This post discusses plot points from the October 21 episode of Homeland.

There’s a real statue in front of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, much like the one Brody glimpsed Carrie through this week on Homeland, called Kryptos. A series of four elaborate encryptions, only three have ever been broken. The first to be decoded reads “BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION.” (The misspelling is deliberate.) It’s harder to think of a better lesson for Homeland, which delivered its best episode this season, and one of its most powerful of the show by sticking to the nuance of illusion, rather than the increasingly frantic contrivances the show has used to generate drama in Brody’s half of the story this season, and by examining the subtleties of the ways Brody and Carrie have lied to each other over the year they’ve known each other*.

In a way, the show makes a joke of such mummery in the first scene when David’s son from his failed marriage, Kenny, meets Saul at the door waving a lightsaber and warns him “I am your father. Don’t make me destroy you.” Saul is here on a quieter mission, to let David know that Carrie was right, with a minimum of bitterness and blame. “We could arrest him. That would be that,” Saul suggests. “Or we could leave him right where he is. Iran is planning blowback against the U.S. for the Israel bombings. Abu Nazir was going to be the agent of that plan. That’s what the Beirut meet was about.” David’s anxieties mostly have to do with his relationship with Vice President Walden. “I dupe this guy, he fires me in five seconds,” he tells Saul. “You tell him you missed the signs on Golden Boy, he’ll fire you in three,” Saul tells him, the closest he gets to nastiness for what David did to Carrie, offering him a way to redeem himself to his country, if not to the woman he drummed out of the agency.

As proof Carrie remains unredeemed in his eyes, David assigns another agent, Peter Quinn, to oversee her. But that insult appears to be an unexpected gift, because after some initial prodding at each other, it seems like Quinn and Carrie might turn out to like each other. Some of the best scenes in the episode happen between Carrie and Quinn, pitting her emotional wrecking ball against his penchant for cleverness as they learn the basic facts, the subtle shadings of each other. “I don’t like surprises,” he tells her when they meet. “I’m not crazy about them either,” Carrie agrees. “Crazy. Interesting choice of words,” Quinn tells her, reminding her he knows who she is. Where Carrie gives out information directly, Quinn does it at a slant, cloaked in sharp, short phrases. “You were fucking him, huh?” Quinn asks her. “Who are you fucking?” Carrie responds, her voice going up in confirmation. “An ER nurse. I’m not that into her,” Quinn deadpans. But he’s sympathetic. “I’m just saying, if he did to me what he did to you, got me fired, and made me think I was crazy when I wasn’t, and sent me off to get my brain zapped, I’d fucking rip his skin off.” When he pushes again, asking “So, was it work or love? Brody?” Carrie snaps at him “What are, we, girlfriends?” and he lets her interrogate him instead. “You ever go back to Philly?” she asks of his past. “There’s no good Indian food,” he complains as a form of the negative. “Why does Estes like you so much?” she wants to know, not revealing that once upon a time, Estes liked her a lot, too. “I’m pretty likable.” He might be, but there’s a knife edge to him, too.

They aren’t alone in their flirtation, either. “Makes you realize there’s this whole big world out there,” Dana tells Finn Walden when he sneaks her away from a study break to the top of the Washington Monument (bonus points for the post-earthquake construction setup). It’s heartbreaking to contrast Dana’s hope for that big world with Carrie, who has a world of experience Dana can’t even begin to contemplate, tentatively approaching someone new. Finn and Dana are sweet and tentative with each other because this is new to them. When Finn tells Dana “I like your attitude,” and she tells him artlessly ‘I like you,” they’re tentative because the risk of rejection is some of the worst hurt they can imagine, Dana’s need to untangle herself from Xander the most complicated emotional extraction she could undertake. Dana and Carrie have the same problems, magnified and distorted by pain and experience.
Read more

Torchwood: Miracle Day is one of the most intensely political things I’ve ever seen on television. Through two episodes, everything from health care, to extraordinary rendition, to the death penalty, to drug stockpiling, to the ethics of abortion and contraception in a world where the population’s exploding. What’s exceptional about Miracle Day, though, is not just that it’s tackling the issues of the day, but the way it’s using science fictional conceits and our affection for existing characters to reframe key issues rather than simply to pose the same questions again.

Charlie Jane Anders has a wonderful outline of the show’s core dilemma: what happens to every aspect of health care, from management to chronic conditions, to disease control, to organ donation, in a world where no one dies? Miracle Day isn’t throwing out the world of politics — people are still opposed to abortion and contraception, and with swamped emergency rooms, there are still questions about health care rationing. But rather than fighting over death panels and mandates to purchase insurance, the events of Miracle Day totally upset the rules, making the question not about how we’re going to pay for health care, but how we’re going to deliver it at all when there aren’t enough beds, enough drugs, enough doctors. In the real world, of course, the payment question’s still there, and still important. But shifting the framework and the questions we ask about the issues, even temporarily, is the kind of thought experiment science fiction’s made for.

And on a smaller scale, I thought the rendition scenes were more effective than Charlie Jane did. It’s one thing to show the impact of extraordinary rendition on a family we’ve just met a couple of minutes ago, like in Rendition. It’s entirely another to see character’s we’ve gotten to know over three or more years torn away from their kids on a tarmac, dragged limp up a set of moveable steps and into a plane. It’s easy to abstract experiences we haven’t had, and that no one we know have had or are likely to have. Art can provide an emotional connection to those kinds of issues, things we oppose in principal but not out of an actual visceral objection to them.

I love me some John le Carré and I remain eager for a good movie about the War on Terror, so I’m glad to hear that Anton Corbijn’s adapting A Most Wanted Man, le Carré’s novel about an illegal immigrant in Germany who is caught up in an American intelligence sweep, for the screen. I’ve always been impressed by the way le Carré managed to pivot after the end of the Cold War from the practitioners of intelligence to the subjects of the craft, and the way he expanded his moral critique of international affairs to more carefully trace the connections between governmental and corporate power.

The only regret I have about that development is that I’d sort of like to see what le Carré would do if he built a set of core characters for our contemporary intelligence era, what George Smiley might look like in the War on Terror. I suppose we already have that in Spooks (which, if you are not watching it already is a grievous error you should rectify immediately) and Sir Harry Pearce. In the U.S., it’s impossible to tell stories about the War on Terror right now without making your heroes either righteous ass-kickers or saintly guardians of civil liberties. You need narrators who can come at the issues sideways to provide actual clarity on them, and the U.K., as an important ally that isn’t a key driver of the current conflict, is well-positioned to provide that perspective.