This post discusses plot points from the November 11 episode of Homeland.

The tragic pas de deux between Saul and Aileen is a small masterpiece in this episode, and one of Homeland‘s finest explorations of how the decisions we made in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks have failed us in the years that followed after it. “I want to trust you,” Aileen tells Saul, the man who tracked her down, who drove back from Mexico to the United States with her, who told her about his marital problems, who got her to give up some of what she knew, and who put her in a hole below the ground. “I’m sorry I’ve become this person, but I have.” What she doesn’t say, though she could have, is that she became this person because she’s being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, conditions that would drive a lot of us to become, as her guard puts it, “a piece of work. A spitter, a hitter, and a shitter.” The warden, as Aileen puts it, may be a sadist. But, as he tells Saul, “We all have our issues. Homeland security funding goes to the big cities, my budget gets cut…And we all have our domains, don’t we? And the United States Penitentiary at Waynesburgh is mine.” And even more to the point, what the warden is doing to Aileen is the same thing we do to many other men who are guilty of her same crimes elsewhere.

Whether this is justice or not, the episode makes an important point: the way Aileen’s been treated has ruined her, both for terrorism, and for any good she might have done to Saul, and to the country that she turned again. “Look at that light. Isn’t it nice?” she asked Saul when she was brought upstairs to the conference room, unshackled, and allowed to look at out at a treeline and sky so mundane that, had the barbed wire been removed, it could have been reproduced and hung in chain hotel rooms across the country. “Time is of the essence, here,” Saul told her. “Not for me,” she reminded him. The country could burn, terrorists could be caught, and Aileen sees only the prospect of a hole in the ground for the rest of her life. And given the promise of a room above ground, even written on a legal document, she couldn’t really believe it, nor in her own potential to do any productive good. Whether she knew who the man in the photograph was or not, she lied to have time to commit suicide, rather than live another day even in a room with a view. “It was the sunset. I’m not going back. I’m never going back to that cage,” she told Saul, dying. “I just spent the day by the window. The whole day. The light. The view.”

That sense of lost opportunity pervades this episode of Homeland. “Tom lost his way. He just went through too many things. And he couldn’t get right again,” Brody tells Jessica regretfully, speaking as much about the ruin of his former friend as himself. And an encounter with Rex, who should have been a kindred spirit, only makes his sense of self-loathing worse. Rex pulls him aside after a repulsive interrogation from a vapid, wealthy woman, who continues Homeland‘s trend of slipping into a satiric tone when it portrays Washington elites, whether at a fundraiser in the country or in Quaker meeting at Sidwell Friends. “How long did they hold you?” the woman asks.”Did you ever just want to kill yourself?” Rex has comfort to offer him, telling Brody “It’s bad enough we went to hell and back. People want to ogle the damage.” But even he wants Brody to be someone he’s not, can’t hear Brody when he tells him “Rex. Honestly? The truth? I’m not that man…No. No. Really. I’m not.”
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This post discusses plot points from the November 4 episode of Homeland.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable’s length.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Wreck of the Hesperus”

“Mom says it’s like the wreck of the Hesparus in here,” Chris Brody tells Mike when he comes over to root through their garage for proof of Brody’s perfidy towards the end of this episode of Homeland. Mike explains that Jessica, who is using the reference to explain that the garage is a mess, is referring to a historical wreck that “some guy,” actually Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote a poem about it. It’s telling that all three of them miss the actual meaning of the poem, which is neither about actual wreckage, nor history, but a wrenching story about a father’s failure to protect his daughter. The wreckage that’s found from the trip is her body, the mast she was lashed to in a vain attempt to protect her in a hurricane, and ” her hair, like the brown sea-weed, / On the billows fall and rise.” It’s a poem with terrible resonance for Chris’s big sister Dana, who has gotten herself into terrible trouble. And it’s a perfect epigraph for an episode of television that’s significantly concerned with how people try and fail to protect each other, and their country.

The first person to fail is Carrie. After all the miracles she’s performed this season, I thought there was something sly about having her be defeated in what she is sure is a definitive investigation by a variety of mundane obstacles. Roya’s speech is obscured by a water fountain. Facial recognition software doesn’t work on her contact because he’s wearing sunglasses. Virgil loses him in the subway. Brody turns out not to know the guy. Later, at his meet with Roya, an irritating interloper checks his Blackberry near the two targets of Carrie’s surveillance, giving them a moment to go silence and become more careful in their speech. Carrie may have an enormous capacity to connect with sources and fantastic instincts about where information might lie. But separating the noise from the signal, in some cases quite literally, is the inevitable challenge of intelligence, and even Carrie can’t change that rule.

