This post discusses plot points from the first episode of the second season of Homeland.

“Tonight is Thursday. I make dinner for the family on Thursdays. I’m making vegetable lasagna with vegetables I picked from the garden this morning,” Carrie Mathison says, with increasing desperation when the CIA comes for her, six months after they came for her job, six months after she burned out part of her brain to try to silence it. “I don’t want to see him. I’ve put all of this away.” Homeland, which won the Emmy award for best drama last weekend, much to my delight, is a plot-heavy thriller, but it’s also a deeply humane show about the pleasures and connections war denies us. And it makes sense to me that as it begins its second season, “The Smile,” from its titles to its details, constantly returns to questions of how its characters feel about their roles in the Great Game of story, and of the war on terror.

When we first met Carrie a year ago, she was living alone in a relatively anonymous town house, pursuing one-night stands, and flouting the rules of her agency to set up surveillance on Nicholas Brody, a recently-returned prisoner of war who triggered an old warning from one of her informants. The Carrie we meet outside of the agency is someone who has acknowledged her mental illness rather than managing it erratically in secret, who lives with her father and sister rather than by herself, who teaches rather than interacts, and who sees that Israel has struck Iran’s nuclear development sites, but observes rather than acting. When her mentor Saul recalls Carrie to active, if temporary, duty because one of her sources, a Lebanese woman who “had a weakness for American movies. She loved Julia Roberts,” there’s a deep cruelty and kindess in the call. Carrie has sacrificed the nimblest part of her mind (if not the best of her self) to the maintenance of her sanity, had it treated like trash by her mentors and enemies. Saul’s call offers a chance for Carrie to serve, and to reclaim some of her damaged reputation, but it’s freighted with two terrible possibilities: Carrie could fail and have her brokenness reaffirmed, or she could succeed but remain shut out of the place that to her was once a kind of tortured heaven.

In a sense, Carrie begins this second season in the same place Brody began the first: believing that she is the vessel for a mission she has neither the desire nor the political capital to shape. “Believe me, I wouldn’t be going if I had a choice,” she tells her sister, shoving choice away from her the way Brody initially did on his return to the United States. “You do have a choice. You always have a choice,” her sister begs her, but Carrie tells her “Not this time.” If last season was about Brody’s coming into a power he didn’t know he had, and in the process separating the CIA from its most valuable asset, this season of Homeland could follow Carrie on a similar journey, gaining the hard intelligence, the credibility, and the mental strength to prove Brody guilty and her detractors deadly wrong, restoring the proper balance to the situation. Her weapons are paltry: a fruit basket from Saul, a phone, a bad brown wig, a flimsily-constructed story about hockey fandom, a headscarf, the ability to throw a knee. And her only victory in this first episode is to throw a tail. Carrie catches no terrorists or torturers, but she does, crucially, catch herself when she falls, and watching her, I cheered, even though I know that for Carrie to return to the CIA would put her further from lasagna, from the garden, and the blue books, and her father’s gentle concern about her lithium.

At home, the plot lines, and the emotions, are more complicated. When I initially saw this episode, and I’ve watched it several time since, I didn’t like the decision to make Brody a potential vice presidential nominee because it struck me as a bit of implausibility that isn’t actually necessary to any of the points the plot seems to be trying to make. It’s one thing for John McCain, who was held as a prisoner in Vietnam, to be a viable presidential candidate years after his return home, and long after the conflict that resulted in his imprisonment and torture had ceased to carry the specific sting and suspicion for the American populace that the September 11 attacks still have for ordinary Americans. Brody is a fresher victim of a rawer conflict, six months into his service in an abruptly-vacated Congressional seat. His only political asset is also a potential liability, even for people who don’t suspect Brody as Carrie once did: his experiences in Abu Nazir’s custody.
Read more

The always-excellent Maureen Ryan talked to Homeland executive producer Alex Gansa about the second season of the show, which stars Claire Danes as bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison and Damian Lewis as former prisoner of war who had been turned and returned to the United States as a sleeper agent. He told her what the lay of the land is at the beginning of the second season, which begins in September, after Carrie made a desperate bid to stop Brody from committing an act of terrorism, something he actually stopped himself short from doing after receiving a phone call from his daughter:

Well you have to understand the Brody has been completely exonerated in the eyes of the intelligence community and actually even Carrie. I mean Carrie had this sort of epiphany before the ECT about [Abu Nazir's dead son] Issa, but before that, I think she is fairly sanguine about the fact that she was wrong, which is what sent her into the ECT, into the mental institution. She said, “Look, I was wrong. I made a mistake. I intruded on this person’s life. I accused him of things that were not true.”

She had no idea about the vest. She has no idea that Dana made a call to Brody and talked him off a ledge. All she knows is that the bomb never went off, which in her mind and in the CIA’s mind and in her period of intense instability psychologically leads her to believe that she was wrong. Which is why she gets into the car with her sister at the end of the finale and says, “I can’t live like this anymore. I need help. I have to go get some help.”

I wrote about this earlier today with The Wire, but one of the things I find fascinating about both that show and Homeland is that they illustrate the limits of assuming that people behave predictably, and thus, the limits of law enforcement and intelligence gathering. The Wire is much more broadly focused, but one of the significant themes of the show is the cops’ uneasy relationship with Omar, someone who intervenes powerfully in the game, but whose motivations don’t map neatly on to the accepted dynamics of it. Brody, similarly, is someone whose motivations can’t be cleanly sifted from a mass of facts and intelligence. Even when Carrie figures out that he’d bonded with Issa and been turned after Issa’s death, he makes decisions that are opaque to her. It’s because Carrie’s brain is wired differently than David Estes’ or Saul’s, her superiors in the agency, that she’s able to read Brody at all. But even his mind isn’t clearly and easily fathomable to her. You can only do so much to analyze and predict the urges of the human heart.

Last week, I noted Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the ongoing troubles that Laura Poitras, a documentarian who’s chronicled the lives of people impacted by the American War on Terror, has had with Homeland Security, which has repeatedly detained her and confiscated her equipment on her return to the U.S. after reporting trips. But she’s not alone. Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan was just detained for the second time by immigration officials on his way into the United States, this time to give a lecture at Yale:

Khan’s arrival for his Yale lecture – preceded by a brief press conference – was delayed by over three hours. The actor did not comment as to why he was detained but before he began his Yale address, Khan smiled and took a witty dig at the incident, “It was nice, as it always happens… Whenever I start feeling too arrogant about myself I always take a trip to America. The immigration guys kick the star out of stardom.” Known for his characteristic humor, Khan further added, “They (immigration officials) always ask me how tall I am and I always lie and say 5 feet 10 inches. Next time I am going to get more adventurous. (If they ask me) what colour are you, I am going to say white.”

You might think that one of the advantages of integrating all of the government’s security functions into a single bureaucracy with unified databases might be that, when you wrongly detain and question someone, you could put a note in their file to so immigration officials who deal with this person in the future know to be polite and careful, and try not to repeat those same mistakes. Hassling artists because they’re brown, or because they question the outcomes of U.S. policy is not an efficient and effective way to ensure the security of America, or to win supporters for American policy.