“This isn’t happening for a reason.” -The Boy, Game of Thrones

“They were real.” -Huck, Scandal

“You don’t want to be the last one caught holding a dog collar.” -Dan, Zero Dark Thirty

When Fox announced that it was bringing back 24, its serialized drama about counterterrorist federal agent Jack Bauer that finished its initial run in 2010, as a limited-episode special event in 2014, much of the commentary about the news focused on questions of structure, rather than content. Time Magazine television critic James Poniewozik argued that 24′s resurrection was part of an exciting move by Fox to make more limited series and more special events, a strategy that includes a shorter run for its serial killer hit The Following, a move that both was meant to accomodate star Kevin Bacon’s schedule and to ape the success of dark cable dramas with shorter runs, and an order of limited-run series Wayward Pines. Others saw it as part of Fox’s decision to walk away from a focus on female-focused comedies and return to an old, reliable—and male-centered—hit from its past. But I’m curious about another question. How is Jack Bauer, whose use of torture, as reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, prompted U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to meet with the producers of 24 to talk to them about how the show was affecting American soldiers, going to play in a world where pop culture has become more thoughtful and searing about the impact of these tactics on both both the tortured and torturers themselves?

One of the most painful depictions of torture presently airing appears on HBO’s medieval fantasy Game of Thrones, where the destruction of Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), formerly a spoiled ward of the Stark family, and now the prisoner of a man who appears to be systematically remolding him according to a monstrous blueprint. It’s a storyline that’s been so grotesque and emotionally agonizing that it’s turned off some critics like The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr, who have found themselves exhausted by what they see as an exploitative element to the proceedings, which are presented only in flashbacks in the novels on which the show is based.

But the relentless return to Theon’s cell, to his crucifixion, flaying, hooding, starvation, sexual manipulation, and last week, emasculation, seems precisely like the point, even if it’s so unpleasant to watch that I’ve taken to peeking at those scenes through my fingers on the first go-round and leaving the room for the second. Theon can’t escape his torture, and neither can we. His lead torturer tells him that “this isn’t happening for a reason,” and in point of fact in the narrative, it’s mostly not. The only new information Theon reveals, that he has not actually murdered the heirs to Winterfell, a Northern stronghold, doesn’t defuse a ticking time bomb scenario, but gets filed away for reference. “You’ve already told me everything, remember? Your daddy was mean to you. The Starks didn’t appreciate you. One good bit, though. The Stark boys. They’re still alive. Wouldn’t that be a hunt to remember?” the mysterious man reflects menacingly. When Theon asks “Where am I? Who are you? What do you want?” one of that man’s henchmen replies, “I want to do this.” Torture is arbitrary and endless, a manifestation of insanity, whether that madness is innate or simply the logical place men arrive at during an endless war.
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Yesterday at The Daily Beast, I got to dig into an idea that’s been striking me for a while: that in the age of anti-hero dramas, teenage girl characters have become almost as prevalent as middle-aged men with dark secrets who we shouldn’t root for, but do. In a look at Game of Thrones, Homeland, Mad Men, and The Americans, I explained:

Like almost every major anti-hero drama on television today, Mad Men is also a story about what it’s like to be a young girl discovering the realities of the world she’s living in. The secret of today’s prestige television is that it can all be read as young adult fiction….

In Homeland, Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), the prisoner of war who returns home after years of captivity by the terrorist Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), reconnects most easily with his daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor). She’s pulled into her father’s plan to become a suicide bomber and the CIA efforts to stop him when agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), deep in a bipolar episode, asks Dana, in desperation, to help stop him. Dana insists that she doesn’t believe he could possibly be a terrorist, but calls her father anyway. A year later, when Carrie is interrogating Brody, she tells him, “It was hearing Dana’s voice that changed your mind, wasn’t it?” Dana, whether she intended it or not, has become a full participant in the moral world of grown-ups, due to her father’s plot. And she finally reaches maturity in the second season, when she realizes that Carrie was right, though for the wrong reasons—she’s finally capable of seeing Brody independently, rather than through the haze of daughterly love…

Mad Men has always had Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka), who was a little girl for much of the series, but one with secrets of her own, including her relationship with Glenn Bishop (Marten Holden Weiner). But this year, she is growing into maturity. After Betty’s cited for reckless driving, Sally tests her mother’s limits, announcing to Henry, “Isn’t somebody going to say something? Betty got a ticket.” She may have rushed home after getting her period last season, but now Sally’s shutting the door on Betty’s face to have some privacy on the phone and asking to go to New Year’s Eve parties.