And even when she does everything right, warning Quinn that something might go wrong with their search of the tailor’s shop in Gettysburg, even Carrie has to fail sometimes. “Everybody missed something that day,” Saul told her of September 11, but she hasn’t learned from that terrible tragedy that sometimes it’s impossible to outrace events, especially when she believes her failure to do so is traceable to error rather than chance. “Did you know?” she confronts Brody. “I have got seven casualties in Gettysburg. Did you know that was going to happen?…Have you been lying to me?…Don’t touch me. Don’t you fucking dare.” The fact that he didn’t know, that he appears to be telling her the truth, seems to be more painful for Carrie than if she’d been betrayed. It means she was truly powerless, that she could not have saved the seven men shot in Gettysburg, that she cannot now extract further truth from Brody, that such disaster will likely strike her again.
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The 2009 action movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was so spectacularly awful, so gleefully, intently dumb that it overdid it and shot past so bad it’s good to so bad it’s bad, that I kind of can’t believe this but…I’m sort of looking forward to G.I. Joe: Retaliation. And I kind of can’t believe that, in between jokes about Channing Tatum babysitting the Rock’s kids, and Bruce Willis talking about his cholesterol, there’s a line about drone strikes, or at least terrifying strikes from the skies, so blunt it could have been spoken on Homeland. “There’s only one man who could authorize a strike like that, and I voted for him,” the Rock says grimly:

This all comes, of course, wrapped in a package that includes an In Like Flint-like president-swapping scheme (sadly, the ladies of America are not also getting brainwashed through salon hairdryers), sexy ninjas, and motorcycles that turn into explosives. I’d expect nothing less. But it’s interesting to me that even pop culture artifacts that are otherwise quite comfortable with projections of American military power are getting increasingly uncomfortable with our capacity to deal death from above and without warning. Homeland’s concerned with the possibility of blowback, while the much showier G.I. Joe makes horrifying spectacle of the prospect of getting blown of out of existence from a higher level of the atmosphere. But they share that anxiety. And it’s telling that the Rock’s character believes that even a legitimate president might have grossly abused the power drones or satellites give him.

This post discusses plot points from the October 28 episode of Homeland.

“How about a movie?” Finn Walden asks Dana Brody as they arrange their first date in this week’s episode of Homeland. “Once Upon a Time in America is playing in Dupont Circle…He’s an Italian director who specializes in wide-screen agony.” That’s pretty lofty taste for a high school student, even the son of the Vice President, but it’s no mistake that Henry Brommell, who wrote this episode, put a movie full of assumed identities and betrayals in Finn’s mouth. This is a craft episode of television, full of cultural allusions and subtle parallels, as Carrie breaks down Brody and builds him back up into a potential double agent.

I’ve loved the introduction of Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend, wisely underacting opposite Claire Danes) as a sardonic foil to Carrie who speaks in pop culture koans and is willing to employ violence that she isn’t. All the interrogation scenes in this episode are just beautifully written, but Peter’s confrontation with Brody started with a blunt and useful delineation of where power lies in the room—and of how this scene would be different from the exchanges we’re used to seeing on television. “I’m a United States Congressman. You can’t just kidnap me and shackle me in the fucking floor,” Brody insisted. “Actually, we can. Thanks to your colleagues we have fairly broad powers,” Peter reminded him. “I want a lawyer,” Brody insisted. “Well, life is full of disappointments,” Peter told him.

I think this episode of Homeland may end up being interpreted as pro-torture, given Peter’s calm use of much of the latitude awarded to him—it’s telling that the CIA has a medical team on hand to treat Brody’s hand immediately. But it’s telling that Peter’s stabbing of Brody’s hand, his spitting rage, are almost immediately revealed to be an act. “Every good cop needs a bad cop,” Peter tells Saul, and it’s true. It’s the emotional connection Carrie has with Brody that allows her to break down the central lie he repeats first to Peter and then to her, that he wasn’t wearing the vest. But for that to work, Brody had to be goaded to feel his connection with Carrie, and Carrie had to believe that her expertise was being underestimated and her emotional connection to Brody treated like it was evidence of her hysteria.

