Homeland

[KevinNYC]

Spoilers

The great dramatic thrust of this event is by having Saul in danger, they are personalizing collateral damage.

If the logic of the drone war is that we are at war and sometimes even when you follow your best intentions non-combatants die in war, then they should have taken the strike on Haqqani at the first instance. Their medical student asset was dead, a high value target was there and was surrounded by militants.
One civilian was there. Saul. If that civilian was not Saul, they would have taken that strike 99 out of 100 times.

You would drone an American citizen who isn't a terrorist and hasn't violated any American or International laws? I'm glad you're not in charge.

And that's why they should have taken the strike on Haqqani, even if you had to kill Saul. Not killing him when they had the chance led to much greater death. The CIA now looks even worse. Saul would have died a hero and now he feels he's going to die a fool.

Saul was right.

[Bless Mathews]

Quinn is a g.

[Thorpesaurous]

Last night was probably the best example of the show doing what it does. Incredibly tense and suspenseful. Probably not making the most sense in the world, but it hardly matters if they can pin the audience down with concern as they're going.

And the And the prison cell conversation between the ambassador and her traitorous husband is some of the best interpersonal stuff they've done on the show that's not Carrie related (which also happens to contain some of the worst interpersonal stuff too).


Honestly it's on a really entertaining 3 week run.

[KevinNYC]

Last night was probably the best example of the show doing what it does. Incredibly tense and suspenseful. Probably not making the most sense in the world, but it hardly matters if they can pin the audience down with concern as they're going. .................Honestly it's on a really entertaining 3 week run.

Yeah, it's been entertaining enough to overlook its persistent logical leaps. A devoted enemy of America passes up the opportunity to kill the cia chief and the ambassador? They would would have unloaded with everthing they had once the door to the vault was open.

Dramatically, it was interesting to see Lockhart make a mistake.

Quinn seemed out of character earlier this year, but now appears to be swinging back pretty hard to the dark side. It would be interesting to see if they go full on torture and how they handle that.

[KevinNYC]

I also wonder how the government of Pakistan is viewing this season. If the ambassador's husband every confesses that he gave info out about the tunnels and the Marine's procedures, it would lead to a straight up war with Pakistan.

[longhornfan1234]

Yeah, it's been entertaining enough to overlook its persistent logical leaps. A devoted enemy of America passes up the opportunity to kill the cia chief and the ambassador? They would would have unloaded with everthing they had once the door to the vault was open.

Dramatically, it was interesting to see Lockhart make a mistake.

Quinn seemed out of character earlier this year, but now appears to be swinging back pretty hard to the dark side. It would be interesting to see if they go full on torture and how they handle that.

Lockart is softer than cottonelle tissue. I hope this mistake haunts him.

[Thorpesaurous]

I also wonder how the government of Pakistan is viewing this season. If the ambassador's husband every confesses that he gave info out about the tunnels and the Marine's procedures, it would lead to a straight up war with Pakistan.

That was one of the things I thought while watching it. If Carrie gets back to the embassy alive, and is extracted, and reports the questionable stuff about the time it took for security to get there, and then there's 56 dead American's on the site of the US Embassy, and Pakistan would be a military occupied state within 24 hours, and it wouldn't be impossible for me to envision it just being wiped to rubble shortly thereafter. It's not as if we get along that well with them as it is, either in real life, or in the world of the show.

And again, wouldn't it be valuable to put some of the story into a bigger perspective. Because something like this would be on a 24 hour news cycle and be international round the clock news within minutes. Two years ago they had a president on the show, and a VP running for office to remotely kill, and senators, and all sorts of other pieces of the world. But now the show has paired itself down to this little world of these nine or so people, in spite of it's telling a story that is running on a global political level.

I don't mind it. But once the tension drops and I get stuck thinking about it, the more it sort of falls in on itself.

[Nastradamus]

Quinn is a g.

I think I said this 4 times during the episode, lol

[Nastradamus]

Lockhart made a complete 180 from being a character you loathed, to being one of the best on the show.

Yah, they have done a great job humanizing Lockhart

[Nastradamus]

Nice. Bringing back the tension of season 1

You miss the last two seasons? Come on man, Brody trying to cross the border was some epic tension. Among other scenes.

[Nastradamus]

Here's an amusing article from Grantland on the missing characters from Homeland's past. In addition to it's amusing observations, it sort of points to my issue about this show seemingly just disregarding it's history pretty completely. Especially the stuff about Jivadi at the bottom. A lot of shows sweep old stories under the rug. I still have friends waiting for the Russian to come back in The Sopranos. But I can't think of anything that does it at this level.


Homeland is not known for making sense for more than two or three episodes in a row. When everything is working, it can be a gripping thriller, but more often than not, especially over the last two seasons, it runs off the rails, throwing weird, unnecessary shocks, and, in a pinch, a redheaded ghost-terrorist at viewers. The past few seasons have forgotten one of the lessons of the first season — that most spy work is observation. The show used to wring unbelievable tension out of the concentrated surveillance of the Brody family. Now, Homeland has an almost terminal case of ADHD.