The regular presence of teenaged girls, particularly teenaged girls in juxtaposition to anti-heroes, isn’t a new development, either. The Sopranos had Meadow Soprano, Tony’s daughter, The Wire had Felicia Pearson, 24 had Kim Bauer, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer let the teenaged girl herself be at the center of the frame—and even sometimes let her be a little bit anti-heroic herself. At this point, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead are notable in part for having teenaged boys in relation to their main characters, and in giving them fewer opportunities to critically assess their parents than shows like Homeland, Mad Men, or The Americans do, and Justified and Sons of Anarchy are notable for not really featuring teenagers at all.

What’s interesting—and I think considerably unremarked on—about the rise of a teenaged girl as a staple of big, prestige, often anti-heroic dramas is that these characters function as built-in critics of the behavior of the adults who are at the ostensible centers of the shows they share. Sally Draper is one of the first people to really see the cracks in her family’s facade, whether her parents are late to pick her up from ballet practice, or failing to be on the same page as parents, with Betty shunted into the role of enforcer while Don gets to be Fun Dad. One of the things that’s made Morgan Saylor’s performance as Dana so impressive on Homeland is the way that Dana simultaneously loves her father deeply and comes to see his true flaws—not the conversion to Islam that upsets her mother so much—more quickly and clearly than anyone else in her family. On Game of Thrones, teenaged boys like Jon Snow, Robb Stark, and even to a certain extent Loras Tyrell, get sucked into pre-packaged narratives of chivalry and bravery, while it’s teenaged girls like Sansa and Arya Stark, Margaery Tyrell, and Daenerys Targaryen who see the real truth of the system in which they’re forced to live their lives, and find ways to circumvent or expand the boundaries placed upon their lives. And while in The Americans, it’s probably too early for Paige and Henry to figure out the real nature of their parents’ work and marital arrangements, their experiences with American consumerism, latchkey kid culture, and emergent sexuality are as important expressions of the show’s themes as Elizabeth and Phillip’s dalliances with sources and conversations with Claudia, their handler.

This isn’t to say that Don Draper, Tyrion Lannister, Nicholas Brody, or Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings don’t matter. But if you want to know how to judge the dark princes and princesses of prestige television drama, you might be better off keeping your eyes on the girls standing off to the side, rather than watching the throne.

This truly is a new standard in sublime ridiculousness: one of the stars of Bravo’s reality show Shahs of Sunset, about well-to-do members of Los Angeles’ Persian community, has decided she’s a civil rights icon:

“It took someone like Rosa Parks to say, ‘I’m not getting on the back of the bus,’ to start a movement,” cast member Golnesa “GG” Gharachedaghi told The Huffington Post. “She got a lot of drama for it, but at the end of the day it started something so revolutionary and I feel like we are doing the same in respect of the entertainment industry.

“Knowing we are the first doing this so our egos are a little bit bigger than should be,” Gharachedaghi continued. “We are paving the way. It’s been difficult being Persian on TV. I don’t think anyone has given us as much drama and bullshit as the Persian community. There has never been anything out there about Persians before.”

Now, I’m not one to suggest that we’ve achieved all of our diversity goals in popular culture, by any means. But there’s a lot of evidence that Iranian-American actors—as well as South Asian actors—have broken into television quite successfully. And their successes raise interesting questions about why they’ve succeeded where African-American characters have actually lost ground on television.

In between Fairly Legal and Life, Iranian-American actress Sarah Shahi alone has two-thirds as many starring or co-headlining roles in television series in the past decade than African-American actresses have had collectively. Nazanin Boniadi (Tom Cruise’s pre-Katie Holmes girlfriend) did 119 episodes on General Hospital between 2007 and 2009, and had a fairly long arc on How I Met Your Mother, in addition to her recurring work on other television series. Maz Jobrani hasn’t had as steady a role as he did on Better Off Ted in some time, but he also recurs regularly. Shaun Toub, who also appeared in Iron Man works regularly in television, including in HBO’s Luck. Adrian Pasdar even played the President of the United States in Political Animals.

Not all of the reasons for these successes are particularly comfortable or helpful. I’d be willing to bet that most people who see Shahi on screen assume that she’s Caucasian rather than that she has Iranian heritage. And the rise of terrorism as a significant subject for television has created work for actors of Middle Eastern origin, like Navid Negahban, who played super-terrorist Abu Nazir on Showtime’s Homeland. But it’s absolutely significant that television feels comfortable casting Middle Eastern and South Asian actors as a lot of different kinds of professionals, from research scientists in Better Off Ted to white-collar legal mediators in Fairly Legal, while African-American actors still often end up breaking into heroic television professions as cops partnered with white counterparts, or as military officers like Andre Braugher in Last Resort.

