The problem all the way through this season of Homeland (Channel 4) has been that it can’t decide what it is. It doesn’t want to be a 24-style action-thriller, but nor does it want to be an introspective character drama. So it’s had the longeurs and plot weaknesses of a character-driven show, with all the incomprehensible, thinly-drawn characterisation of an action film. People did stuff and then they died; people betrayed their country, and then just went about their ordinary business. There was never any climax and never any relief. I mean all this as a critical friend, really. I still watch it.
For the first half, 13 Hours in Islamabad was a radical improvement; a lot of stuff happened, some of it detonating mines that were planted in previous episodes, and various people wanted various different outcomes. There was heroism and pure evil, and Carrie had a hairline injury that gave her patches of derring-do blood. It was almost as if someone had been on a course about how to write for prime time.
Here’s the thing: the plot to kidnap Saul, and then the plot to swap him in an incredibly asymmetrical hostage exchange, and then the plot to kill him anyway, it was all just a diversionary plot away from the main plot, which was to attack the American embassy, in which they were affably and somewhat puzzlingly abetted by Dennis, the ambassador’s husband. In second world war films, the Germans were always much beefier yet somehow we still won. In Homeland, they take this strategic propaganda of weakness much further; it turns out there are a mere 17 marines in the whole of Pakistan, and only two of them are competent. They all tear off to save Carrie, and then all get shot down like flies, while the bloodstained ladyspook and her hirsute mentor survive by hiding behind a car. Darwinism, that is. Raw intelligence, right there on the table.
Meanwhile, some clicks away, the main plot unfolds: Haqqani arrives in the embassy, through the tunnels. Immediately, half the staff are dead. I imagine that is how it happens in real life – you probably don’t mess around with the “nobody move/ touch that button and I blow off your knee cap/ *sniffle*/ gratuitous killing/ sharp intake of breath underpinned by determination to maintain dignity” routine. So totally did it defy the conventions of the terrorist drama that it was utterly transfixing, even beyond the magnetism of the fact that some stuff was actually happening for a change.
In the vaults, bad Dennis cowered, while Martha gave him the first in her series of contemptuous looks. I like the way she really puts her back into them. By the end, for the “I can’t believe you’re so spineless that you didn’t even commit suicide, after I expressly, though for reasons none of us really understands, gave you the apparatus to do so” look, her nostrils are twitching alternately like puppets on a string. The important briefcase, the identity of which all terrorists are instantly able to guess by smell and x-ray vision, so that no decoy could possibly have been deployed, was also in the vaults. Haqqani started shooting people in the head to get them to open up. He promised not to kill them if they would just open the goddam door. An averagely intelligent person would have been able to tell that he didn’t mean it. Sadly, the Senate is apparently beset by the same poor recruitment processes as the army, and Lockhart immediately hit the big red door button. Quinn saved everybody apart from the already-dead ones and the nice one (Fara), who was the only person in the embassy that anybody liked. Presumably, this ends the same way as the second world war, with the weak people implausibly winning; but I cannot, from this vantage point, see how.
2014: Britain’s Year of Wildest Weather (Channel 4) was gob-smacking and hilarious. There is nothing more majestic than the sight of a wave at its full height. There is nothing more amusing than watching a person trying to film a wave on their phone then get knocked over by the wave. Four men take advantage of unprecedented flooding to surf through Bude. Coincidentally, a study of the Darwin Awards – which go to people who die in foolish ways – found that 90% of the “winners” had been men. I’m not saying that men are less intelligent than women, no, no, no. I’m just saying that there weren’t many women surfing down the streets of Bude.
