This post discusses the fourth season of “Homeland,” which concluded on Showtime last night.
Home again, home again. Tours of duty have to end sometime, of course. But after “Homeland” spent most of its fourth season mounting a thrilling and unexpected comeback set in Islamabad and full of tense action sequences and new and worthy antagonists, it was a downer to see CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) come back to the United States, to family drama ginned up just for the occasion, and to the inside of her increasingly poorly written brain. It’s clear now that “Homeland” has the formula for a terrific show. The people running it just can’t resist the elements that once made it special but have since become distractions from the lean action thriller “Homeland” is capable of being.
Haissam Haqqani (Numan Acar), the terrorist-turned-Dar Adal’s (F. Murray Abraham) hope for peace, is a terrific creation, strong and confident where Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) was shattered and often indecisive. His plot to use former CIA-director-turned-contractor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) as a human shield against assassination from the skies was a brilliant inversion of the CIA’s drone program, and his strike on the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad was a clever riff on the Benghazi, Libya, attacks. Dar Adal’s negotiations with him are the sort of scenario that fiction can pose when politicians cannot; the reaction to any suggestion that we treat the Islamic State as a potential partner would be utterly hysterical. If only “Long Time Coming” had devoted substantial time to this plot, rather than to Carrie’s utterly unnecessary mother.
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Similarly, it was fascinating to see Tasneem Qureshi (Nimrat Kaur), Carrie’s utterly ruthless counterpart in Pakistan’s intelligence services, step forward as a political leader, calling for an end to diplomatic relations between her country and the United States. Playing spy vs. spy, rather than spy-vs.-sexy-terrorist, invigorated “Homeland” tremendously, lending snap and crackle into what had become a rather soggy dynamic. “Homeland” managed to do better at setting up intergovernmental rivalries in Pakistan in a single season than it has ever done in the United States, even with four years to do it. If the show doesn’t return to Islamabad next season, it’ll be a real loss.
I never thought I’d be saying that a television show needed less introspection and attention to its characters’ inner lives. But “Long Time Coming” leaves absolutely no doubt that this is true of “Homeland,” which once seemed daring for finding value in Carrie Mathison’s fractured brain.
Even if “Homeland” has reached its limitations in its critique of the war on terror, Carrie is still an original, or at least she is supposed to be. Listening to her speak in cliches, telling her estranged mother that her return for a funeral is “too little, too late,” insisting to her sister that she “had reasons” for her trips overseas or eulogizing her father by noting that “he had demons” is grating and disappointing, with none of the weird specificity of soon-to-be-ex-CIA director Andrew Lockhart’s (Tracy Letts) gesture, showing up at a wake at 10 p.m. awkwardly bearing lasagna.
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After four years of watching Carrie, and now the fragile Quinn (Rupert Friend), ponder getting out before they inevitably get pulled back in again, it’s time for “Homeland” and Carrie to really commit. Rather than tempting her — and us — with the prospect that she might get truly well, a development that would render “Homeland” a less interesting show, the series should get back to the idea that there’s value in the way Carrie’s brain is configured. And after all this vacillation, “Homeland” would do well to have Carrie pick a path and stick to it. Whether she stays in the agency to help Quinn, or, in a more intriguing scenario suggested by her reaction to Dar Adal’s deal with Haqqani, Carrie goes to war with her former CIA colleagues, “Homeland” needs the laser focus that helped her spot the code in Brody’s finger movements four seasons ago.
It’s one thing to try to explore new moral dimensions of the post-9/11 world; as the Senate intelligence committee’s report on the CIA’s use of torture demonstrates, we can’t have too much of that kind of scrutiny. It’s another for a show to seem so persistently uncertain about its characters and its best self.
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