This chaos has consequences, not just for the coherence of the plot, but also for the legions of characters who we’re told are supposedly important, but get dropped without much comment. In particular, the show’s shift from the D.C. area to Pakistan means that an army of characters are stuck Stateside, without so much as a long-distance phone call or check-in via hallucination. There’s a veritable graveyard of Homeland characters who have just dropped off the map, even thought they could theoretically still be integral to the plot. Here are a few of those dearly departed characters, along with some educated guesses about what they’ve been up to.

Chris Brody

The boy who wasn’t there. Chris Brody’s sister, Dana, was always a more interesting moral foil for her father, and she received the majority of the family’s and show’s attention. There was only room on this show for one interesting child character. Chris’s plight was not unlike Walter Jr.’s on Breaking Bad. That character was pushed aside when it became clear Jesse was the more interesting partner for a father-son relationship with Walt. So Walter Jr. was doomed to a life lived at the breakfast table, and Chris was forced to stumble around the fringes of the show and his parents’ fraying marriage, not knowing that his father was a terrorist.

What he’s probably doing right now: Sternly being told to leave his room, and tweeting about Bradley Beal to his 70 followers.


Dana Brody


For all that people complained about Dana’s story lines (remember when she and her terrible boyfriend killed a dude?), she’s one of the better characters Homeland has produced. Played convincingly by Morgan Saylor, Dana was a real, live, interesting teenage girl, and vital to the central plot of the show. Dana Brody is a dearly missed presence on my television. I held out hope that somehow she would be roped into the spy game, Kim Bauer–style, carrying on the Brody legacy of being bullied into doing dangerous things by Carrie. But, sadly, she disappeared from the show.

What she’s probably doing right now: Attending Vassar, on and off, spending time in a collective of DMT users and participating in protests against drones. #Occupy

Maggie Mathison


Remember when Carrie, like, almost drowned her baby? And it seemed like this season was going to dig into her motherhood, and what she was sacrificing by functionally giving it up? Nope, neither do I. With the unfortunate death of James Rebhorn (who was excellent as the Mathison patriarch), Carrie’s sister Maggie became the moral compass of her family, the force weakly trying to pull her back to the States. But when the shit actually hits the fan and the drones start flying, nobody wants to hear anything about Carrie’s family.

What she’s probably doing right now: Waiting for a Skype call that will never come.

Virgil!


Carrie’s go-to guy for illegal surveillance was crucial to the show, back in the day, when he spearheaded her efforts to spy on Brody. But as Homeland became increasingly about the romance between Carrie and Brody, Virgil’s role shrunk. His awkward brother Max is part of Carrie’s team in Islamabad, hanging out with Fara and Quinn while they wait for Carrie to make important decisions. As entertaining as Max can be, it’s really a bummer that Virgil’s gone. While Mandy Patinkin’s Saul is a great grumbly dad figure for Carrie, David Marciano was a perfect weird uncle.

What he’s probably doing right now: Running a back-alley service to prevent the NSA from being able to read your email (for an additional fee, he also removes DRM protection from your iTunes library).

Mira
Saul has a wife! And she was mad at Saul for wanting to get back into government at the beginning of the season! You’d think the CIA would tell her that he’d been kidnapped, or something? Or that she’d have noticed when he didn’t come home or call, for however long he’s been gone for? The healing of Saul’s marriage was a surprisingly down-to-earth subplot for Homeland, focusing on the quiet costs of a life spent in intelligence work. Now, the stakes for Saul are insanely high and Mira is nowhere to be seen. Oh well.

What she’s probably doing right now: Hopefully on a plane to Pakistan? Or making some phone calls asking where her husband is?

Javadi
Showtime
Getting Javadi, who planned the Season 2 CIA bombing, to be the Iranian intelligence chief while spying for America was basically the whole point of Season 3, right? Lockhart gave up Brody to be executed so Javadi would get promoted, and Carrie got placed as the station chief in Istanbul so she could manage him as a source of information. Naturally, ongoing tension between the CIA and its biggest-ever asset would be a crucial part of Season 4. Except that he’s nowhere to be found. (Has anyone even mentioned him?)

What he’s probably doing right now: Sitting on a file with all of the information Carrie needs to save Saul from the Taliban, waiting for someone to just call him and ask nicely.

Eric Thurm (@EricThurm) is a writer living in New York who has written for Complex, the A.V. Club, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

Pretty poorly written stuff. Most of those characters ran their arc(Brody kids, Jivhadi) or are still involved as much as they ever were(Saul's wife, Carrie's sister). James Rehborn dying sucks and I did ask where the **** Virgil was this season. He probably got another acting job or something in all reality.

edit - http://deadline.com/2013/04/david-ma...member-472926/

[Bless Mathews]

I think I said this 4 times during the episode, lol

Favorite character by far.

[johndeeregreen]

As has been mentioned already, the level of tension has been at a place where I can overlook the logical leaps and bounds they took the last couple episodes.

[ItsMillerTime]

Quinn seemed out of character earlier this year, but now appears to be swinging back pretty hard to the dark side. It would be interesting to see if they go full on torture and how they handle that.

So glad they're doing this with Quinn. He was always talked about as this shady, black ops guy with a sketchy past. Now we finally get to see it. Although, wtf does he think he can accomplish working by himself with 0 resources? Either way, that Pakistani George Clooney is fvcked.

[brandonislegend]

Starting tonights episode now