Gharachedaghi’s comments aren’t offensive just because they trivialize the risk that Rosa Parks too, and the basic liberties African-Americans were denied, though of course they do that. They’re frustrating because she’s failing to acknowledge the work that Iranian and Iranian-American actors have already done to blow open opportunities in the industry for their counterparts.

It’s a new year, and that means a whole lot of new popular culture, whether it’s a crop of television shows centered on female characters, like FX’s The Americans or Showtime’s Masters and Johnson, the continuation of promising franchises like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness, or even just news on who will be directing the new Star Wars movies and potentially starring as Carol Danvers in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. But every year, I like to take some time out to explore things that are missing pieces in my own spotty pop-culture education, that give context to the larger trends that are emerging in film and television, or that I simply didn’t get a chance to catch in the previous year. These are my 2013 pop culture New Year’s resolutions. I’d love to hear yours in comments:

1. Finish Homicide: Life On The Street and Twin Peaks: I got through a chunk of Homicide in 2011, and the first season of Twin Peaks last year. And I can’t stop thinking about either one of them. I’m looking forward to finishing both for the simple pleasure of watching them, and for all the things I know that watching them will let me see in the rest of pop culture.

2. Read all of the competitors in the 2013 Tournament of Books: Judging the 2012 Tournament of Books, a competition that puts all kinds of novels, written in all kinds of styles, up against each other, was one of the most fun things I did last year. This year, I’ll just be an observer as a group of talented critics tries to sort between everything from the pulp of Gone Girl to the interrogations of Bring Up The Bodies. But I’m excited to catch up with the books I haven’t read, including HHhH, The Round House, The Fault In Our Stars, Arcadia, May We Be Forgiven, Ivyland, Dear Life, Where’d You Go Bernadette, Beautiful Ruins, and perhaps most of all, Chris Ware’s Building Stories.

3. Seven Samurai. Yojimbo. Ran. Throne of Blood. I don’t know enough about Asian cinema, or about Westerns, either. So it’s time to get my Akira Kurosawa on. I’m going to start with these four movies. And I’d love your recommendations for where to go once I’m done with those.

4. Watch Hatufim: Whether you think Homeland jumped the shark this season or gained adrenaline as it ramped up to the major terrorist attack that ended this season, the show is guaranteed to remain a key part of the prestige television landscape—and shows based on Israeli programs look to become an even more important part of the network television mix. I want to go back and see where Homeland came from and watch Hatufim, the Israeli show it’s loosely based on, especially as Gideon Raff starts work on American television shows in conjunction with Homeland‘s creators.

5. Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl: One of the most common complaints about Hollywood today is that it’s hamstrung by commercial concerns, chasing movies that will make hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than ones that will recoup modest gains but make more important points. But I’m curious about what kinds of movies couldn’t get made when there was a genuine blacklist. So I’m going to spend some time this year with the movies Louise Brooks made in Europe when it was difficult for her to work in the United States.

After Adam Lanza shot twenty young children and six of the teachers and administrators who helped educate them in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, the massacre renewed the long-dormant national debate about gun control, and sparked a complementary—and in some cases diversionary—discussion about mental health funding and treatment. But it’s also revived another old conversation, about whether video games are too violent, and whether they play a role in encouraging, desensitizing, and even preparing mass killers for their rampages.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the outgoing independent from Connecticut who has long crusaded against video game manufacturers, said in his appearance on Fox News Sunday that “The violence in the entertainment culture—particularly, with the extraordinary realism to video games, movies now, et cetera —does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent…Doesn’t make everybody more violent, but it’s a causative factor in some cases.” Obama senior strategist David Axelrod tweeted “”In NFL post-game: an ad for shoot ‘em up video game. All for curbing weapons of war. But shouldn’t we also quit marketing murder as a game?”

