The second series of
Homeland begins with Carrie on her meds and teaching EFL, while Saul
is cruisiaround Beirut dressed as Meyer Lansky, and might as well
be wearing a sign saying 'shoot me, I'm the CIA station chief here
and I'm Jewish'. But having disposed of Carrie, the CIA then send her
back to Beirut, which in Homeland terms is basically a teeming street
market bordered by crumbling houses and populated by shifty-looking
people who automatically follow strangers and threaten them. Sort of
like Brooklyn.
Meanwhile Brody,
everybody's favourite Marine sergeant turned Congressman is now a
viable Vice-Presidential candidate; in fact more viable than Paul
Ryan, while moonlighting as an Islamic terrorist. It's a shame he
appears to be a Republican, because he'd fit right into the Obama
White House with that profile. He's picked up a new handler, an
English-accented woman (Roya Hammad, played by Zuleika Robinson, left)
who's somehow got White House press credentials for her grad student
blog, because we have to make it easy for Al-Queda, and because no
one's yet figured out that Damian Lewis, despite having served in the
101st Airborne during WWII, is British. But then so is the
guy playing Carrie's careerist nemesis at the CIA, David Estes
(played by David Harewood).
By a quirk of picking
up the right cloth shoulder bag on her way out of her Beirut
contact's apartment, Carrie unwittingly delivers to Saul a copy of
Brody's suicide-bomb confession—which of course has never been
used, but the Al-Queda types like to carry around with them when they
head to the teeming markets to do their shopping. Saul manages to
sneak it out of Beirut, by hiding a copy which the Lebanese version
of Homeland Securtity confiscate, and now we now that the
psychologically disturbed Carrie was right, David was wrong, and
Brody is now a problem.
In fact, Lewis'
adjustment to American life has an extreme flaw, which is when he
gets into casual dress. He seems to prefer a kangol and polo shirt (this is a marine sergeant, not a suburban golf pro, remember) two sizes too small early on. But then, in episode three, despite his having to make
an important political speech with the VP (played by Jamey Sheridan as if he's Michael Murphy), Roya sends him to drive
the Al Queda bombmaker who's a tailor in Gettysburg to a safe house.
The illogic of this boggles the mind, especially since in other ways
Al-Queda are supposed to be all-powerful, with assets everywhere in
America. But it gets even worse when Brody arrives in Getttysburg walking stiffly through town in a
casual outfit of baseball cap, windbreaker, and slacks that appears to again be too small for him, as well as brand-new, starched and ironed. And he walks with a prissy
kind of stiffness which would make him stand out in any small town,
unless it were the set for a remake of Invaders From Mars. I thought
maybe this was somehow a sort of character comment, a cunning reference to Fifties paranoia, or to his
inability to adjust to civilian life as a spy, but I suspect the reality is that either Brody is
more comfortable in uniform, whether Marine or politician, where he
can be as stiff as he likes, or Lewis is more comfortable in British casual wear.
Then, as he tries to
change a flat tire without a jack, and chase his passenger through
the woods in a rainstorm, which winds up in his having to kill him
with the patented TV neck-breaker while he talks to his wife who's
wondering why he's not at the speech. Watching Lewis trying to
balance these elements of his it occurred to me what I was seeing
was a 21st century version of I Led Three Lives, the
Fifties TV show which starred Richard (no relation) Carlson as
Herbert Philbrick, 'citizen, communist, counter-spy'. I recalled
mentioning the show as one of a number of examples when I wrote about
Homeland's first series last year (link here). But now the parallel
was more direct, although in this case, Brody has only two lives, I
thought with some disappointment.
That disappointment
lasted only as far as episode four, in which Carrie hands Brody the
ulitmate hotel bar pick-up rejection: just as he's about to
embrace/strange Carrie agents burst into the room, and this CIA
version of the Murphy game sees him led away with a black hood over
his head, headed to Gitmo or some safe house torture chamber.
So the stage is set for
Brody to be turned—whether by persuasion or by the sort of
combination of therapy and drugs that has been so ineffective with
Carrie—into a real Herbert Philbrick. He's the war hero who's been
turned by Al-Queda who can now operate as a double-agent, thereby
doubling the risk, and, as Philbrick discovered, making even
the simplest daily tasks fraught with suspicion, deception, and of
course danger. The possibility is then open for the CIA, knowing that
Carrie is a head case and has already been involved with Brody,
assigning her to be his handler, which will add an element of the
'will they-won't they' dilemma so beloved of American television
morality, and it leaves the continuous question, which was never a
problem for the audience following Richard Carlson, of whether or not
Brody's latest conversion is real.
Complicating the issue
will be Brody's Marine ex-buddies, the most demented of whom is
convinced (correctly) Brodie played a part in the murder of his
fellow convert to Islam, the sniper Walker, and a burgeoning sub-plot
of romance between Brody's daughter and the son of the
Vice-President, which raises the worry that the need to keep a
teenaged audience interested by showing them versions of themselves,
which so plagued 24 that it quickly became unwatchable, could well
take over the show. I can see Abu Nazir sending the Teen Terrorists
to the US and infiltrating them into Sidwell Friends School.
I Led Three Lives was a
paradigm of the Red Scare during the death-throes of the McCarthy
Era. Homeland is threatening to become exactly the same thing—with
the hugely exaggerated threat of the enemy within being overcome by
the increasingly harried misunderstood hero. Lewis does a great
imitation of Richard Carlson worried he won't be able to find a pay
phone in time to let the FBI know where and when the cell meeting is
where the latest secrets are about to be passed on to Moscow. Beneath
the flash of the plot, the twist of Brody's being a successful
politician and a legitimate Moslem/terrorist (which thus far in
Homeland appear to be the same thing) and of course the distinct
pleasure we take in watching Clare Danes go all psycho every week,
Homeland is, at heart, an old paradigm come home to roost, I Led Three So-Called Lives, under the
guise of My So-Called War On Terror.
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