In Which We Speak In The Parlance Of The Times

Children of the Damned

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Homeland
creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa

As the premiere of the third season of Homeland approached, Showtime released a trailer that left me fretting over not only the ratio of Nick Brody to Carrie Mathison airtime but also how much more fun than her he looked to be having (jungle shootouts beat being handcuffed to a hospital bed every time). Thankfully Abu Nazir’s Sherif Meshad’s shadowy network stepped in and leaked the first episode, because piracy funds terrorism, and it’s Brody-free! Here are some minor spoilers.

As the season begins, it’s approximately two months following the bombing at Langley and there’s no place like home — where Carrie’s assembling more wall-sized collages, Dana Brody is returning from an inpatient treatment program, and Saul Berenson, now the acting head of the CIA, is overseeing the planning of an Oz-codenamed mission that has Peter Quinn in Caracas building bombs for the season’s opening scene.

Our first look at Carrie is as she is beginning her testimony before a Senate committee investigating the attack that wants to know why Congressman Brody had been given immunity (and what from) by the CIA in exchange for information and to account for her whereabouts the 14 hours after the bombing that she was missing. Because of Carrie’s track record for respecting authority, we know this is going to go pleasantly. Also the committee’s chairman, a Senator Andrew Lockhart, is like Arlen Specter hell-bent on character assassination, but more smug about it. Carrie, who no longer fears the skepticism of her superiors after last season’s validation, really gives the committee something to tut-tut over when she tells them that she thinks Brody is innocent.

Between her testimony and erratic notes (which look exactly like the ones I take for writing these recaps), the agency lawyer decides Carrie should plead the Fifth. Her dad is worried too; she’s off her lithium and boozing hard. The station chief appointment Carrie was given at the end of last season apparently never materialized, and her current role at the CIA is ambiguous. Unfortunately it’s looking like the role might be that of scapegoat, as leaks from inside the agency threaten to out her as the disgraced congressman’s mentally unstable lover and hold her culpable in the attack.

Is it worth pointing out that Carrie’s constant “I missed something” self-flagellation is seen as a sign of her mental instability while at the same time everyone in the government is champing at the bit to blame her for not preventing the bombing? She’s crazy to hold herself accountable for the actions of terrorists, but it’s not crazy for those in charge to do the same.

Meanwhile, the only other person who believes in Brody’s innocence, his daughter Dana, is completing her last day of therapy after attempting suicide. And even though the Brody family is still hounded by the press and receiving death threats, she seems like any other moody and horny teen who experiments with sexting, instead of one whose father is America’s most wanted and who was an accomplice to vehicular manslaughter.

As the season progresses we’ll see whether or not tensions at home will derail Dana’s recovery. With the family’s military paycheck and benefits revoked, Jessica considers dusting off the accounting degree to provide financially for the family and get time away from her mother, who has moved in (apparently devoted “uncle” Mike Faber is no longer so devoted). 

With Carrie running around D.C. in a frenetic search for Brody, last year’s black ops supervisor Dar Adal has cozied up to Saul, advising him on how to repair the CIA’s reputation. Catering to Capitol Hill politics has never been his forte (but it is why he’s so likable!) and the pressure of it has paralyzed Saul’s decision-making abilities as it comes time for him to move forward on an operation that, if successful, would wipe out the six individuals (minus Brody) responsible for planning and executing the Langley attacks for professional terrorist Majid Javadi, or the Magician, as he’s known in espionage parlance.

At home, bringing the same gravitas to drinking whiskey as he does to eating peanut butter, Saul gets drunk and mulls over the decision while his estranged wife Mira, returned from Mumbai, puts him to bed. For the second time in the episode we hear a character talk about “taking it one day at a time” in the wake of the bombing. Here it’s Saul and Mira’s strategy for reconciling their marriage; earlier it was Dana in group therapy discussing how to cope once she returns home. 

The next day, Saul authorizes the mission (which neither Carrie nor agent Danny Galvez, who we’re assuming died at Vice President Walden’s funeral with director Estes last season, are involved in) and for 20 minutes the fate of America’s clandestine service depends on whether or not Peter Quinn can assassinate his target, codenamed Tin Man. During the operation, Quinn accidentally shoots the Tin Man’s son, a boy who looks like Brody’s surrogate one, Issa. I hope this is a passing coincidence and not the show setting us up for some message about civilian deaths in drone versus on-the-ground strikes. Also, terrorists, stop having kids! Things wrap up with Saul’s turn in the Senate committee hotseat.

The episode made good use of the show’s talented cast by focusing on how the characters grappled with the consequences of the Langley attack and the void left by Brody’s disappearance. It has me especially anticipating how the dynamic of Carrie and Saul’s relationship, which has always been more interesting than the relationship between her and Brody, shifts.

While my investment in the Brody family is modest, Dana’s maturing sense of self and intimacy could make for an engaging comparison to the adult relationships in the show. In my idealized version of Homeland, this season provokes thoughtful discussion of the idea that one “hysterical” woman’s sexuality could endanger an entire nation. But I’ll settle for suspenseful, plausible cloak-and-dagger drama.

