Spoiler alert: this review is for US viewers who are one week ahead of the UK.
By the end of its third season Homeland, once the darling of television critics and Emmy voters, had outstayed its welcome. The continuation of CIA agent Carrie Mathison’s (Claire Danes) love affair with marine double agent Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) had turned the show into an unbelievable and tedious soap opera. The rebooted fourth season was much better, at least right up until the finale.
The fourth season started with Carrie and fellow agent Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) back at home after a disaster in the Middle East and they both hated life stateside. Carrie orchestrated getting them back into the field in Pakistan, which is when the season really started to soar. While it still concerned Carrie’s very persnickety way of dealing with her co-workers (and her mental illness), it was mostly an action show, watching the CIA crew go on a series of high-stress missions before the American embassy was taken over by a group of terrorists in one of the tensest, saddest, most emotional episodes of television all year.
The season finale last night didn’t really live up to that promise. Why? Because it brought Carrie home again. What made Homeland’s first season so amazing was that it was a perfect combination of the personal and the political. Brody’s life was ruined by the war and you see the personal toll his involvement took on him. Carrie was one of the people running this war and her personal obsessions were coloring the way she approached it. This just wasn’t about spying and action, but about two fascinating individuals who were both victims and perpetrators at the same time.
Homeland hasn’t been able to find that balance since. This season got rid of Brody and hyped up the action, but it never found a way to make what was happening with Carrie personally dovetail with what happened with her professionally. At the beginning of the season Carrier was dealing with her newborn daughter and Quinn found himself in an unlikely relationship. What happened with those as soon as they got to Pakistan? We totally forgot about them. The final episode brought us back to the US and suddenly we’ve forgotten everything that’s happened overseas.
Most of the finale was about Carrie dealing with her father’s death and her mother’s reappearance. After 10 episodes hunting a Pakistani terrorist, we finish off the season learning more about Carrie’s mommy issues? This season was about Carrie, Quinn and Saul (Mandy Patinkin) trying to hide from their lives at home with the action of the battlefield, but when the show ignored those lives back home so completely, it made viewers not care about them either. And, as a result, we never really got closure on the terrorism storyline that drew us in so effectively.
Also the romance between Carrie and Quinn seems ill advised. Is there one man that Carrie has come across that she hasn’t tried to sleep with? The show hasn’t adequately dealt with her getting over Brody or Aayan (Suraj Sharma), the Pakistani medical student Carrie seduced and then witnessed being killed. Now all of the sudden she’s making out with Quinn after her father’s funeral? Yes, Carrie makes bad decisions with men and she tells Quinn that she knows it’s going to end badly, so why does she do it? Unlike with Brody or Aayan she has nothing to gain, so it feels like her one true romance needs to be earned a little bit more.
The thing about this season of Homeland is that it was very much like 24, which show creators Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon worked on before this. The main intent for this season of Homeland was to be a spy thriller, like The Bourne Identity, but without all those shaky camera shots. It succeeded by co-opting several of the devices that were used nearly every season in 24: a no-good spouse acts as a traitor to their powerful partner, one agent goes rogue when his agency won’t go along with his plan, an authority figure who is so weak that he gives into the terrorists.
The result was a very entertaining season, one that moved at a great speed and provided surprising twists and lots of compelling action. What it never integrated into that were the personal stories. Instead, they were just tacked on to the beginning and the end of the season to try to give this some depth, like a “for your consideration” ad that was a part of the series itself.
Homeland is still a really good show and a lot of fun to watch. But I don’t think it can ever be that great show again, capturing our dread about the post 9/11 world and the compromises Americans make to ensure our safety. Will it be slick and well-plotted and utilize Claire Danes’s acting to the very tips of her toes every episode? Be sure that it will. But until it can find a way to blend what is happening with the agents at home as well as in the field, then Homeland’s glory days will be behind it.
