Although it isn’t quite an EastEnders featuring Dot Cotton nattering away to Ethel in a gloomy kitchen about their distant past, ‘Q and A’ is – for the most part – noticeably more low-key and stripped-down than anything Homeland has presented us with so far.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s boring, or facile, or that it treads water for three-quarters of an hour while the writers conjure up the next explosive twist. In fact, the slower pace, the tighter camera angles, and an emphasis on character that allows the performances of Claire Danes, Rupert Friend and (most notably) Damien Lewis to shine even more brightly than before are a welcome breather after the tumultuous events of the preceding episode. Nor does the story simply move a few paces forward; it leaps so far that by the 45th minute, the entire dynamic of the show has changed.
At the beginning, Brody is still a terrorist pretending to be a congressman and lying to his wife; at the end, he’s a CIA agent pretending to be a terrorist pretending to be a congressman (while still telling fibs to the missus). It’s a seismic shift, and yet … it isn’t. The genius of Homeland is that despite his untrustworthiness, his lies, his cheating on Jess and the small matter of his treasonable behaviour, Brody is simply too likeable to be a bad guy.
While no one was rooting for him to succeed in blowing himself up, his motives for donning the suicide vest in the first place seemed no more questionable than those of the US Government, as personified by Vice-President Walden, in ordering the drone strike that killed Abu Nazir’s son Issa. It’s always seemed like only a matter of time before he crossed back over the line.
He doesn’t have an easy time of it, though. The ex-marine’s tortured indecision and streak of wounded but not-quite-tainted nobility have always been endearing; seeing him squirming like a fish skewered on a hook as his web of lies is coolly disintegrated by the sharpened-to-a-point questioning of Peter Quinn is almost heartbreaking.
Damien Lewis’s performance is dismally exquisite, his portrayal of Brody’s defiance crumbling into hopelessness when he thinks the game is up – in spite of his truthful protestations that ‘no bomb went off … I killed no one … you’ve got nothing on me’ – an undoubted career highlight that ought to win him a mantelpiece of awards. It even tops Claire Danes’s similarly memorable depiction of Carrie’s descent into manic depression last season.
Danes is great too, as Carrie brings her personal life to work for the umpteenth time and uses her deep feelings for Brody to get at the confession which Quinn, with all his sharpness and (feigned?) uncontrollable, Charlie Sheen-on-the-fiftieth-line bonkersness, was unable to obtain – although the nuances of Rupert Friend’s performance are just as fascinating. Is Quinn secretly a bad guy with a touch of the crazies, or did he merely learn the ‘Talk, motherfucker!’/stabbing-suspects-through-the-hand routine from Jack Bauer?
Either way, it’s to be hoped he remains in the picture for the second half of the season, because he’s far more interesting than dullard David Estes or kindly-but-stolid Saul, either of whom would, sad to say, become instantly more compelling if they were revealed as the as-yet-unidentified CIA mole.
With Brody out of custody and just about back on the side of righteousness, now merely paddling in the shallow end of lies rather than drowning in them, his de facto boss Walden and the Veep’s son Finn – partly because he’s now officially Dana Brody’s boyfriend but mostly because of the hit-and-run incident that provided this episode’s only other moment of explosive WTF? besides Quinn’s outburst – will undoubtedly be as central to whatever anti-American dreadfulness Abu Nazir is plotting as Brody and Carrie will be to thwarting it. But beyond that (and an inevitable nipple-slip by Jess Brody at some point before the season finale, most likely whilst in a clinch with Mike), nothing’s certain – which, in a series that confounds expectation as compellingly as it entertains, is just as it should be.
This week’s big Homeland question: Is Saul secretly a baddie or not? Come on, guys … enough’s enough. Spill the beans.
This week’s not-so-big Homeland question: How did the unfortunate pedestrian run over by Finn Walden manage to walk across the entrance to an alleyway and not hear the sound of a car roaring through the stillness of the evening?
Aired at 9pm on Sunday 4 November 2012 on Channel 4.
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