As Annalee Newitz reminds us in a valuable post at io9, there is no conclusive evidence that consuming violent games, movies, or comics leads to violent behavior in the real world. And at the Washington Post, Max Fischer ran the numbers on video game popularity in countries with much lower rates of gun violence, and found no correlation between game play and real-world violence. And there’s something deeply sophistic, in the absence of that evidence, about pivoting away from questions of effective gun control to proposals for video game regulation or condemnation. At least discussion of the mental health care system is part of a reasonable tapestry of efforts, including gun control, that we ought to be considering, if not a substitute for conversations about magazine capacities and the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban. Blaming video games or any other kind of violent media for causing violence in the real world is a dodge from policy solutions. And it’s a dodge from the conversation we actually need to have about the state of our popular culture, and the profound fears about justice, disempowerment, and the state of civil society that are reflected in it. Video games are easy to target. The things that actually, truly frighten us are much harder.

One of the things I’ve been turning over in my mind in recent weeks is why the renaissance in our television is so specifically concerned with, as NPR’s Linda Holmes put it, “avoiding being violently killed” to the exclusion of other concerns like finding a satisfying place in the adult world, a loving, complimentary partner, doing good, honorable work, or being a good citizen in difficult circumstances. But as much as I feel somewhat burned out by the gouts of violence on my television, it’s true that questions about deploying violence, avoiding it, and its moral and immoral applications, permeate our political culture and lived experience today.

If you’re a woman in the United States, you’re taught from a young age that you have to be careful to avoid having sexual violence visited upon you. I cannot imagine being African-American and considering how to speak to my child about the possibility that his or her interactions with law enforcement may become deadly, or that in some areas of the country, people may feel entitled to shoot them dead on slight, and imagined, provocation. There are people in this country for whom the best way to pay for college is to enlist to be sent to a protracted war that carries with it a considerable risk that they will return maimed or brain injured. We are waging a war from the skies in which our political leadership appears to accept the deaths of children as a reasonable level of collateral damage, and where 17 percent of the pilots who actually have to carry out our drone strikes are considered “clinically distressed” by their work. As many commentators have usefully pointed out, the massacre in Newtown is deeply disturbing in part because the community was not afflicted by a constant blight of gun violence like the one that spread like rot over Chicago this summer. We’ve lived through a political election in which obvious references to the lynching of the first black president were excused away as jokes.
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This post discusses plot points from the second season of Homeland.

“Why do I feel like this?” Carrie asks Brody as he walks off into the woods, in pursuit of a tentative hope of redemption, at the end of the second season of Homeland. “‘Cause you gave it up to me,” Brody tells her. “Completely,” Carrie confirms to him. It’s a sentiment I share about this show, which I loved without reservation in its first season. But my sentiments at the finish of this one are somewhat more complicated than “Goodbye, love.”

I thought in many respects, this episode felt like a deliberate punting of issues down the road. First, Quinn declined to kill Brody, and then, when it seemed like the episode might be setting Brody up for self-murder, a suicide that would end only his own life, and the continuing prospect of shame to his family, sent him off to have his name cleared. The show appears to feel very little regard for the fact that Brody murdered Vice President Walden. And though Brody cleared the way for Mike to take care of his family, it doesn’t seem to me like Homeland is prepared to jettison Brody’s family and clean the slate, given Dana’s miraculous deduction that her father did, in fact, intend to be a suicide bomber, and the release of Brody’s suicide tape, whether by al Qaeda or by the mole.

It seems relatively obvious at this point that Saul must be the mole. His off-hand offer to Carrie to accompany him to Abu Nazir’s send-off, combined with the close-up shots on his wary face as the bomb at the CIA exploded the moment after Brody realized that something was wrong, but before he made the connection as to what it could be, seems to confirm that, and to set up the conflict for the show’s third season. But it’s unclear to me what his motives are. Does he hate Estes so much? His joy when Mira told him she would return from Mumbai in the wake of the bombing, that almost greedy “Yes. Please,” was a lovely character moment, but this is an awfully complex way for Saul to try to heal his own broken homeland. I expect we’ll learn more about who Saul is, but I suspect I’m going to have a difficult time making the shift from understanding him as Carrie’s devoted mentor, and a man with a particular, ethical view of American intelligence, to seeing him as a criminal mastermind who says Kaddish for his victims out of a kind of twisted guilt.

I think I also have some trouble with the idea that this is going to become a show whose primary means of moral interrogation is the emotional torture of Carrie Mathison. It would be enough for me, rich, and touching, and terrifying and joyous enough to simply let Carrie try to figure out how to be a whole person as she was in the first, and best, episodes of this season. “She told my dad she was going to CVS, and she never came back,” Carrie tells Brody during their brief respite at the cabin, the only night they have together as a true, and genuinely loving couple. “He has what I have,he just wouldn’t get treated…There’d be a message in the stars and we’d have to buy a camper and drive out to the Great Lakes for the miracle.” That tragedy of her father’s mental illness is stakes enough, particularly when it expresses itself in Carrie’s self-denial. “I understand,” she explained of her mother’s decision. “Living with that can eat you up.” Her fear of what her mental illness might do to Brody, and of what it might mean to give her whole life to the CIA, would be enough to carry a season of the show for me. “Maybe I’m just not giving it away to this place,” she told Saul. “Maybe I want other things.”
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This post discusses plot points through the December 10 episode of Homeland.