Carrie’s interrogation may seem emotional at first blush, but with the benefit of watching the episode a couple of times, it’s impressive how systemic it is. Carrie beings by evoking Brody’s guilt at the sin both of condemning her and not loving her quite enough. She gives him water, a kindness. She reminds him of their shared damage from the war. She delineates the difference between him and Abu Nazir. And she reminds him that he’s still worthy of love, and of doing the things that make someone worthy of the love of a daughter, or a lover, or a wife. “It was hearing Dana’s voice that changed your mind, wasn’t it?” Carrie asks him. “She asked you to come home, and you did. Why? Maybe because, maybe because you finally understood that killing yourself and ruining Dana’s life wouldn’t bring Issa back. Maybe because you knew then how much you loved your own child. Maybe you were just sick of death. That’s the Brody I’m talking to. That’s the Brody that knows the difference between warfare and terrorism. That’s the Brody I met up in that cabin.” If you doubt her intentionality, even for a moment, it’s so striking that she moves from the finale piece in her emotional portrait, “That’s the Brody I fell in love with,” to the question “What is Abu Nazir’s plan?” From that moment forward, Brody tells her the truth, about Roya, about the vest, about the fact that there is a coming plan. A blade through the hand produces resistance. But love is undeniable. The question that hangs over the episode is whether the latter could have done its work without the former.
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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.
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This post discusses plot points from the October 14 episode of Homeland.

This episode of Homeland clarified what, for me, has been the major struggle with the beginning of the second season of this show, which I still love, but which has been experiencing what feel to me to be some serious growing pains. There’s been a significant imbalance, episode by episode, in the quality of Carrie and Brody’s stories. Claire Danes and Damian Lewis continue to work at the top of their game, but while Danes has been given a relatively streamlined storyline that showcases Carrie’s struggles to adjust herself to life without the CIA to provide her an identity, Lewis has been asked to employ his formidable skills in the service of increasingly ridiculous and unsustainable capers. And that’s never been clearer than in “State of Independence.”

When we first see Carrie in this episode, she’s as high as we’ve seen her since her marker-induced meltdown in season one, listening to jazz like that which focused her concentration and lead her to see Brody’s hand gestures in Homeland‘s pilot. Her father, who has always been one of Carrie’s best advocates, wants to know what she’s doing. “I need to get this done and it needs to be done right,” she says of her report from Beirut, showing substantially more loyalty to the CIA than it’s show to her. I felt a brief moment of pride in her when she acknowledged his insistence that she needs sleep—perhaps the electroshock treatments, the vegetable garden, the teaching gig, the test in Lebanon had produced a Carrie who knew her own limitations, could temper her brilliance to the needs of her brain chemistry without giving it up entirely.

But it turns out that flash of self-care was just set-up for a more devastating sequence when Carrie arrives at headquarters, prepared to walk agents through her report. “I’m sorry. Am I late? I was told 6pm, which would mean I’m 15 minutes early,” she says, falling apart as she realizes that she was given the wrong time to keep her away from the meeting. “Always debrief with the person in the field. It’s in the goddamn manual.” There are good reasons for Carrie not to be in the CIA any more, among them that her illegal surveillance of Brody could weaken an eventual case against him. But it’s cruel to see the people who punished her break the rules out of a distaste for her, and shame her out of an inability to directly exclude her. “He’s still out there, David,” Carrie pleads with her old boss, her old lover, only to be told that “That’s not your concern anymore.” Carrie, always the junkie, needs to know “What about all that stuff I pulled out of the Beirut apartment. Can you at least tell me if there was any actionable intelligence in that?” But it’s a form of self-torture to ask that question and to know that she won’t be allowed to work on the material, much less to know what it contained. Carrie’s brain could burn itself out spinning scenarios for those papers and that bag. And David doesn’t help by insisting on cutting her off. “Between you and me, yes there was,” he tells her, before revealing how little he knows of her. “Carrie, you didn’t come here today expecting to get reinstated?”
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I’m unsure about the voiceover used to sell the movie, but I remain pretty excited for Zero Dark Thirty, in part because of its focus on the role of female intelligence operatives. I’d have a proclivity for these kinds of stories in the first place, and it doesn’t hurt that, as Eli Lake recently recounted in a great feature for Newsweek on women and espionage, is actually an accurate reflection of how the hunt for bin Laden went down:

The most human moment in the trailer may be Chris Pratt asking Joel Edgerton “What part convinced you?” and Edgerton’s deadpan response, “Her confidence.” It’s a relatively new thing, this idea that we could trust women to give orders to men in uniform, and all of a sudden, we’ve got a lot of fascinating female intelligence operatives playing with that tension and those questions about reliability. In the current iteration of the James Bond movies, M stands for mother, to a certain extent, with Bond breaking into her apartment and playing fast and loose with her orders in a classic display of rebellious boundary-testing. On Homeland, Carrie Mathison is meant to seem unreliable because of her mental illness and the way it interacts with her gender, influencing her affairs with both David Estes, her boss, and Nicholas Brody, her target. But the show doubles up the reasons she shouldn’t be trusted, and then proves her right anyway. Now, Jessica Chastain, who doesn’t actually speak a word in this trailer, presented in profile, eyes huge or utterly obscured, is being presented as the person on whose shoulders the mission to get Osama bin Laden rested. That cleaving of the requirement that expertise be validated by machoness if not explicitly by gender, even by emotional stoicism, is fascinating and important. These are big, tense, horrible things the intelligence community sets into motion. And women seem to be the ones expressing the weight of that knowledge, and those decisions.

