Homeland, Showtime’s freshman drama about bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison and Nicholas Brody, the former prisoner of war she suspects of being a terrorist and falls in love with anyway, starts its second season on Sunday at 10 PM. I caught up with the show’s creators, Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, who collected Emmys for best drama writing and for best drama last weekend, at the Television Critics Association press tour in August to talk drone strikes, Carrie as assault survivor, Brody’s political future, and putting Islam on screen. This interview touches on the basic setup of the show’s second season, and has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start out by asking one question that had been percolating in my mind since last season: were we meant to think that Carrie was sexually assaulted after she was pulled out of the prison in the first episode?

Alex: We didn’t explicitly want you to think that, but it was always a subject of our discussions: what exactly happened to her? And the possibility certainly was there. What made you think that?

I thought the transition in the pilot between that and the scene where she’s washing her genitals after that, there’s that sense of carried-over shame that was really interesting.

Alex: We talked about that. At one point we were going to show some of that period where she was being held, and we chose not to. It just felt at some point like it was beside the point at that time.

How much time has passed between the first season and the second.

Alex: Six months. Ish?

That’s a quick turnaround for Brody as a Congressman.

Howard: It’s sort of like, dog ears, six months in TV time. Some stories are better explained. The idea would be that he was appointed to that seat…Which is what happened last year [with former Congressman Anthony Weiner].

I also wanted to ask about the vice presidential storyline, where Brody learns that Walden is considering him for a spot on the ticket, because while it’s nice to have him close to the Vice President, it’s hard for me to believe he would pass even an initial vet.

Alex: Well, I mean, Sarah Palin passed a big vetting process. Look, the guy’s a national figure. He’s generally acknowledged to be a hero. He’ been demonstrated to be incredibly good when he gets up to speak.

Howard: And in the context of what we posit geopolitically, he’s especially valuable to Walden in terms of casting an image of strength and service.  

Alex: But we also want to make it clear that he’s not the only choice out there. There are other, he’s being vetted among a number of vice presidential choices.

Howard: And he’s still a long shot.
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“If we start talking about it we’ll be here all day, making diagrams with straws,” Joe (Bruce Willis) tells Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his younger self, over diner coffee in Rian Johnson’s elegant but ultimately incomplete futuristic thriller Looper. To its credit, Looper spends more time on the uses and moral implications of its time travel technology, which has been outlawed, and is used primarily by a criminal syndicate that sends its victims back in time to be assassinated by young men who must eventually kill their future selves as part of the bargain, than in attempting to make it comprehensible. But the movie ends up split between two equally rich concepts, failing to adequately connect them, and doing full justice to neither.

The movie begins with Joe, a young looper, explaining his work in 2040s Kansas, where he kills people at the edge of a sugar cane field, burns their bodies in an industrial facility, and stops at a diner where he practices French with his favorite waitress, Beatrix. He spends more time on the mechanics and mindset of his job, a profession populated mostly by young men who aren’t very good at thinking ahead, but very much enjoy the lucrative rewards of their work, paid in bars of silver strapped to the bodies of their victims, which allow them to frequent flashy clubs and stay addicted to stimulant eye drops that turn the world pleasantly upside down. Joe’s boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels, vastly more enjoyable here than he is pontificating in The Newsroom), grumbles at Joe that “The movies that you’re dressing like are just copying other movies. Fucking 21st century effect. Do something new,” and suggests that he abandon his plans to visit Paris because “You should go to China…I’m from the future. You should go to China.”

As an aside, Joe mentions a mutation that’s given about ten percent of the population mild powers of telekenisis, a revelation that once lead people to believe that superheroes were about to emerge, but “Now it’s just a bunch of assholes who think they’re going to blow your mind by floating quarters. It’s like this whole town: big heads, small potatoes.” What’s initially an aside, a bit of local color in a glimmering megacity that Johnson builds with the same hardboiled spine and detailed flesh that he brought to Brick, his first feature, also a collaboration with Gordon-Levitt, becomes the point on which the movie bifurcates.