Judging from some of the things that I’ve heard you say in comments and on Twitter, a lot of you are frustrated to the point of quitting with Homeland. I’m not sure I’m at that point yet—there are too many good performances, and too many strong emotional moments for me to walk away from yet. But increasingly, it seems like a show that’s sacrificing its best potential to plot mechanics that don’t necessarily even make much sense, to the sense that it needs to be exciting, rather than deeply felt, or tender, or psychologically astute. The name of the show should lend itself to the considerations of inner life, our sense of home and what makes it and the threats that come to it from ourselves as much as from our enemies, all things Homeland did beautifully last season. But instead, it’s turning outward in a way that feels less distinct than the show once did.

There are good moments in this episode, but often, they aren’t enough. Carrie’s suspicions of Galvez, telling Quinn “He is a Muslim,” only to find out that he’s forced himself back into the field too soon, would have been a nice character moment for the show, and a good repudiation of the correlation between Islam and terrorism that the show’s dispelled only fitfully. But we don’t know Galvez at all as a person, only as a functionary of Estes’. He’s barely a character. The mole storyline has been so dormant until this episode that I was choosing to believe that the show had wisely decided to abandon it. Instead, the whole moment is a perfunctory bump on Carrie’s path to finding Nazir still hidden in the plant where he held her captive.

The best sequence, by contrast, was one between characters we’ve come to know well. “I don’t want to fight anymore, even for something. I’m tired of fighting,” Jessica told Brody as they returned from confinement, musing on how well they’d done for so long. “Since we were sixteen, and all we wanted was to be together. We were all okay.” Even if Brody had never been turned, the dissolution of their marriage after his return from war would have been a worthy subject for a television show, and it’s the storyline that Homeland has respected most, trusting its initial elements—Jessica’s relationship with Mike, Brody’s sexual brokenness, his affair with Carrie, Brody’s relationship with Dana—to be genuinely moving without ornamentation.. Brody’s admission that “I tried, too, to deal with everything that happened. But that was beyond me. I was fucked the moment I left for Iraq. We all were,” would have worked in that context, which may be why it carried the weight that it did.

And even though we know that’s not the case, the simplicity of the means by which they admit their marriage was over was beautiful even in their pulp surroundings. Brody seems about to tell the full truth to Jessica when he begins, “The time that Carrie came over here to the house, on the day Elizabeth Gaines was shot and Tom Walker died, Carrie said some crazy things to Dana and to you. She said things about what I was going to do.” And there’s a particular sadness to Jessica stopping him, explaining, “Don’t. Not now. For the longest time all I wanted was for you to tell me the truth. I wanted to know it all. I don’t have to know anymore. I just don’t want to…Carrie knows, right? She knows everything about you. She accepts it. You must love her a lot.” Again, if Brody were only a wounded veteran, it still would have been haunting to hear Jessica admit that she can’t handle knowing the fullness of what her husband suffered and who he became, to surrender him to a woman with a greater capacity to absorb his pain.

In a way, this episode made me realize something about Homeland: the show would be more interesting if it were willing to invest as much in exploring the perspective of someone who hates the United States as it has in exploring Carrie’s zeal to defend it, or Brody’s broken embrace of his family even as he takes pleasure in killing the vice president. That’s a risky thing to do, going truly inside the head of a terrorist without endorsing his or her perspective, though Showtime managed to pull it off to a certain extent in Sleeper Cell, aided by a tremendous performance from Oded Fehr. But Homeland has never really seemed interested in doing that with either Abu Nazir or Roya. That’s lead to both machinery that never really made sense or was explained, like Nazir’s work with Hezbollah. And it’s left psychological blank space in the show, as when Nazir gets Carrie alone and chooses to rail against…argula?

