Homeland recap: season four, episode two – Trylon and Perisphere
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Version 0 of 1. SPOILER ALERT: This blog is for people watching Homeland series four. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen season four, episode two. Read the episode one blog here. ‘Carrie, here’s the thing: it’s not about you’ Well, it was good while it lasted. After a promising series opener boasting tension, intrigue and the great Corey Stoll, Homeland’s renewed – or rather rebooted – spark was unceremoniously snuffed out here, in an episode that for much of its run-time bordered on the soporific, with one jarring, and to my mind, disastrously ill-judged exception. (Two if you count the revelation that Saul briefly got rid of television’s most revered beard. As if. That thing is fused to the man’s chin.) I’m talking of course about Carrie’s near-drowning of her baby, which proved the nadir of her brief return to the US. We’d already had evidence of Carrie’s emotional detachment from her child in last week’s episode, and it was reinforced early on here, most notably when she and baby Frannie visited Brody’s house, and Carrie confessed that she couldn’t “remember why I had you”. Even so, I didn’t expect what followed. The scene itself was ambiguously enough shot to draw doubts over how serious Carrie’s intentions were – it looks as though she just lets Frannie briefly “slip”, rather than consciously submerging her – but I was still troubled by the implication. Granted, a mother’s inability to connect with her newborn is, of course, very real, and one which great drama has been drawn from in the past (We Need to Talk About Kevin being a good example). The problem for me here is that, given how the show has set up Carrie in this season – myopic, selfish, generally dislikeable – this feels less like a genuine attempt to explore the issue, and more like a way of adding another defect in Carrie’s increasingly “difficult” character. The moment felt, at best, crassly handled, and at worst the point where some viewers might decide that, actually, Carrie, and Homeland in general, has become a bit too much of a drag. Mind you, some might have reached that conclusion about the show even without said baby with the bathwater moment. Homeland’s return to the US felt unnecessary, slowing the plot’s forward movement down to a crawl. The main development here is Carrie’s quest to compromise Lockhart, after his decision to withdraw her from Afghanistan following Sandy Bachman’s death at the hands of the mob. To that end, she tracks down a case officer in Islamabad, Jordan Harris, now working a dead-end job in the CIA archives after learning that Sandy was trading state secrets to his source in return for intelligence – a potentially treasonous act that Lockhart himself had seemingly OK-ed. Carrie, naturally, winkles that information from a reluctant Harris and confronts Lockhart with it, earning her a promotion to Sandy’s old station chief position in Pakistan in the process. It’s all a little too easy – from the moment that Carrie first tracks down Harris, you’re fairly convinced that she’ll be on her way back to the Middle East by the episode’s end. Over in Pakistan, Aayan – the medical student whose family was killed in the air strike – is still feeling the repercussions of his roommate’s decision to upload the video of the attack. The media want to make him a totemic figure for anti-American sentiment, but he wants none of it, declaring that the mob who killed Sandy were as bad as the Americans they were protesting against. Later Aayan receives a visit from a masked man demanding that he avoid speaking to the press at all, presumably because he works far better as an Islamist propaganda tool if he is not vocally undermining their message at every turn. I remain intrigued by how Aayan will slot into this season’s narrative arc. Just how innocent is he really? What, for example, were in those vials he asked his classmate to hide? Saul again remains again on the periphery, though it was nice to see some back and forth between Mandy Patinkin and F Murray Abraham. Dar Adal reckons that Lockhart’s growing instability as head of the CIA might provide an opening for Saul, so hopefully Patinkin’s screen time will be significantly increased in coming weeks. Sadly I can’t say the same about Quinn, whose more prominent role has diluted some of the engaging mystery of his character. I remain unconvinced that the show actually has very much to say about Quinn, beyond the fact that he is deeply haunted by his complicity in some of the CIA’s darker secrets, and the hokey story fashioned for him this week, in which he had a drunken tryst with the overweight motel manager and then defended her honour against some taunting lads (by giving them a sound beating), didn’t exactly disabuse me of that notion. Perhaps there’s a larger plan at work here, but given some of the other creative decisions made in Trylon and Perisphere, I don’t hold out much hope. Notes and observations • Trylon and Perisphere might sound like doomed lovers in a Greek tragedy, but were actually were the names given to two of the constructions at the 1939 World’s Fair, which offered up a utopian vision of the future and whose slogan was “Dawn of a New Day”. Soon after, the second world war broke out, and both structures were melted down to make bombs. • Interesting point raised by timbono2 in last week’s comments about how Homeland feels somewhat hamstrung by its failure to tackles the rise of Islamic State (Isis): The problem for me with this show is the rise of IS in the real world. Current events in the Middle East and in the so called "war on terror" are moving more quickly and spectacularly in the real world than in this show. Season one was right on the edge of current affairs, this one feels a bit like it could have been made four years ago... • Filming began in June, just as the wider media were beginning to recognise the threat of Isis (note how this Guardian video from June refers to them as “Islamic militants” in its headline, suggesting that back then the group’s notoriety was far from established in the west), so its perhaps understandable that the season’s focus is largely elsewhere. • Still no jazzy opening credits. Alan Sepinwall says in his recap of episodes one and two that the show will bring them back in due course. Of course, they’ll need to be de-Brodyfied first. What did you make of this week’s episode? |