“It helps that this guy Wellington is like a walking meme”
When he has time to reflect, David Wellington may well ponder exactly when everything went to hell. When Simone is subpoenaed to appear before Senator Paley’s judiciary committee he is furious. He gallantly buttonholes Paley on her behalf who tells him: “I don’t think you know her as well as you think you do,” and on that we can definitely agree. Before you can say “honey trap”, Simone lawyers up and begins negotiating an immunity deal. When he confronts her in a tapas bar, she stages an altercation that is duly filmed, uploaded and sent viral by the same army of bots that spread the ‘JJ is dead’ story. Wellington is thrown under the bus like an indie drummer and it hurts. He’s so far out of his depth, it’s not funny. We terribly overestimated him.
“You think Dante might be a part of that? You think I might be a part of that?”
Carrie wangles herself a seat at the committee and like everyone else present, is struck by what she hears. Unlike everyone else, she has the Carrie-o-vision eyes and ears in the Wellington household showing that David is as innocent as a babe. It prompts a return to that solid Homeland staple, Carrie in trouble, calling on Saul. He is naturally appalled by her illegal surveillance operation, but he quickly slips into problem-solving mode. He lends a sympathetic ear to her predicament and so much more. He joins the dots between the Simone Martin affair and what happened at Lucasville. He points out that it was Dante who brought Simone’s parking ticket to her attention and the scales fall from her eyes. Carrie wants Dante’s guts immediately, but Saul insists she lay low for a while as he works the Russian angle – he can’t risk her alerting anyone. She agrees. It’s the only sensible thing to do.
She reneges on that agreement and puts together an operation with her squad which involves honey trapping and sedating Dante in his own apartment. He will awaken to the sight of a seriously pissed off Carrie and her crew of ill-informed underpaid goons. Dating Carrie really is more trouble than it’s worth.
“If you’re right, whoever’s bankrolling this woman also wants McClendon’s murder pinned on the White House.”
Naysayers will gripe that his handling of the Lucasville standoff was not an unqualified success, but Saul is still smarter than the average bear. He works his socks off this week initially hitting up Russia expert Sandy, another refugee from Allison Carr’s downfall in season five. He teams her up with Clint – “the best information scientist at Darpa” – and they get to work back-engineering the Russian conspiracy.
Ivan, meanwhile confirms himself as a rotter by meeting up with Yevgeny Gromov. He tells Gromov that Saul is on to him and berates him for recycling his methods but like all social media influencers, Gromov is not one to be put off by a few haters. He’s part of a new breed, one that disdains the old Russia that Ivan embodies, contemptuous of its protocols and its failures.
Realising he’s in trouble, Ivan arranges a meeting with Saul. It’s the last thing he ever does. Yevgeny intercepts him, sticks him tied up and alive in a body bag before dumping him over the side of the boat. It’s a grisly death and further evidence if it were needed that this Gromov kid does not play.
Notes and observations
- Simone getting a parking ticket always felt a bit unlikely and it makes a lot more sense if it was engineered as now seems the case.
- Many of you in the comments called that Dante was up to no good, but don’t claim victory just yet. At least wait until Carrie and her squad have a few hours’ quality time alone with him.
- I do like the look Elizabeth gives David when she hears about Simone Martin for the first time (“The convoy, now this?”) It really takes the wind out of the announcement of her bond program for public schools which I was looking forward to hearing more about.
- It feels like a bit of a misstep to portray Krupin as the Bible-quoting Christian when Putin’s Russia is so closely enmeshed with the Orthodox Church. It does, however, give Gromov the chance to recite the Old Testament back at him before he kills him, like Jules from Pulp Fiction. He has the makings of a great Homeland villain.
Will Dante survive ordeal by Carrie? Is David doomed? Can Yevgeny be stopped? Let me know below.