Carrie’s confrontation with Roya in this episode carried the same promise and the same lack of fulfillment. Carrie mentions Roya’s family losing land, but we don’t know any of the details, nor how she came to know and be recruited by Nazir, and the scene never gets there. Instead, Roya rattles Carrie, asking her “Have you ever had someone who takes over your life, pulls you in, gets you to do things you would normally never do?…Do you have anyone like that?” knowing full well, of course, that she does, and his name is Nicholas Brody. When Carrie admits that she’s been so influenced, Roya turns the tables on her. “Well. I’ve never been that stupid,” Roya tells her, declaring her independence of choice. “You idiot whore. You think you understand me or what my family have lost and suffered? You think is just some fucking game?” When she switches into Arabic, the only thing we learn about what she’s saying is a clue that makes Carrie realize that Abu Nazir is still in hiding, the show sacrificing a chance at psychological insight for plot mechanics. Carrie may think that she fucked up the interrogation. But Homeland botched the sequence, too, choosing story over its characters.

Coming to the end of my day of writing on Monday, I realized something: I was exhausted by my last several days of watching television. It’s not just that Sunday has become so jam-packed with strong, interesting shows that my weekends feel more like a build-up to my craziest work day than a chance to relax, or the fact that I’m in the middle of a barrage of mid-season finales. It’s that that almost all television now, particularly in drama, seems to be operating in a sphere so intense that it’s impossible to relax—and sometimes impossible to watch, or even to follow what’s happening on-screen. Every show has a conspiracy. Shocking violence has become the norm, and seems to be escalating quickly. The stakes are constantly so high in every episode of television that plot is often swamping strong character dynamics. It made me wonder if our television needs to take a chill pill for a while, if only so we can start thinking more carefully about what kinds of storytelling tools are most effective.

The shows that got me thinking about this phenomenon were Scandal and Homeland, two shows that purport to operate in very different environments, network and cable, soap and anti-hero drama, but this week had a plot element in common. It’s not as if political assassination attempts are taboo on television: West Wing shot President Bartlet in its “In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen” episode, though the show made clear relatively quickly that the President himself would survive, and drew much of its drama from the grave threat to the life of one of his chief aides. But in that case, it felt like assassination was reserved for a moment of extreme gravity in the narrative arc of the show. In four days last week, we had two shows that had as their plot points attempts to kill a high official of the United States government. On last Thursday’s episode of Scandal, President Fitzgerald Grant was shot on the way to his birthday party, in what seems to have been a plot set in motion by his wife—it was the presidency as soap opera subject. And then on Sunday’s episode of Homeland, former prisoner of war Nicholas Brody, who has declined to murder a bunker full of government officials, got a chance to kill just one, the Vice President of the United States, the man responsible for the drone strike that killed Brody’s surrogate son and the biological son of the super-terrorist Abu Nazir. Last year, Brody’s decision not to commit an assassination was one of the most exciting episodes of television on any network.

It’s not only that more than one show is now fantasizing about killing high officials, a highly sensitive subject, that diminished the power of Homeland. It’s that the conspiracy around Brody has gotten significantly more complex. There are more people in play on the ground, journalist Roya Hamad, a munitions expert and his team, Abu Nazir himself, who seems to have strolled over the border. The scheme is grander, an attack on a welcome home ceremony for Marines, in front of Roya’s camera crew. The shock of Brody’s true nature would be even bigger now that he’s a Congressman. All of these elements amp up the magnitude of the plot against America. But they also introduce the possibility of inconsistency, implausibility, of error, and of emotional discontinuity, or losing track of characterization. And yet people continually seem to think these sorts of escalations are worth it, to believe that plausible character development and the emotional stakes that come along with being a human in a high-pressure situation aren’t actually enough to sustain our interest, and there has to be a giant conspiracy (as was the case with Lost Resort and remains the case with Revenge) or mystery or the promise of bloody destruction to keep us in our seats. It’s too bad, because some of my favorite shows—Sons of Anarchy with the cartels and the Irish, Homeland with Nazir, and Revenge with its shadowy initiative—have spent a lot more time on conspiracies that seem like they must eventually be dissolved or dismantled than on their main characters emotions, and have done so at moments when the actors on each shows are hitting high-water marks.

And it’s not just complicated serialized storytelling that can be getting in the way of experiencing genuine emotion on shows. One of the things that’s marked the search for increased intensity in our television watching is increasingly escalating violence, disgustingness as a signpost of how serious a situation. In 18 hours yesterday, I saw two of the grossest things I’ve ever watched on television, Glenn yanking an arm bone out of a zombie’s rotting flesh on the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead (I couldn’t make it through the rest of the episode) and a scene from an upcoming episode of television that was much more viscerally upsetting for taking place in a non-genre setting. This is not to say that grotesque violence can’t be powerful signposting: the latter incident is so powerful and so keeping in character that I’m still having a physical reaction to my revulsion hours later. And for those of you who know what’s coming in the Song of Fire and Ice universe, I’m bracing myself for some truly horrific things coming down the pike in Game of Thrones that will literally test my ability to keep my eyes on the screen as they occur. But I’m curious about the extent to which it’s actually necessary to holding mass interest.
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This post discusses plot details from the December 2 episode of Homeland.

