This post discusses plot points from the April 3 episode of The Americans.

The Americans has been with us long enough, and debuted as a confident enough show that by its ninth episode, it has clear and distinct preoccupations and approaches. And it’s also in a place where it can pull all of them together as it did in “Safe House,” an extremely impressive episode of television that burnished Noah Emmerich’s chances for an Emmy.

There’s something fitting about the fact that this episode begins and ends with staples of American cuisine that are also examples of American excess. The Americans has made a habit of using Paige’s shopping habit, her trips to the mall, her Girl’s World magazines small ways to get at the allure and the danger of American consumerism, so it makes sense that the show would move on to the more visceral sense of taste and smell. “Can I have another piece of fried chicken, please?” Paige asks at the dinner where Phillip and Elizabeth tell their children that they’re separating. She and Henry spin off into a fantasy of fried chicken every day—or at least twice a week—a dream of delicious, deep-fried plenty, before being blindsided by another particularly American phenomenon: the prospect of their parents’ divorce. At the Beeman’s party, Elizabeth asks “Paige, do you want a hamburger?” Her daughter’s shrugged rejection is a refusal to participate not just in the meal, but in the allusion that everyone is all right. And when Stan tells Vlad “Nothing beats American fast food. It’s probably full of all kinds of nasty shit that will kill you, but it sure tastes good,” before shooting him in the head, he does so with a certain amount of pride in American lethality and American toughness, the ability to down a thousand hamburgers and still be fast enough to carry out an execution.

It’s also characteristic of the show, which has been an exercise in using geopolitics to illuminate intimate politics, to have a war between spies grow out of jealousy between men. Phillip is indulging himself, taking the affection that he can’t get from Elizabeth from Martha instead. “Clark, I’m in love with you. I’ve waited my whole life for you. And I would do anything for you,” Martha tells him. “Anything. All you have to do is ask.” All she wants, then, is for him to “stay with me. Please? Just this once?” And in giving her the comfort of him sleeping in her bed, Phillip runs smack into Chris Amador.

It’s possible that Chris is keeping an eye on Martha because her reaction to him interrupting her at the file cabinet made him suspicious. But it seems more likely that he’s jealous of her high-heeled shoes, her sense of renewed vitality, the sense that it’s the result of some guy other than him. “You’re just a guy who spent a night with a girl,” Chris spits at Phillip, when he tries to imply that he’s no one, rather than going for the spy angle. And after Phillip stabs him in self-defense, the misunderstandings escalate in precise accordance with the anxieties of the people who make the mistakes. Stan, terrified after his experiences underground, gets rough with Nina, asking her “Who put the finger on Amador? My partner.” Amador assumes that Arkady has been taken because he can’t believe that the FBI would step wrong, though as it turns out, and in keeping with the episode’s fast-food frame, Arkady’s been injured in a freak accident that keeps him from his regular run in the park. “Burnt it on a potato,” he tells Vlad. “It exploded in the microwave. They want to graft my skin. American technology.” Elizabeth, the paranoid interrogator of American culture, assumes that Amador is working them, rather than grasping for one triumph after death. “He fingers the head of Directorate S to protect a first tour officer?” she asks Phillip, certain there must be some bigger plan at work.
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Michael Douglas, atoning for his stint as Gordon Gecko, that avatar of rapacious eighties capitalism, has cut an ad encouraging traders who see evidence of wrongdoing or get offered shady deals to call their local FBI office:

Somehow, it’s not as catchy as “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” And the problem, I suspect, is less that folks on Wall Street don’t know where to go and more that you’ve got to make them want to pick up the phone in the first place. In pursuit of that goal, it might help if folks other than Bernie Madoff had ended up suffering more than embarrassment and financial losses for facilitating the downturn.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 27 episode of Homeland.

Homeland‘s had an incredible introductory streak, so I suppose it’s inevitable that the show would produce an episode that’s less than stellar. And I’m still trying to decide if this episode, which in one fell swoop made the plot more convoluted and saccharine, signals a derailment of the show or if it’s a mild aberration, necessary to the film’s larger themes.

First, there’s Brody’s backstory, which is about as straightforward as it can possibly get: it turns out that in his captivity, Abu Nazir had Brody teach his son English, and when the boy was killed by a drone attack, Brody dedicated himself to revenge, specifically on Vice President William Walden. There’s nothing precisely wrong with that storyline, and as usual, it’s well-executed: Brody’s face when he sees a bath for the first time after months of filth and captivity is a sight to see. But I’ve gotten used to seeing Homeland subvert our expectations, and so the cheesiness of Brody teaching Isa to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” or bonding with him over soccer, of seeing the boy comfort the post-traumatic man by treating him like a son would treat his father felt like a letdown if only because it was so emotionally predictable. I want to resist the urge to demand that I be surprised all the time, because on principal, I do think fictional should operate by consistent internal logic rather than aiming to operate like Rube Goldberg devices in contravention of the logic we’re all governed by. I don’t want the show to get increasingly baroque. But I do want Homeland to continue its commitment to subtlety and emotional richness that doesn’t grow out of entirely predictable places. This story of drone strikes is entirely too emotionally and politically simple, it doesn’t make the case for using drone strikes. The show’s portraying Abu Nazir as a decent man and only asserting that he’s a villain. It would be nice for that work to go in two directions.

