Like an express pulling out of a station, the second season of Homeland started hesitantly – jerkily, almost, as if its brakes were still on – but is now building up a head of steam as it powers out of the suburbs and into open country.
While the journey may be heading through familiar territory (Carrie’s depression bubbling over into manic, dangerous behaviour, Brody driven to extreme violence by the desperate need to keep his secrets, Jess and Mike coming this close to rekindling their affair, Saul outsmarting everyone yet still not quite being able to brush away the air of suspicion that hangs around him like the smell of a shirt that needs changing), this is no rehash of season one. We’re on a new, darker trip now.
Brody’s expedition is darkest of all. Compelled by a combination of Roya’s voice-of-an-extremely-posh-newsreader persuasiveness and the necessity of keeping his clandestine activities secret, everyone’s favourite covert al-Qaeda git heads back to Gettysburg to rescue the tailor-cum-maker of suicide vests who kitted him out for the aborted bombing last season from an impending CIA sting.
Things rapidly go pear-shaped when the combination of a flat tyre, a concerned Jess on the phone (her husband was meant to be keynote speaker at the fundraising dinner – i.e. schmoozing fest – she has arranged with Mrs Veep Cynthia Walden) and a panicky elderly terrorist leads to a chase through Pennsylvanian woodland, during which an unfortunate stumble leaves the tailor impaled on a tree.
‘You’re not going to die,’ Brody gasps as he tries to plug the hideous wound in the old fella’s chest, ‘so kill that thought right now.’ Unfortunately, Jess chooses that moment to call again and when the bleeding tailor groans in pain, Brody tries to silence him and ends up snapping his neck as if he were trying to get the lid off a bottle of pop. Oops. When he gets home, Jess – who had just invited loyal, lovelorn Mike in for a ‘nightcap’ – doesn’t believe any of his feeble, fibbed excuses. The Brody marriage is once again back on the fragile ground upon which it found itself last year – minus the angry cry-wanking. So far.
Despite Brody’s Gettysburg distress taking centre stage, and Damien Lewis excelling as the killer congressman, Claire Danes is even more captivating in the other principal storyline of this episode. After being deliberately frozen out of a meeting at Langley, the permanence of her exile from the CIA really sinks in for the first time, and combined with her ongoing dismay at having been wrong – or so she thinks – about Brody’s terrorist proclivities, she heads home, glams up as if to go out and then shovels all the meds she can find into her face, washing them down with Chenin Blanc. Then she lies down on her bed and waits to die. It’s a terrible, wonderful performance, visceral and heartbreaking, and the relief one feels when she comes to her senses and forces herself to throw the pills up into the toilet is testament to Danes’s brilliance.
It’s a good job Carrie lives, as it turns out, because Saul arrives at her house a few minutes later with the denouement of last week’s episode to show her. Having outsmarted Hezbollah in Beirut, he has safely liberated the memory card containing Brody’s confession. When she sees the footage that confirms her original suspicions, Carrie is reborn. ‘I was right,’ she says, a new light gleaming in her eyes like a train in the distance. Her journey starts again here – and we’re with her all the way.
This week’s big Homeland question: How will Abu Nazir react to Brody’s method of keeping the bomb-building tailor quiet?
This week’s not-so-big Homeland question: How come Saul just happened to have an identical memory card on him to fool the guy at the airport in Beirut? Is he really just that good?
Aired at 9pm on Sunday 21st October 2012 on Channel 4.
> Buy the Season 1 boxset on Amazon.
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