.

This week’s big Homeland question: What is the significance of the rug in Saul’s office? Nothing ever happens in Homeland by accident; when Carrie tripped over it, we were meant to notice. Would it be too great a leap of the imagination to connect this piece of floor drapery with Brody’s prayer mat? Is the scruffily noble Peter Jackson-lookalike actually the as-yet-unidentified mole inside the CIA who tipped off Raqim about being tailed? He had a chance to slip Hamid the razor, as well. Surely not …?

This week’s not-so-big Homeland question: Honestly, when was the last time a TV show got away with having the word ‘fuck’ in the opening titles?

Aired at 9pm on Sunday 18th March 2012 on Channel 4.

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