“I still prefer to figure the problem out, not obliterate it,” Saul told Dar Adul when the two men met over chicken and waffles at the beginning of this episode of Homeland. “You’re too sensitive for this line of work,” Adul told him. “Always have been.” There was once a time when this show was about that central difference of opinion about how to deal with terrorism, Carrie’s preference for building relationships with her sources pitted against David Estes’ way with a drone strike or a SWAT team. But increasingly, Homeland leaves conversations like these hanging in the air in favor of plastic ties and pacemakers. Remarks like David’s explanation that Quinn is “here to kill terrorists, Saul. Like all of us,” could stand on their own if the events around them questioned or affirmed his assumptions and the wisdom of that position. But last night’s episode of Homeland reaffirmed a worry I’ve had this season since it expanded beyond the core question of whether Brody will commit an act of terrorism: the show increasingly feels in love with plot mechanics rather than moral quandaries and character development.

There was a bit of moral debate in the scene between Carrie and Nazir while he held her in captivity, after she rejected his attempts to give her water. “Who is the terrorist?” Nazir wanted to know, querying Carrie on the drone strikes. But the scene couldn’t quite draw out a contrast or spark an actual debate between their world views there because Carrie isn’t even close to a forceful advocate for the use of drones. Instead, their conversation fell into a rather predictable track. Carrie reminded Nazir that his tactics can be similar to drone strikes, asking him to imagine “A young man enters a Shia village pushing a cart filled with candy and toys. He waits for all the children to gather round, then reaches back, and flips a switch.” Nazir tells her that he believes there’s a difference because”We fight with what we have…Generation after generation must suffer and die. we are prepared for death. Are you? With your pension plans and organic foods, your beach houses and sports clubs. Do you ahve the perserverence, the tenacity, the faith? Because we do.” Nazir “We carry God in our hearts, our souls. To die is to join him. It may take a century, two centuries, three centuries. But we will exterminate you.” Carrie points out that it’s that worldview that shapes her perception of him: “Like I said. You’re a terrorist.”

If the show had been able to make a connection between Nazir’s eliminationist worldview and the idea that it’s possible, or even desirable, to kill all terrorists and—as we’ve learned from reporting about the Obama administration’s drone strikes program—potential terrorists, represented by Estes and Quinn, it would have wandered into truly challenging territory. And the show might even have felt stronger to me if it made the point that, in the distorted world these characters inhabit, children are the only people still capable of taking moral responsibility. “Every morning I wake up and for a few brief seconds I’m free, I can just look at the sky, or listen to the birds again,” Finn, the only person in this show who experiences ongoing guilt, tells Dana when she agrees to see him while in hiding. “And then, wham. I remember the sound of that woman hitting the windshield. I remember that I’ve killed another human being and I can’t take it back…Remember that night? At the top of the Washington Monument? Can we start over?” Dana is sorrowful, but absolute, as she tells him no. “Whatever we felt, we broke it,” she reminds him of his dismissal of her. “We killed it, just the same way we killed that woman.”

Brody’s decision to help kill Vice President Walden may have been the big event in this episode, but it actually felt somewhat anti-climactic in this context, and I wouldn’t say hisaracter arc truly felt resolved. There are countless questions on the way to the moment when Brody tells Walden that he’s withdrawing from contention for the vice presidency because “It’s not for my family. It’s for me. Because I want to feel clean again. And because I pretty much disagree with everything you say and do…You still don’t get it, do you? I’m killing you.” Why didn’t he call Saul or someone else in the CIA when he knew Carrie was in danger? The only plausible explanation is that he knows about the mole, a plot line that hasn’t been mentioned since the first season of the show, but there’s no indication that Brody has any idea. How did Brody avoid the Vice President’s security? Isn’t that office monitored by video? Why doesn’t Brody just take a picture of the serial number and text it to Nazir? Or given that Carrie’s escaped, buy time with a number that’s a digit off? And really, what makes him decide to go through his collaboration with Nazir in the first place once Carrie was off and running? The only thing that really makes sense to me is that it’s a kind of demented, in-the-moment compromise, an opportunity to be a hero to Carrie and to fulfill his deep-seated desire to kill Walden, presumably triggered by Nazir requiring him to “Swear. On Issa’s immortal soul.”

