Homeland recap: season four, episode five - About a Boy
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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 four. Read the episode four blog here. “A professional liar”. For all the subtext it contains, Quinn’s description of Carrie in About a Boy is less an insult than a statement of fact: ultimately the success or failure of her undercover operations depend on how easily she can slip between sincerity and subterfuge. It’s how she acquires assets and information. It’s how she gets results. The difficulty comes when those lines between the personal and professional become muddied, when those lies that Carrie routinely tells become bundled up with deeper truths. It’s something we witness in this week’s episode, and it isn’t pretty. The bulk of About a Boy takes place in the safe house, with Carrie trying to gain the confidence of Aayan, who still seems wary of her despite their tryst. If Carrie’s coercion techniques last week were purely sexual, this week she tries to get him to talk by displaying her own emotional vulnerability. It’s one of the oldest ploys around, but it takes a true sociopath to pull it off without revealing something genuine of themselves in the process. Carrie, for all her faults, isn’t quite in that territory, so instead we get an uneasy mixture of truth and lies: she has a child, her “journalist” partner died on an assignment that she gave him, and she wishes she could have married him. It works. “I can’t lie to you any more,” says Aayan who finally admits to her at the episode’s end that, yes, his uncle, the terrorist Haaqani, is still alive. But at what cost has Carrie obtained that information? Aside from the thorny ethical issues of what Quinn describes as “fucking a child” (steady on Quinn, he’s not that young), there’s the emotional toll of this act of deep cover. Carrie has so far this season been unaffected, eerily so, by the goings-on around her, but here we finally glimpse the inner punishment she’s been taking, most notably when she bursts into tears while having sex with Aayan. It’s reassuring to see her display something other than the blank “Drone Queen” callousness of recent weeks, though you do wonder how long she can maintain this delicate emotional equilibrium, given what we know of her. Aayan and Carrie’s slow, character-driven scenes balanced out nicely with the faster-paced spy game stuff going on elsewhere, most notably the storyline involving Saul. Admittedly his discovery of Ghazi the runaway thug at the airport felt like a way of keeping Mandy Patinkin around a while longer, and Saul’s willingness to believe that Ghazi appearing in the check-in queue just as he did was simply a happy coincidence was hugely unbelievable, given what we know about the man. But the whole thing was tense enough to negate those plot contrivances, and Saul’s kidnapping by the ISI sets things up nicely going forward. Meanwhile Quinn and Fara are staking out the cleric seen with Haqqani last week, taking the occasional snap of him while having terse conversations about what it takes to be an agent. I enjoy watching the pairing of Quinn, world-weary and conflicted about Carrie’s behaviour, and Fara, still extremely green in this whole spying business and who vaguely idolises Carrie. Fara, for all her enthusiasm, doesn’t quite have the pluck needed to place a tracking device on the cleric’s car at a crucial moment, and a crucial lead in the mission to get to the bottom of the link between Haqqani and the ISI is lost. The ISI are certainly busy this week, given that they’re also still tailing Dennis, the ambassador’s husband, giving him a gentle nudge to ensure that he doesn’t drunkenly blurt out the truth behind his treachery to John Redmond in a hotel bar. Dennis, easily spooked, relents, and after eavesdropping on Redmond and his wife badmouthing him, decides to continue with the treason. He sneaks into Carrie’s apartment and takes snaps of a couple of telling objects – her medication and a picture of her with her child. A mere episode after saying how pleased I was that Mark “Duck Phillips” Moses had been added to the cast, I’m now already a bit exasperated by Dennis, a laughably two-dimensional weasel of a character, seemingly introduced solely to move the plot forward. It requires a whopping great suspension of disbelief to go along with the idea that his entirely capable ambassador wife wouldn’t have jettisoned her loveless marriage to this evasive, shambling drunk years ago, but that, when the show is ticking along as nicely as it is here, is something I’m willing to do. Notes and observations Quote of the week “I’m a spy. I know shit.” – John Redmond, sounding less like a secret agent and more like a 12-year-old boy playing GoldenEye with his mates. |