In addition to that saccharine interlude, the show’s writing also felt a little flat. I actually think it’s been to Homeland‘s credit that, in a season full of shows like Boss and Hell on Wheels that aim for rhetorical heights, the show’s stuck to plain language. The writing hasn’t overshadowed the emotions. But here, the writing felt a little flat. We’re stuck with an FBI stooge who says things like “Justice? What does that mean?” or “It’s his word against mine.” His snark at Carrie, “You people have rubber hoses, don’t you?” isn’t a bad slap at the CIA’s record on interrogation, but he’s got such wooden lines otherwise that the line doesn’t land very hard. Carrie isn’t elevating matters either with lines like “If your men made a mistake, you need to come clean.” I hate seeing this show feel like a cliche. Fortunately, there’s Tom Walker in the woods, joking grimy that he’s hunting “office supplies” before blowing away a hunter who has the misfortune to recognize him. Homeland is more fun when it pulls us into sympathy with someone whose head we don’t necessarily want to be in at all, much less feel in concert with.
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This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 20 episode of Homeland.

“Call him a terrorist. What happened here won’t matter very much.” -The FBI’s liaison to the CIA on the Tom Walker detail

“I’m going to be alone my whole life, aren’t I?” -Carrie

Tonight brought another twist in the mystery of what happened to Brody in Afghanistan and who he is now. But I think I’ve decided that I don’t much care about the final destination of this show as long as it keeps taking us to these fascinating, heartbreaking places. Whether Brody is guilty, innocent, or merely beyond our comprehension, Homeland is, I think, a story about how our country breaks our hearts.

On a policy level first, the botched apprehension of Tom Walker pulled together three central themes of the show. First, Carrie turned out to be wrong about the extent to which she could wrangle Walker’s traumatized wife, who made a grand, stupid gesture to try to absolve herself for the sin of moving on. But she was right to order caution in the raid, and disaster resulted when the FBI ignored her, leaving two men dead at prayers and the Muslim community up in arms. Second, that tragedy continued the show’s dedication to finding beauty in prayer: the agents’ sights picked out the iconic arches in a mosque that from the outside was so non-descript, it looked like a warehouse. And finally, it was an example of a government agency being so callous about Islam that it would be nice to believe it wasn’t true, though of course it mirrors an ugly reality.

Then, there’s the human heartbreak of the work-service to country can be salvation and damnation both. Saul, mounting a last-ditch effort to make Mina stay, compares himself to Walker, saying their fatal flaws are that they both love their wives. But of course he has it wrong, admitting, too late, that “I always come when they call me.” And even in his own home, there’s someone he loves more than his wife. Twice Carrie’s come to his home in tense moments with Mina, and twice Saul’s admitted her. He can take time to chastise Carrie and to comfort her, but not to save his marriage.

Then, there’s Jess, who is in an agony of guilt, and Brody trying to absolve her and himself. What pulls them together is an invitation to a party thrown by a power-broker from their church with political plans for the Brodys. It turns out that playing perfect saves them. Their children watch for the arrival of a hired car like it’s something far more powerful than a prosaic sedan, and when the parents return home, drunk and excited by having lived up to the imaginations of powerful people who see the promise of America in them, their children are sober, placid, and watching uniquely American dreck. It may not last, but a single night of Ice Age, popcorn, and accord feels like heaven.

I’m almost done with the second season of Sleeper Cell, and it’s fascinating how much the show changes from the first miniseries to the second. Where we initially got to know the members of the first cell through a combination of frantic action and hanging around, the second cell’s sort of presented to us as a packaged deal and we don’t get to know them as well as people. But more importantly, the second season raised some interesting questions for me about how we address Islamophobia and torture as practiced by the United States government, and how to best build villains that let us condemn those attitudes and behaviors.

There’s the contrast between Darwyn’s three case agents. Ray’s well-intentioned, but not particularly ideologically engaged: to him, terrorism is a crime and it doesn’t seem to be particularly important to him to learn about Islam as a motivating force for that crime. Patrice actually knows a lot about Islam — she’s more knowledgeable about and respectful of mainstream Muslims than Ray is, but she’s also more militant than Ray about fighting extremist forms of the faith. She’s willing to put her body on the line to try to kill extremist Iraqi insurgents. And when she’s killed by those same kinds of extremists, they’re murdering not just another foot soldier, but someone who was working on eliminating the misunderstanding between non-Muslims and Muslims that is jidhaists’ most powerful recruiting tool. Warren Russell, the case officer who replaces Patrice, is all too easy to dismiss as an arrogant, inexperienced ass even though his skepticism of Darwyn’s faith is probably a realistic portrayal of what happens when you go through the FBI’s Islamophobic training regimen. And presenting his distrust of an entire faith as a deeply ingrained institutional problem rather than as something only jerks fall prey to would be more useful and disturbing, an actual spur towards reform rather than an isolated incident.

Similarly, I have mixed feelings about the way the show presents Farik’s torture at American and Saudi hands. At one point, one of his interrogators complains that torture isn’t consistent with U.S. values but that it’s something the country’s been forced into by terrorism. Of course it’s true that the greatest victory Osama bin Laden won on September 11 was suckering us into giving up on core American values, but that’s only part of the story here. I don’t really think there’s a question that there are people who believe that torture should always have been part of the menu of options for the military and law enforcement, and who saw the September 11 attacks as an opportunity to tear down rules against torture. The key is how to get folks to recognize both that streak of thinking and the wrongness of it. If you’ve got a cackling, black-hooded dungeon master representing that position, it’s easy for audiences to turn away in revulsion and reject it as implausible.