Joe’s routine is interrupted when his friend Seth (Paul Dano) shows up at his apartment having failed to kill his future self, or close his loop. He’s terrified, and with good cause: Abe’s private squad of hitman show up at Joe’s apartment to do the job he couldn’t. Joe eventually gives Seth up in order to keep his secret stash of silver, a not particularly subtle allusion. But before Seth dies, he passes along a warning from his future self to Joe: “He told me there’s a new holy terror bossman in the future and he’s closing all the loops.” It proves prescient. Joe’s loop shows up, but unlike Seth’s, who slips because of Seth’s negligence, he’s prepared, which makes since, because Future Joe is prepared, determined to escape and kill the bossman, known as the Rainmaker, so he can avoid being spent back and live out his life with his wife in China.
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This post contains spoilers for the September 27 episode of Parks and Recreation.

After a strong start to its fifth season last week that laid out major themes, including Leslie’s anxieties about her new role and her separation from Ben, how Ron will handle the Parks Department without Leslie there to balance out his antipathy for government and, as Leslie put it, “feelings and emotions,” and Andy and April’s next steps towards adulthood, this week’s episode of Parks and Recreation left me feeling concerned. Leslie’s election to city council, Andy’s decision to pursue police work, and Ben and April testing the waters in Washington should give us a sense of a slightly larger Pawnee, letting us finally spend time with Councilman Hauser, seeing who Dave’s colleagues in the police department are, finding out where Pawnee’s trouble spots are other than Ramset Park. But “Soda Tax” mined old Parks territory to little effect.

Parks and Recreation is always at its best when it explores issues specific to the surreal version of Pawnee it’s set in, rather than getting too close to real-world political issues. It’s one thing for Leslie to accidentally marry a couple of penguins and set off an equal rights crisis. But watching Leslie follow spontaneously in Mayor Bloomberg’s footsteps doesn’t have much pop. Sure, the sodas in question are freakishly large: “Roughly the size of a two-year-old child, if the child were liquified,” as Paunchburger lobbyist Ms. Pinewood, puts it. But the issue doesn’t seem to come from any particular passion of Leslie’s.

And in another diversion from the usual brilliant eccentricity of the show, Leslie’s constituents seemed dumb rather than particular to Pawnee. The woman who told Leslie, “My husband started drinking those giant sodas and he gained 100 pounds in three months. Consequently, we haven’t had sex in ten years,” was typical and reasonably funny fare for the show, but the guy who thinks “we should tax all bad things, like racism, and women’s vaginas” is less clever. And having someone declare that it’s not the federal government’s business whether he pays taxes feels suspiciously like the show editorializing on people who want the government’s hands off their Medicare. It’s all a bit common for Parks and Recreation.

It’s also a problem that the show recycles the threat for a company to take jobs out of town. Last season, when Bobby Newport threatened to outsource Sweetums, his suggestion was genuinely unnerving, both because it was such a nasty thing for such a dumb, sweet man to suggest, and because the prospect of it coming true seemed real. Here, the threat is recycled, but it doesn’t carry any real weight. It would be interesting if Leslie blows off the warning and it comes back to bite her. But in this episode, it seems like the show going to the same well twice in less than a season’s-worth of episodes, to significantly diminished effect.

It’s also returning to the same well of Leslie seeking out Ron for reassurance and Anne for policy ideas. If the legislative fight had been stronger, I might not have cared so much, but how many times do we have to hear Ron tell Leslie things we know, like “you were insubordinate, a pain in my ass, and worst of all, bubbly.” Sure, it’s a difference to know that he tried to have her fired, but not enough of a rift to make the conversation feel like a standout.

What did feel new, and the major thing in the episode that worked (though I did like Andy’s training and Chris’s revelation, which could produce some awesome therapy sequences), was the scene where Ben confronted April about her slacking in Washington. Most of April’s apathy has been harmless, or supported by Ron, or jollied-through by Leslie. But this time, Ben “asked you to come here because I thought you’d enjoy it and I think you’re smart,” and she’s both disappointing those expectations and making it harder for him to do something he definitely cares about even if it’s something she’s not sure she likes yet. It was an interaction that produced an actual shift in their dynamic, and let April feel some actual shame. Now, maybe her take with the interns isn’t the actual desired end result here, though her promise that “If you don’t do it, I swear to God, I’m going to murder you in your sleep. I know where you live. 14th Street, right?” shows a better sense of DC than Hollywood normally demonstrates. And it represents forward progress, rather than backsliding, whether to what a person or a show has been, in favor of striding boldly towards its future.