Homeland recap: season four, episode nine – There's Something Else Going On
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Version 0 of 1. Homeland is, in many ways, the TV equivalent of its own protagonist: a periodically brilliant show that possesses a maddening self-destructive streak. It frequently finds new ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. A case in point is this episode: There’s Something Else Going On. The first 50 minutes or so are very good indeed, but everyone will remember the final four minutes: Haqqani and his men sneaking into the embassy through its secret tunnel after an air strike on Carrie and Saul’s CIA convoy caused a diversion. I’m not entirely against Homeland chucking in the odd shocker at the end of the episode; done well – as was the case with the Langley bombing – it can prove extremely potent. This, though, was daft. It was a scene straight out of 24. No, really – there was a near-identical storyline involving Chinese mercenaries ambushing the CTU headquarters in that show’s awful sixth season. Haqqani’s sneak attack jarred with what had been, up until that point, more of the same gripping, gruelling drama we had seen in Halfway to a Donut. Much of th is episode was spent on the protracted exchange of Saul for the Taliban chiefs, a trade played out on a landing strip outside Islamabad (a perfect spot for some wide-angle cinematography). I got the sense, from Carrie’s wary demeanour (not to mention the episode title), that Haqqani and the ISI were going to pull a fast one during this switch, a feeling that intensified when the child who had been accompanying Saul had a suicide vest strapped to him. That, thankfully was just an extremely unpleasant contingency plan. Haqqani was not interested in disrupting the trade. His attention was elsewhere. Saul, though, was set on disrupting the trade. We already knew that he would rather die than be the reason for the return of the Taliban chiefs to Afghanistan. What we didn’t know was that he was willing to allow a child to die as well. “They put the vest on him, not us,” was his justification, something that Carrie, trying to dissuade Saul from his act of martyrdom, quite rightly called out as drivel. This season Homeland has done a nice job of projecting America’s larger problems in the Middle East onto this smaller story, with Carrie in particular hiding behind the notion of “moral justification” for her increasingly suspect actions. Here, though, she’s the voice of sanity. “Fourteen years of war and this is what it’s come to? Asking a child to blow you to kingdom come and for what?” It was a speech that could have felt like grandstanding, but in the context, and delivered powerfully by Claire Danes, felt completely earned. Back at the embassy, Dennis was getting twitchy. We wondered how Carrie might handle the Dennis situation, and her ploy with Ambassador Boyd – where Boyd angrily put a halt to Carrie’s interrogation of Dennis, and then did some subtle interrogation of her own – was very canny indeed. But Dennis is canny too and saw through the ruse. He remained tight-lipped until the very last second, when he revealed that he had told Tasneem about the tunnel. Great job, Dennis. Now you and the rest of the embassy are about to be taken hostage by terrorists. It’ll be interesting to see what Haqqani’s ploy is: I’d wager that, as he did with Saul, he’ll eye up a further exchange, though with even more eye-watering demands than before. Meanwhile, I think we can assume that Carrie, Saul and Redmond are safe. The air strike miraculously managed to hit all the other vehicles in their convoy bar theirs. Very fortunate, that. Notes and observations • Lots of symbolic weight given to Saul’s glasses this week, particularly the act of taking them on and off again. Any theories? • For some excellent ruminations on Homeland’s depiction of US involvement in the region, I recommend this Vox essay on the subject. • Carrie was drugged with 25i, otherwise known as N-Bomb. It sounds pretty intense. Quote of the week “What the fucking fuck?” Senator Lockhart, in response to the air strike. I’m starting to wish that Lockhart’s dialogue was just swear words, given how good he is at spitting them out. |