James Woods’ review of Thomas Wolfe’s latest novel Back to Blood is a fairly comprehensive dismantling, taking on everything from the way Wolfe overcooks every sentiment until they blend together in a grey mush to some of the creepy racial attitudes in Wolfe’s depictions of the overmuscled physiques of his characters of color. But beyond the novel itself, Woods makes an argument about how research can serve fiction, or undermine it:

Over the years, Tom Wolfe has campaigned strenuously on behalf of the journalistic role in fiction. In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” and elsewhere, he has argued that American fiction since the nineteen-sixties has fallen into sterility and irrelevance, because American novelists aren’t looking at the world. According to him, they’ve retreated from the traditional calling of writers like Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis, because they’ve exchanged the labor of reporting for easy fictional games (postmodern self-referentiality) or for a few dull inches of ivory (minimalism, dirty realism). The American novel will be reborn, Wolfe claims, when the novelist gets out onto the street and starts copying. Not only will such reporting produce the little details, “the petits faits vrais that create verisimilitude”; it is essential for literature’s greatest effects. American fiction, grounded in “a highly detailed realism,” will properly emulate the Zola who went down into the mines in Anzin, in 1884, to do research. While underground, Wolfe says, Zola discovered that the pit horses lived and died in situ; when he transfers this found detail to the pages of his novel “Germinal,” the reader is moved and aghast….

Very occasionally in this novel, Wolfe gives evidence that he knows the difference between those French prunes and “Hotchkiss, Yale . . . six-three.” At one point, Nestor, fleeing the opprobrium of his community, ends up at a favorite Cuban bakery, where he enjoys “a whiff of Ricky’s pastelitos, ‘little pies’ of filo dough wrapped around ground beef, spiced ham, guava, or you name it. . . . He had loved pastelitos since he was a little boy.” It’s a rare passage without exclamation marks, and superficially it resembles Ivan and the prunes. But the detail about the pastelitos has the whiff not of pastry but of research. Like everything else in this book, it is imparted information, and is thus the expected detail, the properly stamped sociological receipt. Ivan’s French prunes come out of nowhere, and surprise us with their singular surplus: Why prunes? Why French prunes?

This is something I consider a great deal, and I tend to think that research should serve three main purposes in fiction, whether it’s fiction that means to comment on the real world, or to dream beyond it, both equally valid aims:

1. It should identify conditions and conflicts that provide rich drama: So much of what’s important about research, whether it comes through formal reporting or new life experiences, is identifying new stories and conflicts in the first place. David Simon’s reporting is the reason he could identify bureaucratic tensions and criminal rivalries that would be the basis for The Wire. Thomas Mann might not have seized on sanatoriums as a subject, one of the examples Woods offers up, had his wife not ended up in one. Whether you think they should have happened at all, t’ll be interesting to see how Kathryn Bigelow’s conversations with the Obama administration end up affecting Zero Dark Thirty.

2. It can be a source of unexpected details that make characters more fully-rounded people: Woods’ complaint about Wolfe’s use of pastelitos is not that the description of them isn’t accurate, but that it’s unsurprising. Knowing that a Cuban character enjoys traditional Cuban food doesn’t necessarily add much to our sense of that character as a distinct person. But learning, as was the case with the opening of this season of Mad Men, that Madison Avenue advertising executives were stupid enough to throw water balloons at Civil Rights protestors, both creates a powerful little anecdote and exposes the gap between the sophisticated facade of self-appointed masters of the universe and the reality of their behavior.

3. It should avoid errors that take knowledgable viewers out of the story: It may be a little thing to complain about, but one of the most irritating things that television, in particular, does, is name a location where something is happening in the name of credibility, and then show a place that is patently not that location. Homeland committed a particularly egregious violation of this sort last season when it said an attack was going to take place in Farragut Square in Washington, DC, and then used a location that had precisely nothing in common with the block-sized park. Slips like that may not matter for the majority of viewers of any given cultural artifact. But it’s silly to gesture at realistic detail and immediately undermine the attempt. I’m not saying that everything in fiction has to function exactly the way it does in the real world—fact-checking is an awfully boring way to watch television. But if you’re commenting on the world as it is, or putting characters in a familiar world, considering whether the choices you’re making and the details you’re including pull consumers out of the universe you’ve created or create internal contradictions will serve you as well as them.