And it’s in this environment that Estes pulls a power play on Saul, diverting him from the efforts to surround the power plant where Carrie says Nazir is holed up after her escape. “I’m on my way to catch a terrorist,” he asks them. “What could be more important than that?” No one says it out loud, but apparently, the means in which that terrorist is caught, and who takes the credit for it. Or as Adul puts it, “Little things I can count on mean more and more to me as I get older.” If only Homeland was still as good as it once was at parsing those little things that mean everything, that make all the moral difference in the world.

This post discusses plot points from the November 18 and 25 episodes of Homeland.

During last night’s episode of Homeland, as Peter/John removed his silenced revolver from his coat, preparing to dispatch with Brody should he no longer prove necessary, I grabbed my boyfriend’s wrist so hard he told me it actually hurt. It was an interesting moment for me and my relationship to this sometimes-miraculous, sometimes-confounding show. The moment was tense and well-constructed, but the prospect of Brody’s death was viscerally upsetting to me not because of the plotting and counterplotting taking place around him, but because of the simpler questions Homeland has obscured this season. What does it mean to be alienated from your country, your family, and the values you once devoted to yourself to protecting? What does it mean to understand the motivations of a terrorist?

Homeland has always been somewhat uneven when it tries to answer those questions, but that it tries to answer them at all has always made it a rather different animal from its counterparts and predecessors. In the first season, and in an inversion of how these things normally work, the show did better when Brody talked about what Abu Nazir meant to him than in the brief flashbacks that outlined his relationship with Issa. In this week’s episode, the discussion between Carrie, Peter, David, and Saul about whether the plot Brody had outlined to them made sense produced one of the most interesting moments the show’s had in some time: Carrie explaining that it made sense because of how it met Abu Nazir’s emotional needs and standards. It was mirrored by Abu Nazir’s explanation to Brody himself, that he could be hunted and killed like bin Laden, his legend reduced by the manner of his death, or he could bring his fight to American soil himself, carry out a plot on his own terms. Nazir’s explanation of his own motivations—apart from the actual plausibility of the mechanics of it—was one of the smarter attempts I’ve seen to imagine how bin Laden’s death has changed the world. Homeland‘s genuine interest in mysteries both large, like why Brody would turn on his country, and small, like how Nazir feels about his place in the world, is the thing that sets the show apart for me even when it delves into more prosaic territory.

And as niftily-constructed as Nazir and Roya’s plot against the vice president is, it’s prosaic. It’s a standard fantasy of hyper-competent terrorism that ignores how small-scale and ineffective plots against America have actually become, and how easily-thwarted those that actually make it to the execution stage have been. I understand that the demands of plot keep some of these fantasies alive on-screen. But those fears also animate policies in the real world: they’re kept alive by interests more powerful than American audiences’ addiction to artificially high stakes. And just as those fears crowd out rational conversations about everything from the Defense Department budget to airline security in the real world, the plot this season has crowded Homeland, too. Last year, the construction of a vest and Tom Walker’s possession of a sniper rifle were comparatively simple logistical concerns that served the contrast between the two men, how they’d responded to torture, and what waited for them on their return. This year, the complexity of the plot against America, and America’s plots against its potential attackers, has put layers in between Brody and his motivations, Roya in between Brody and Nazir, the munitions expert in between Brody and Walden, Quinn in between Carrie and Brody.

The scenes between Brody and Carrie are a constant reminder of how excellent Homeland is when it strips away that clutter and focuses on what draws the two of them together: their shared inability to truly and seamlessly integrate into the roles set out for them. Their difficulty makes them valuable, to a certain extent: Brody can play the hero tenably enough to be of use to Nazir, and Carrie is right often enough to be worth some of the trouble she causes David and her other colleagues at the CIA. But both of their masquerades have expiration dates. Carrie’s already hit one of hers. And Brody is very, very close to his. “I’m going to be in the cell next to you. Which, I have to admit, isn’t the future I imagined for us,” she told him during their sojourn to the motel. “If we saw this through togehter, if we finally stopped Nazir once and for all, that you’d be a real hero. And that fact would somehow make everything you did before not matter. That it would all just be about getting to there.” Quinn may hear “a stage five, delusional getting laid” in the sex he overhears between Carrie and Brody. But they’re clearer-eyed, if more wistful, than he imagines.
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