Tag Archives: Emily Nussbaum

“In Memoriam” to a once-stellar series? Sam Lim and I discuss Episode 11 of Homeland

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carrie Jay Pinho: OK, so here goes…

I have to be honest: this was probably my least favorite episode of Homeland this season. There are way too many flaws to remember off the top of my head, but here are a few of my initial complaints:

1) If there’s one scene that embodies all the problems raised by this episode, it’s the one where Carrie finds the secret passageway in the tunnels and her companion improbably moves in alone without even bothering to inform his colleagues right away, never mind wait for backup. That moment was so single-handedly ridiculous I couldn’t believe it was actually happening while I was watching it — it played off every horror movie cliche, and the fact that he was killed was just about the most predictable TV death in recent history. Not a good look for Homeland. On the bright side, it did lead to my favorite online comment of the year (which can be seen below Alan Sepinwall’s typically spot-on review):

I was totally with it until Carrie did the job of like a hundred SWAT teams and then out-muscled Abu Nazir immediately after he’d slit the throat of a large man. Might I add that Carrie weighs like 90 pounds, hadn’t slept in two days and has a diet that consists of Chinese takeout, her father’s sandwiches and vegetarian lasagna. Oh, and she’d been in a car wreck less than two days ago. That was really the best they could think of? I hope the writers do some serious soul-searching before season 3 starts.

2) Again, Saul’s naiveté is quickly morphing into “unbelievably stupid” territory. If he really does believe that Estes and Quinn are plotting Brody’s assassination — as we know is the case — then would he really bring all this up publicly, again and again, revealing how much he knows and thereby endangering himself? That scene with the polygraph test — while showing off, once again, Mandy Patinkin’s incredible acting — was just not credible: what does Saul get out of openly accusing Estes of running an off-the-books black ops plan to kill Brody? Saul’s a veteran spy; in no universe does his insistence on getting himself into deeper trouble make any sense.

One last note re Saul: I really did like the way he completely disappeared from the storyline for the remainder of the episode after his scene with Estes. It was a good matching of form to content, as in: what would the show look like without Saul? Obviously, he’s not actually going to disappear — at least, not like that — but it was interesting to see that the CIA accomplished the single greatest goal Saul and Carrie had been working toward (getting Abu Nazir), and yet Saul was portrayed as a complete sideshow to it by the end of the episode. It was as if Estes’ plan to isolate him were already being enacted. If Estes and Saul somehow both survive the season finale next week, I really hope the show never finagles some twisted way to get them back in each other’s good graces again. In my opinion, the Saul-Estes relationship has passed a point of no return: there’s just too much mutual suspicion for them to ever go back to the way they were, so I hope the show never tries that. Continue reading “In Memoriam” to a once-stellar series? Sam Lim and I discuss Episode 11 of Homeland →

Going crazy over Homeland

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brody

New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, who’s come up with an elaborate theory about the latest episode of the Showtime series Homeland (warning: spoilers below), worries that she’s turning into Carrie Mathison:

Yet I couldn’t help getting drawn in, because after some consideration, I found that I’d stumbled upon a solution—which is to say I developed a completely insane theory that explains everything. I am also prepared to defend my crazy theory at all costs, because this show is turning me into Carrie Mathison. Enough preamble. The theory is this: Nicholas Brody is faking it. He plotted with Abu Nazir to have Carrie kidnapped, so that Brody could “save” her, thus ensuring her loyalty and manipulating her into concealing their crimes (which she did, after all: she didn’t tell her bosses about the scheme to kill the Vice-President.) All that face-acting Damian Lewis was doing, with the yelling and the screaming into Skype—a notable departure from the subtlety of Lewis’s earlier performance? He knew Carrie was listening. It was an act.

Carrie Mathison is clearly in love with Brody. Brody has feelings for her, too, but he’s still capable of manipulating her (which is the same thing she’s doing to him, after all, in the name of the C.I.A.—calming him down with sex, holding his hand to reassure him.) When Nazir kidnapped Brody, during that mysterious prayer confab a few weeks back, the two came up with a plan. I’m not sure what that plan is, beyond killing the Vice-President, but it seems to involve messing with Carrie’s head—even more than she’s already been messed with.

When you think about it, my theory explains much that felt strange about “Broken Hearts.” It explains why Brody was going so over-the-top bonkers. It explains why Nazir didn’t walk away with his cell phone, to explain the pacemaker plan out of earshot of the C.I.A. operative he’d kidnapped. My theory also explains why Nazir was so willing to let Carrie go, even before Brody had given him the code: they’d scripted that element, to make it clear that Brody was motivated by love. The twist would match up perfectly with the show’s thematic fascination with behavior as performance, which goes back to Season One, when Carrie watched Brody strip and suffer on her monitors as if he were some especially juicy episode of Real World: The Patriot Act.