In your face, predictability naysayers! All the Homelanders – and it seemed there were a fair few – who gloomily forecast Saul’s discovery of the memory card containing Brody’s confession would be followed by anticlimactic obviousness for the rest of the season are now hopefully gorging on their own words with the enthusiasm of Lauder Wakefield at a free bar. Instead of fulfilling the glum prophecies of Saul being killed off and Carrie being left as the only person knowing Brody’s secret again, the show has confounded expectation and veered off on a refreshingly different path.
Ironically, given its explosive climax, ‘New Car Smell’ lacks the pacy tension of last week’s woodland violence, marital discord and pill-popping tragedy, returning to the slower, subtler surveillance ‘n’ subterfuge of the early episodes of the first series. Aided by returning Larry David-and-Morrissey double act Virgil and Max, along with snarky analyst newcomer Peter Quinn, Carrie is back with a bank of tellies and a collection of black-and-white Brodyography. But this time, she’s not the only one who thinks the former marine is a terrorist.
‘Carrie Mathison was right about the redheaded menace,’ Virgil remarks jovially, but he was half-persuaded by his pal’s earnest rhetoric last time around, anyway. It’s über-sceptic David Estes who has to practically turn himself inside-out with uncomfortable magnanimity to admit Carrie was bang on about Brody’s bastardliness – and even then, he can’t quite bring himself to reinstate her in the CIA. Instead, he puts Quinn in charge and huffs off, worrying about the only completely detestable character in the whole series: Vice-President Walden. ‘The guy’s palling around with a jihadist!’ Estes laments to Saul, but if it was a choice between conflicted killer Brody and the loathsome, Trump-like politicock, we’d take the former every time.
Sadly, it seems that Mrs B isn’t of the same opinion. While daughter Dana cops off with Walden’s son Finn inside an obvious sexual metaphor the Washington Monument, Jess hoofs her hubby from the house, forcing him to check into a hotel – and it’s here that the episode puts its foot down, accelerating with the rapidity of Lewis Hamilton driving away from the McLaren garage for the last time.
Brody rings Carrie from the bar, inviting her for a drink (a platonic one; ‘This is not a booty call!’) and some hatchet-burying. She agrees, hoping to trick him into calling his contacts within al-Qaeda, but either through her ongoing rustiness at undercover work or his drunken wiliness, it doesn’t quite work out. Brody pays the tab and goes upstairs, leaving Carrie alone in the bar. ‘Your work is done,’ Quinn calls her to say. ‘Get the fuck back here.’ But saying ‘bollocks’ to bosses is what Carrie does best and she follows Brody up to his room instead, blowing her cover rather than her congressman and giving him a faceful of fact.
‘You have disgraced your nation,’ she says. ‘You’re a traitor and a terrorist and now it’s time to pay for that.’ The CIA dash in and take Brody down, leaving Carrie with a mixture of triumph and sadness and all the wet blankets who predicted Homeland’s slow, tedious death with a lot of egg on their faces. Quite how the rest of the series will pan out now is anybody’s guess – and that’s the point. Rather than being staid or humdrum, Homeland is now heading into the great unknown, unpredictable and unmissable.
This week’s big Homeland question: What is Peter Quinn’s dark secret? He’s bound to have one; nobody gets to talk flirty-dirty with Carrie – ‘You were fucking him, huh?’ – without later being unmasked as a treacherous bad guy.
This week’s not-so-big Homeland question: Will Chris Brody ever utter more than a single line in an episode again?
Aired at 9pm on Sunday 28 October 2012 on Channel 4.
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