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 the opal ring.

"Man Down" - Kalax (mp3)

"Midnight Rage" - Kalax (mp3)

The new ep from Kalax is entitled Journey and you can find his soundcloud here.

In Which We Are Jailed By Our Homeland

Enduring Feelings

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Homeland
creator Gideon Raff

There has been some hand-wringing on the part of critics and fans about whether or not Homeland’s writers were going to drag out Nick Brody’s double life as a hand-shaking symbol of American military success and bomb-wearing traitor for the entire season — or even possibly the rest of the show’s run — to a point where the audience would have lost interest and the show credibility. Those fears were allayed within the first five minutes of last week’s episode when Estes and Saul decided to set up a surveillance operation on Brody and bring Carrie in as bait.

Convinced Brody has made her during their hotel bar apologies, Carrie confronts him before he can warn Abu Nazir’s network, and we all get to relish the showdown as Carrie asks, “Do I want to be friends with a demented ex-soldier who hates America, who decided that strapping on a bomb was the answer to what ailed him?” In last night’s episode, titled “Q&A,” it seemed that while Carrie might not want to be friends with a demented ex-soldier, she still wants to be his lover.

As Woody Allen said, the heart wants what it wants. There may be no logic to her enduring feelings for Brody, but Carrie has come to a point of accepting them and then uses them to get inside the Congressman’s head. It was kind of nice to see love as strength instead of a weakness of a CIA agent.

The episode begins with Brody being hauled to an off-the-grid, poorly lit basement where Peter Quinn and his menacing cheekbones get the first crack at interrogating him. Peter confronts Brody with the shooting of Elizabeth Gaines to enable Secret Service protocol and Issa’s death. As Saul puts it, he sets the table with Brody’s lies. Brody’s initial defense is aggressive but after being left to dine on his damning confession video, begins to show signs of indigestion.

Meanwhile, outside the shadowy world of CIA interrogation, the Brody household and his legislative team begin to wonder where he’s disappeared to. To buy themselves 24 hours of questioning time, Estes tells the politician’s office that Brody is helping out on a hush-hush assignment. Still, they’re running out of time to get answers.

Putting the “dagger” in “cloak and dagger,” Peter speeds up the interrogation by stabbing Brody in the hand with a switchblade and enabling Carrie to enter the questioning, playing good cop to his bad. She starts with their relationship, asking Brody if he had fun breaking her heart, and then moves on using an angle that has gotten her past his defenses before — their shared trauma from frontline horrors. “You said up at the cabin that you didn’t have anyone to talk to. Did you ever find anybody — a friend, a therapist?” she asks Brody. They agree that “no one survives intact.”

Throughout the interrogation Brody still maintains that he never put on the bomb maker’s vest, but Carrie’s intimate series of questions and confidences do get him to give them Roya Hammad’s name as one of Nazir’s henchmen and that, as feared, a retaliatory strike on America is being planned. As always, the scene between Carrie and Brody was beautifully acted by Danes and Lewis, but it still felt self-consciously like an Emmy reel submission.

Brody’s interrogation ends with him back in a broken state, curled up on the cement floor in the fetal position. For the first time this season I felt sympathy for the guy as he once again got roped into playing the puppet, this time for the CIA in exchange for the organization keeping the suicide tape private. Seeing how well being Nazir’s and Vice President Walden’s lackey has worked out for him, it’s clear this agreement is only to further disrupt Brody’s domestic life and eat away at his poor crushed soul. Carrie and Saul scrape Brody’s destroyed psyche off the floor and Carrie drives him back home, leaving him to come clean with his wife.

As we near the second season’s halfway mark, there are two aspects I’m looking forward to seeing play out, besides obviously Carrie and Brody’s relationship. The first being the question of whether or not there’s a mole in the CIA. I finished the first season thinking the show’s writers wanted us to think there was one. It’s not a point that’s been raised yet, but it would be a great way to add a few twists into the second half of the season. There was an episode or two, when the razorblade was given to Afsal Hamid, and Saul first avoided then failed his lie detector test, that we were led to believe he was the mole. However, if there does turn out to be one, my money is on Galvez, even though he has so far spent this season in the background.

The second is the parallel father-daughter dynamics between Brody and Dana and Carrie and Saul. Both are touching. Dana understands her father better than anyone else in his life (besides maybe Carrie). She sees through his charade of normalcy and even managed to talk him out of blowing up the Vice President. Saul is not just Carrie’s mentor, but the stable father figure she didn’t get from her manic dad. He was able to make sense of her rantings when no one else could and, with less hesitation than anyone else at the CIA, trusts her judgment and has continued to advocate for her. It was probably nothing, but it would be clever for the scene in the previous episode, where Saul visits Estes at his home and is greeted by his son in a Darth Vader costume and growling “Luke, I am your father,” to turn out to be a bit of foreshadowing into either the Brody/Dana or Carrie/Saul relationship.

