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Also A Woman

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Homeland
creator Gideon Raff

"Over the years, the CIA had become less and less willing to hire ‘people that are a little different, people who are eccentric, people who don’t look good in a suit and tie, people who don’t play well in the sandbox with others,'" Bob Gates said. "The kinds of tests that we make people pass, psychological, and everything else, make it very hard for somebody who may be brilliant or have extraordinary talents and unique capabilities to get into the agency." As a consequence of its cultural myopia, the CIA misread the world. Very few of its officers could read or speak Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, or Farsi. … Far too few had ever haggled in an Arab bazaar or walked through an African village.

- Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

At the end of its first season, Homeland left us wondering how a show centered around a intelligence officer was going to work around the fact that the agent was fired and had lost her top secret clearance. The show's season two premiere was mostly about setting up a plausible scenario for getting Carrie Mathison back into the intelligence fold, and how Brody was handling double duty as terrorist and politician.

We rejoin our heroine (Claire Danes) following the bombing of several Iranian nuclear facilities by Israel, and as demonstrations denouncing the nation and its allies have erupted throughout the Middle East. Along the banks of the Potomac River, Carrie is attempting to find sanity in civilian life. Living with her father and her sister, she gardens, teaches English, swallows handfuls of Lithium, and sneaks glimpses at military intelligence blogs.

Her mentor Saul (Mandy Patinkin) is back in the field — holed up in the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, where one of Carrie’s old assets has made contact in the form of invisible ink on a banknote. Bobbing and weaving his way through Beirut, Saul manages to meet up with the source, Fatima Ali, first wife of a Hezbollah commander, who claims an attack on America is imminent but refuses to talk to anyone besides Carrie.

Brody has been elected to Congress and is doing a well-enough job to be shortlisted for a spot on the Vice President’s presidential ticket. But before he makes it official, the VP wants to know about any possible skeletons in Brody’s closet ... or garage. No doubt when you’re living a secret life as an Al Qaeda agent, the smaller lies and deception required of politics is a breeze.

Agent Galvez (Hrach Titizian) approaches Carrie at school about needing her help. When she gets home that evening, the pleas for help continue, this time from Saul. Justifiably, Carrie balks at the request, telling Saul that it’s her night to make dinner for the family and she has vegetable lasagna planned (cooking pasta — Virgil would be proud!).

Dinner will have to wait as Estes is outside, ready to brief her on Fatima, who doesn’t trust her intel with anyone besides Carrie. She needs to fly immediately to Beirut to meet with her. During their discussion, Estes rolls his eyes at Carrie’s anger over him having humiliated her and ruined her career. Clearly he’s still going to be a dick this season.

Back at work, Brody continues being stoked about the possibility of being Vice President until, like the devil coming to collect after a crossroads deal, one of Abu Nazir’s associates — juicy new character Roya Hamad — comes slinking into his office with an assignment: steal an encryption key from a safe in Estes’s office during tomorrow’s homeland security briefing and prove he’s still devoted to avenging Issa’s death.

A reluctant Brody complies, recording the information in his moleskine. In Brody’s homelife, daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) still has a teenager’s bratty attitude. She’s transferred to a private school filled with the insufferable spawn of other politicians. During a morning Quaker meeting, when classmates are discussing the recent bombings in the Middle East, Dana a) shows up her fellow students by knowing the difference between Arabs and Persians and b) lets it slip that her father is Muslim.

That evening, Brody shows some backbone by admitting to his wife (Morena Baccarin), who is furious with Dana for having said her father is a Muslim in front of the entire school, that, yes, he is. Enjoying her role as politician’s wife, Jessica freaks out and ransacks the garage for evidence of his devotion, throwing his Koran on the ground. Later that night, Brody buries the holy book under a tree in the backyard, during which Dana creepily appears out of nowhere to help.

A flight to Cyprus and a box of Clairol hair dye later, Carrie is preparing for her Beirut mission and her prepper, Estes, and Saul share doubts about her competency. The mission is off to a shaky start, as she arrives in the city a bundle of nerves and self-doubt. As Carrie attempts to meet up with Saul, she’s followed around the market district by one of the men tailing Saul. Pursued through the bazaar, Carrie’s CIA instincts kick in and she manages to evade capture. We leave her grinning and triumphant.

As Carrie says midway through the premiere, Estes was right about her not belonging in the CIA, an organization best known for its fuck-ups, infiltration by moles, and recruitment of con men as informants. Carrie is the extraordinary talent mentioned in the epigraph. She is eccentric — possessing a preternatural ability to recognize patterns and predict behavior.

Carrie's obsessive tendencies may be pathological, but they also mean she tackles a puzzle to its resolution. She’s fluent in Arabic and able to negotiate her way around foreign cities with fluidity. She’s also a woman, which gives her an edge at recruiting other women as assets and better able to gain their trust, particularly that of women undervalued by fundamentalist sects and other agents. Just look at where it got her with Lynne Reed, the Imam’s wife Zahira, and now Fatima.

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about recess.

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