Good old Homeland. Just when viewers might be thinking that the season has finally started to plateau, with last week’s impressive but laidback and stripped down episode being followed by something that’s staid and unexceptional for two thirds of its running time, a horrific and protracted bloodbath materialises from nowhere.
No biggie, just an unheralded, dispassionate and gruesome massacre in a haberdashery that wipes out one of the recurring regulars and (possibly) the most interesting new character since we first met Carrie and Brody at the beginning of Season 1. It also re-raises flagging expectations like a television speedball and could only have been more shockingly captivating if Saul or David Estes had been caught in the hail of the bullets, rather than Galvez and Quinn.
It was necessary, though, because what precedes the violence really is pretty dull. There’s lots of incidental stuff going on (Virgil and Max make a mess of a surveillance operation; Mike and Lauder go to the tunnel where Brody murdered Tom Walker, suspicions of their former comrade-in-arms swelling like an aggravated zit, but are then warned off conducting a private investigation by Estes; Dana, wracked with guilt about the hit-and-run incident, goes to a hospital in search of the victim and learns that the poor woman has carked it overnight) but very little about the two main characters and their storyline.
It’s almost as if the writers are worried that their tortuous plotting of preceding episodes has backed Carrie and Brody into a corner and they’re worried the only ways out are through falling in love or fading into blandness.
Happily, there’s nothing to worry about. As long as Brody has a jealous wife and a propensity to bullshit her – lying really is second nature to him, which is just as well, as being a triple double agent must make remembering which side one is on a massive pain in the principles – the man who puts the ‘con’ into congressman will never be tedious; and as long as he’s trying his best to do the wrong thing for the right reasons, a horrendous and ghastly faux pas of incendiary proportions is never far away.
‘Is it her again?’ Jess carps when she learns her hubby is now working for the government in a new, covert capacity. ‘They kicked her out,’ Brody lies glibly. ‘She’s not even at the CIA anymore.’ The ramifications of this latest fib remain to be seen, but the consequences of the nugget of false information he drops into conversation with Roya at Carrie’s behest are immediate and devastating. He mentions the Hezbollah operative with whom the terrorist telecaster met previously and she draws an immediate connection with the tailor’s shop in Gettysburg … where Peter Quinn and a CIA team are heading for a recce.
Quinn is a brilliant character, sharp-witted, arrogant, explosive and the perfect foil to Carrie in a way that none of her other colleagues could ever aspire to be – which is why it’s to be hoped that the wounds he suffers when the black-masked storm-troopers burst into the shop and open fire aren’t fatal. PQ is alive at the end of the episode, certainly (long enough to look more like Charlie Sheen mid-overdose than ever), but Homeland is no respecter of persons. If a character’s death is more dramatically important than keeping them alive, they’re going down, no matter how watchable they are.
Whether Carrie can recover from the dreadful knowledge that she might be at least partly responsible for the tragedy is a question that remains to be answered, but there’s no doubt that after ‘A Gettysburg Address’, Homeland is capable of recovering from even the most somnambulistic lulls. Just add slaughter.
This week’s big Homeland question: It’s almost too unthinkable a notion to bear contemplating, but was Moz-a-like Max’s inability to earwig on Roya’s clandestine conversation deliberate? Surely he can’t be anything but loyal to his brother and Carrie …?
This week’s not-so-big Homeland question: What does Dana see in Finn Walden? She should shop the selfish git over to the Old Bill and get back together with loyal, dope-smoking ex Zander.
Aired at 9pm on Sunday 11 November 2012 on Channel 4.
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