This post discusses plot points from the October 7 episode of Homeland.

“It’s not lost on me why people don’t trust my judgement,” Carrie tells Saul on the roof in Lebanon. “Why you didn’t even want me here. It’s not fair, I know, for you to be the one who had to decide. It fucked me up, Saul. Being wrong about Brody. It fucked me up. Because I have never been so sure and so wrong. And it’s that fact that I still can’t get my head around. It makes me unable to trust my own thoughts. Every time I think I see something clearly now, it just disappears.” It’s a powerful scene, one fueled by Saul’s rebuke to her that “We were supposed to meet her together so you could talk to her and I could assess her reliability,” after she meets her source alone, his overheard shot at David that “For the record, as long as we’re covering our asses, I didn’t want her here in the first place. She’s not well.” Homeland‘s perspective has always meant that we know more than any other single other actor in the show, and often, that gives us a kind of authority over them. But here, it’s created a terrible helplessness: we know that Carrie is not just damaged, but has been damaged through a terrible injustice. And there is nothing at all we can do about it.

If last season was centered on the questions of whether Brody would carry out his mission and when Carrie would crack and be found out, this season has built up a different set of questions. Will Carrie be exonerated, either by patient, excellent work or the radical revelation that Brody did, at one point, intend to commit terrorism? Will Brody’s conversion to Islam become public? Will he get away with what he intended, and with his murder of Tom Walker? Is the story of Walker’s part in the plot plausible, now that the failure of its radical and immediate sequel has left it exposed to scrutiny? How long can Jessica, who is meeting “the junta who actually runs DC,” who wants to use Jessica to get to her husband, sustain the bright fiction that’s propelled her to the social standing he enjoys so much? The problem is, for these questions to remain suspenseful, they can’t be resolved or kept alive by implausibilities and chicken wire, something that the show leaned on heavily this episode.
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The killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Libya last month, and the protests that swept the region afterwards, were an illustration of the profound difficulties the Middle East faces in the phase of its history that followed the Arab Spring. The television shows that started airing last week were in development long before those tragic events, and couldn’t have anticipated them, but in a sense, that makes them more forward-looking. A profound sense of anxiety about America’s foreign policy in the Middle East is showing up on both network and cable television this fall, on issues ranging from America’s relationship with Israel and Iran, to the quality of decision-making in the chain of command, to our ability to project power to prevent genocide.

Showtime’s Homeland returned this season with its characters operating in an environment where Israel had bombed Iran’s nuclear sites in an effort to prevent that nation from successfully developing an atomic weapon. It’s a somewhat more realistic scenario than one in which an American prisoner of war returned to the United States and became close enough to the Vice President of the United States to have a serious shot at assassinating him, and a storyline that could give Carrie Mathison and Saul Berenson work to do even if Nicholas Brody were to be removed as the series’ primary antagonist. A strike on Iran may be a nightmare possibility, but it’s one that emerges from the region’s history and the public imagination rather than the fevered brains occupying a writers’ room.

It’s also a device that, unlike the drone strike that provided a background for the action of the first season of the show, portrays the United States as more drawn into a conflict than instigating it. We learn about the strike from a news report that doesn’t discuss whether the United States supported it, or whether it’s caused tensions between the United States and Israel. Future episodes suggest at least some Americans support the attack, or at least want to intervene to clean up the messy aftermath of it. But through the three episodes I’ve seen, the strike provides an atmosphere of tension more than an actual driver of plot for Homeland‘s second season. The theme of American complicity and blowback have receded, and I miss the narrative propulsion and moral engagement of the drone strikes debate from the first season.

Homeland‘s creators Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon told me when I spoke to them in August that the other frame narrative they’d considered for their show’s second season involved Pakistan’s growing instability and nuclear weapons. Their decision to go in another direction means they aren’t overlapping with Last Resort, about the crew of a nuclear submarine who become enemies of the state when they question orders to launch a nuclear weapon at Pakistan. That chain of events is a less literal thought experiment than Israel’s strikes in Homeland, given that nuclear disaster in Pakistan is more likely to result from weapons insecurity or the instigation of a war between India and Pakistan than offensive action by the United States.
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