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.

"Chelsea Hotel No. 2" - Rufus Wainwright (mp3)

"Go or Go Ahead" - Rufus Wainwright (mp3)

 

In Which Homeland Renews Our Interest In Living

The Fifth Column

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Homeland
creator Gideon Raff

Both last night’s episode of Homeland and the previous week’s ended with the playback of Congressman Nicholas Brody’s black-and-white avowal to hold the United States, namely the Vice President and members of his national security team, responsible for the deaths of 82 children. Still, throughout both episodes, Brody’s earlier commitment to the terrorist cause, or as he calls it, “fulfilling my oath of defending the country from threats both foreign and domestic as a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps,” seems to have become flimsy motivation since rejoining his family in Virginia. Rather he seems a man lost.

I had a hard time believing in such naiveté from a grown man. I would have thought that if eight years of being held prisoner by an al-Qaeda terrorist cell hadn’t jaded a person, than six months in politics would have. And here Brody is, still failing to grasp the fact that once you join the dark side, there’s no turning back. The man is in some serious denial to think he’s not bound for the rest of his life to do the dirty work of both Abu Nazir and Washington D.C. Yet every time Roya Hammad begins a sentence with “Need I remind you...” or Vice President Walden whispers a favor in his ear, he’s incredulous. Did he really think he was going to be able to renege on a deal with the CIA’s most wanted? You’re the fifth column, Brody!

Brody was also foolish to ever believe there was honor in his cause — that before those drone strikes, the soul of America was lily-white (I’m pretty sure that purity was lost the moment we stepped onto this continent and claimed it as our own) — and for thinking that Nazir wasn’t aware from the start that his family would be likely collateral damage in his crusade against America.

I guess that’s always been one of Brody’s biggest flaws — an aw-shucks belief in a binary good and evil. He thinks he knows better than anyone else the difference between the two and that he’s the last moral man on the Eastern seaboard. Look at the disgust in his treatment of former military buddies Mike and Lauder. Sleeping with your friend’s wife and developing a taste for booze both seem forgivable in comparison to Nazir’s nefarious agenda. The veneer on Brody’s fantasy may be finally wearing thin. Apparently power washing the blood of another man out of your clothing at a carwash late at night will elicit some soul searching.

Brody is also still figuring out how to lie. His wife Jessica accuses that they roll off the tongue, but really they more sputter. He wasn’t able to come up with a plausible cover for his day attempting to take the tailor to a safe house that entire drive to Gettysburg and back. The only thing that makes me believe Brody was ever a marine is his ability to improvise in the field. The carjack he jerry-rigged out of firewood seems like the work of a man who has had to repair a Humvee in an Iraqi battlefield.

There are a couple other ways Brody is still adapting to life stateside. He’s still getting the knack of contemporary cell phone usage. Texting mayday messages to Beirut using a Blackberry presumably paid for with tax dollars seems like the kind of thing that could be uncovered by any citizen that knows how to file a FOIA request. Also, your smartphone is a tracking device and if anyone was ever to question his story about attending union meetings in Culpeper, you’re busted. This one seems the most obvious, but if your wife calls you while you are in the middle of chasing down a fellow subversive, let it go to voicemail lest she hear you break his neck.

While Brody is having second thoughts about what is driving his life, Carrie Mathison is as obsessive as ever. I love the way she can hardly contain her excitement each time Abu Nazir’s name is mentioned.

As Saul shared the footage recovered from Beirut at the close of last night’s show, Carrie got the validation for her work and intuition that she needed. Up until that point, there was plenty to keep audiences wondering if she wasn’t about to slip back into oblivion. Signs included sitting in the dark listening to jazz and promiscuous sex. All that was missing was the alliterative speech. (Really you could make a drinking game out of most behavior on the show — impulse control, suicide attempts, alcoholism — take a shot every time someone exhibits DSM criteria!)

Even though previews of upcoming episodes show Estes learning that Carrie was right about Brody, it is still not clear if she’s ever really going to be able to get her security clearance back. It’s hard to believe there are not going to be Agency eyebrows raising each time her chin starts quivering. I suggest she get a job in the private sector. Contractors do all of America’s dirty work these days anyway.

So far this season, Claire Danes’ acting has continued to be a highlight. I was skeptical when the show began, but watching her question her judgment on the rooftop of the Beirut safe house and her defeat after being kicked out of the debriefing back at Langley headquarters, her raw vulnerability still impresses. And while some viewers may be worried about the believability of CIA operations as they have played out these past few episodes (Skype?!?), it seems par for the course given the Agency's real-life tactical operation success rate. For the first half of its existence, the main approach of the CIA was to either throw money at any con man claiming Communist intel or parachuting untrained student insurgents behind enemy lines.

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. You can find her earlier reviews of Homeland here. She last wrote in these pages about recess.

"Sanguine (Please Say A Word)" - Jessica Bailiff (mp3)

"Your Ghost Is Not Enough (Be With Me)" - Jessica Bailiff (mp3)