Homeland - End of Series

May 8th 2012

Homeland, Channel 4’s award winning US drama import, finished its first series on Sunday night, with its brilliance and popularity marked not by viewing figures, and not by the rave reviews, but by the fact that my housemate and I celebrated watching the last episode with a fry-up, a privilege previously only awarded to The Apprentice final. Nothing spells excitement like a celebratory fry-up.

The finale was as tense and rewarding as could be hoped, with Brody’s plan finally coming to light – kitted out in a bomb vest, he attended an event held by the Vice President, planning to exact revenge for a covered up drone attack the politician authorised that killed 82 children, including Abu Nazir’s son whom Brody befriended whilst held captive. Carrie, meanwhile, was depressed after her manic episode, pining for Brody, and jobless, with only Virgil and his van still willing to go along with her theories.

As rogue Marine Tom Walker unleashed his sniper attack on the event, only Carrie, roaming the area unofficially, understood this as a ploy to get Brody and his unorthodox undergarment into a secure bunker with his targets. Unable to get the CIA to listen, she had to rely on Brody’s suspicious daughter Dana to talk her dad down, in a thrilling race against time as Brody desperately rewired his bomb in the bunker.

Though Dana succeeded in getting the attack aborted, this left Brody still loyal to Nazir whilst appearing completely innocent, which drove Carrie to check herself into hospital to undergo ECT, worn out by her disorder and believing her theory incorrect. The series ended on a harrowing note as Carrie recalled Brody’s dream about Nazir’s son, a crucial indication of his links with Abu Nazir, but succumbed to anaesthetic before she could tell anyone. As she convulsed on the operating table, we were left to wonder whether this memory would survive the procedure.

The episode was a suitably exciting and nail-biting finish to a series that has been consistently superb, maintaining intrigue and intensity throughout. Possibly the best aspect of the series, however, has been Claire Danes’s outstanding portrayal of Carrie, especially in her accurate and powerful  depiction of her breakdown, leaving me genuinely upset to see her heartbroken and having lost the job she lived for at the end.

The character of Brody, meanwhile, was excellently handled, and given believable motives that made him more complex and interesting than a simple war hero gone bad, and was a perfect example of Homeland’s skill in blurring views of good and evil, and complicating the ‘them and us’ rhetoric of the war on terror.

The show is returning for a second series, and although the finale set up further avenues for the show to explore, with unanswered questions about a government mole and Brody’s missing confessional tape, I can’t see them topping the intrigue and originality of the first series now that we have a clearer idea of who Brody is. But while the second series will certainly have a different tone, if it can replicate the quality of the first series and its mature if bleak view on the war on terror, it will continue to be one of the best dramas on television.

Homeland - 'Pilot'

 

February 23rd 2012

After years of trying to keep up with critically acclaimed, high-concept American shows, watching with my face almost pressed to the screen for fear that I miss a crucial piece of garbled dialogue and inevitably ending the hour of viewing with a headache, I approached the much-hyped Homeland with some trepidation. In this case, however, such fears were completely unfounded, and I instead found a perfectly paced and gripping drama.

The central premise of the series is that a raid on an al-Qaeda compound stumbles upon prisoner of war Nicholas Brody (played by a terrifically beardy Damian Lewis), an American marine who has been missing for 8 years. Triumphantly borne back to America as a war hero, there is one woman who is not welcoming him with open arms: renegade CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes). Based on information that an American POW has been ‘turned’, gleaned from an unauthorised visit to a terrorist in an Iraqi prison ten months earlier, she decides that Brody is the POW in question, that their discovering him in the compound was a set-up, and that he has been brought back to the US as a threat, a sleeper agent about to bring down the country from the inside. Overwhelmed with suspicion but in her superiors’ bad books after her sortie into the Iraq prison, she goes rogue and sets up surveillance in Brody’s home, determined to unmask him.

Playing brilliantly with post-9/11 paranoia, the key to Homeland’s success lies not just in this intriguing premise, but in the way these themes of paranoia and trust pervade the entire show. What could have been a simple “is he evil or not?” is complicated by the uncomfortable truths we unravel about his opposite number: Carrie turns out to be suffering from a mood disorder, on anti-psychotic drugs, and with a history of unstable and reckless behaviour – and it soon becomes not just a question of whether she can trust Brody, but whether we can trust her.

By the end of the episode, through clever use of flashbacks we discover that Brody is certainly hiding something, after it is revealed that he lied about his fellow Marine’s death – Brody, under orders from Abu Nazir who he had claimed he had never met, beat him to death whilst they were held captive. The details are hazy, but it’s a clever way to end an episode built upon conspiracy and deceit.

My only reservation about Homeland would be whether the central intrigue can be sustained over the entire series as masterfully as it is in the opening episode. The inclusion of clever sub-plots such as Brody’s wife, under the impression he was dead, conducting an affair with his best friend, plus Brody’s children – one an unruly teen, the other too young to remember his father – seems to show that the drama has mileage. Homeland has already garnered awards in America and has been renewed for a second series, which suggests that this intense and enthralling drama is most definitely one to watch.