Homeland Season 2

            It was the best of shows. It was the worst of shows. It was Homeland Season 2. The first season of Homeland featured sterling performances from Damien Lewis, Claire Danes, and Mandy Patinkin. Showrunners Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon built the plot slowly and methodically. By the end of the season, Marine Sergeant and former POW Nicholas Brody (Lewis) strapped a suicide vest on, ready to blow up himself, Vice President Walden (Jamey Sheridan), and a host of other luminaries. The Emmy Awards lavished Homeland with praise, awarding Homeland Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series, Best Actor for Lewis, Best Actress for Danes, and for Outstanding Writing. In its second season, Lewis, Danes, and Patinkin delivered some of the best dramatic acting on television, but increasingly ludicrous plotting, exponentially expanding gaps in logic, and the desire to turn Lewis and Danes into a romantic couple undermined the entire season.

            The writing and acting in the episode “Q&A” represented Homeland at its peak. The majority of the action in “Q&A” occurs in the basement of a CIA safe house as Carrie Mathison (Danes) interrogates Brody about his failed suicide bombing. As Brody continually denies his membership in a terrorist cell and his attempt to assassinate the Vice President, Carrie continually questions and prods him about his family, his relationship to the terror cell, his eight years as a POW, and their own lurid sexual history. The episode, building on the events of the series, shows how Carrie breaks through the web of tenuous lies holding Brody’s psyche together. The interrogation scenes prove emotionally devastating as Carrie digs deeper and deeper into Brody’s (and ultimately her own) damaged mind. Lewis excels at portraying Body’s desperate attempts to lie his way out the situation—hoping that just one more lie will set him free. Danes ably portrays Carrie’s fragility and damaged psyche as she works to elicit Brody’s confession. The episode is the product of great writing, built on the history that these characters share, and is brilliantly executed by Danes and Lewis.

            Mandy Patinkin’s Saul Berenson, Carrie’s CIA supervisor, has several standout episodes. Patinkin’s acting nearly salvages the utter stupidity of the season finale, “The Choice.” He delivers in a wide range of moments, covering anger, hope, grief, and relief in a short 65 minutes. Saul verbally eviscerates Carrie for considering leaving the CIA to start a new life with Brody. After seeing Carrie alive following a terrorist bombing at the CIA, Patinkin allows a smile to cross Saul’s face, relieved that in the midst of all the horror that Carrie has survived. He mourns his dead colleagues while saying the Kaddish over a room full of bodies. Patinkin displays Saul’s simultaneous elation and anguish at receiving a phone call from his estranged wife, who promises to return home. While Patinkin did not win an Emmy for the first season, he is the equal of Danes and Lewis.

            While Lewis, Danes, and Patinkin offered terrific acting, the progressively inane plotlines overwhelmed Homeland Season 2. The ridiculousness began early in the season with terrorist/reporter/plot expediter Roya Hammad sending Brody on a mission to Gettysburg to transport the tailor who supplied him with a suicide vest to a safe house. In order to do this, Brody skipped a fundraiser with the Vice President and a chance to solidify their growing relationship. The trip to Gettysburg ended with Brody accidentally choking the tailor to death while explaining to Jessica, his wife, why he could not attend the fundraiser. Other absurd plot lines included Brody’s daughter Dana and Finn, the son of the Vice President Walden, running over a woman with a car and then covering it up; terror mastermind Abu Nazir murdering the Vice President via a wireless connection to his pacemaker; and Nazir’s ninja death squad murdering a team of CIA agents at the tailor’s shop in Gettysburg in broad daylight and walking out the front door with a chest full of explosives.  In “The Choice” Brody becomes America’s Most Wanted after his car explodes at a CIA memorial service for Walden. Somehow the Secret Service and the CIA did not notice someone move Brody’s car right next to the building hosting the service. No security personnel, at any point, noticed a large SUV parked in a restricted area? Really? These increasingly preposterous plot points created a jarring disconnect between the grounded and believable characters and a world around them that seemed hell-bent on descending into mindboggling stupidity.

            The writers of Homeland also made a major error by positioning Carrie and Brody as a romantic couple. The first season demonstrated how the experiences of the Iraq War psychologically damaged Carrie and Brody. As Carrie investigated whether Brody was indeed a terrorist, she recognized Brody as a similarly injured soul. As Carrie grew closer to Brody to further her investigation, they engaged in several sexual encounters as Brody attempted to figure out whether Carrie had confirmed his true loyalties. The way these two deeply psychologically scarred people played each other represented one of the highlights of the first season that culminated in “Q&A.” As the season dragged on, however, the writers attempted to convince the audience that Carrie and Brody actually had a deep and romantic love for each other. This notion rang false to what made these two characters interesting when paired together. Carrie’s love of Brody, as she identified him as similarly damaged to her and had him under surveillance for months, makes a certain amount of sense. His unconditional love of her does not. He after all, revealed her mental state to the CIA which resulted in her losing her job and undergoing electroshock therapy. Yet in “The Choice” they retreat to Carrie’s family cabin to discuss their future together and act as if they can leave the past behind—a brutally damaging past where he did terrible things to her in service of a terrorist plot. Brody’s confession that he saved her life over Walden’s is hardly the romantic gesture that the show would like the audience to believe. Brody attempted to kill the Vice President once and aided in Nazir’s plan to kill him a second time. With Carrie aiding Brody’s escape following the CIA bombing, the Carrie-Brody love story seems destined to continue into the third season.

            In its second season, Homeland’s illogical plotting undercut the outstanding performances by Lewis, Danes, and Patinkin and pushed Brody and Carrie in a direction that I have no interest in following.