This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 16 episode of Homeland.

I’ve been incredibly impressed thus far with the way the show has handled Brody’s reintegration into his family, particularly the rivalry between Jessica and Dana for his affections. There’s a genuine discomfort to the fact that Nicholas will laugh with his daughter behind a closed door but won’t let his wife touch him while he’s masturbating to her, that Nicholas is able to be more patient with Dana than Jessica is. “She’s obviously got a secret life out there,” Jessica says, worried, only to have Nicholas laugh it off, saying “She’s sixteen…Didn’t you have a secret life when you were that age?” “Yeah, with you! That was different,” Jessica tells him, but it’s not, not really. Similarly, Dana takes Jessica’s relationship with Mike as a kind of visceral betrayal: her mother is cheating on not just Nicholas, but on her, exposing her to the evidence that she has an undomestic sexuality.

And it’s Nicholas who reins Dana in, implying to her that they can have their own secrets, that she is perhaps more relevant than her mother to his endurance. “You know when I went over to Afghanistan, you were in third grade…That’s what I took over with me. You were in a play that year, the Wackadoo Zoo. You were so good,” he tells her. “Honey, it’s practically all I thought about for eight years. It kept me alive. But now I’m back, and all those things that kept me going, they’re gone.” I’m trying to decide if there’s something genuinely queasy there, or if it’s just the dichotomy between a man who can get his teenage daughter to be good for Lawrence O’Donnell and the man who sees himself powerfully distant from his family in the mirror.

Speaking of Lawrence O’Donnell, I thought there was something pretty game about his agreement to be a pleasant dupe in this episode. “I was told Lawrence O’Donnell gives everyone a hard time except guys in uniform,” Nicholas tells his family, explaining why he’s not afraid of the interview. And true to this expectation, O’Donnell serves up softballs disguised as emotionally difficult questions. “What did they want?” he asks Brody about why he was tortured. “They want you to lose faith,” Brody tells him, swinging incredibly hard at the soft toss. “To lose faith in your country, which they say is the devil. In your brother marines who they say aren’t coming for you because you have no military value. In your wife, who they say has got your arms wrapped around someone else.”

Carrie’s also getting some tough love and tender treatment from the men in her life, namely Saul and Virgil, who is rapidly becoming my favorite character on the show. Carrie’s prickly about the fact that the CIA isn’t protecting Lynn, telling one of her colleagues who describes her as a hooker that “If by hooker, you mean someone who’s off risking her life while we’re sitting around a conference table.” But she’s not doing well in meetings, reacting badly to Saul who wants to know “You think that when I ask you the same exact question I’d ask anyone else, I’m giving you a hard time?” He’s angry at her for treating him like all the other people they work with, but also for sexualizing their relationship. I really want to know more about Carrie’s backstory in the department. And after she asks Lynn to take a risk, it turns up nothing. She snaps at Virgil, who, after suffering through the yogurt in her fridge, decides to make them both a real meal, saying “There’s some spaghetti in the closet. It’s only 10 years past its expiration date. I’m sure it won’t kill us.”

But they never get to dinner. Lynn’s death didn’t strike me as particularly surprising, and I would have liked to see her fleshed out a little bit more so her murder hit harder. But I do appreciate that it opened up another thread of the mystery, a case where we know slightly more than than Carrie and Saul but where we have absolutely no idea how they’re going to get there. It’s a perfect example of why spoilers don’t matter: the journey, rather than the destination, is what’s going to be tremendously exciting.

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 9 episode of Homeland.

The difference between a good television show and a great show is often that the latter, even when an episode is somewhat below-par, is still capable of doing something smart and surprising. Homeland got put to that test in this second episode, and I think it passed. So even though I’m slightly underwhelmed by this second episode, I still think this is the best new show of the fall.

One of the things I liked best about this episode was the way it built parallels between Carrie and Nicholas, between the man being hunted and the woman hunting him. It’s in some little things: Carrie’s body curling up as she paints her toenails in an imitation of the safety Nicholas finds in the corner when he can’t bring himself to face the cameras outside the house; Nicholas lying on the couch to watch the game and Carrie lying on the couch to watch him. These are both deeply messed-up people operating in parallel, Carrie desperately seeking absolution from the people around her while everyone wants Nicholas’ blessing; Nicholas is opaque to the people around him while Carrie is too clear, too open, too easily wounded.

I found myself wishing that the folks who shoot Breaking Bad were shooting this show, particularly Nicholas’s flashbacks to the time of his captivity. Can you imagine that scene of him digging his fellow captive’s grave, singing the Marine’s Hymn, with the kind of weird color saturation as Gus’ confrontation with Walt in the New Mexico desert? But from those flashbacks we see Brody’s isolation in captivity, and we see him come to the light again in a mosque. Even so, I was genuinely surprised by the image of him praying in his garage. His disappearance, the trip to the hardware store, all suggested some terrible project, some weapon as a monster in the basement. That he was picking up a prayer rug instead both delays the tension and suggests a deeper conversion. Is Brody not a Manchurian Candidate, but instead, a true believer?

And i thought it was powerful that said revelation came after the show took some time to explore how deeply how many branches of government are invested in Brody as a symbol. “The man represents a significant victory in the war on terror thanks to our friends at the CIA,” the brass warns Mike, before blackmailing him by revealing that they know about his affair with Jessica. “Putting aside for the moment that Sgt. Brody owes him his life, these are the facts. bin Laden’s dead. America thinks, or wants to think, that this war is drawing to an end. Politicians are pushing for a wholesale withdrawal from Afghanistan.” And when Mike makes the mistake of thinking about Nicholas’ well-being, they make it clear what they think: “Fuck it. Drive on. Isn’t that what you Marines say?” In keeping with that deep connection between Brody and Carrie, David is in on that meeting, applying the pressure. “He has career stakes in Brody, whom he and his department brought home to great fanfare,” Saul warns Carrie. “You want to challenge that? Get all your ducks in a row, first.”
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