Homeland’s fourth season marked a pleasing return to form for the counter-terrorism drama (though one with a slightly deflating denouement), meaning that expectations for its forthcoming fifth season were high. Building anticipation further, the show’s creators have been drip-feeding information about what that fifth season might entail: we know that Carrie is now based in Berlin, and that the season will feature storylines referencing Isis and Edward Snowden (and, as we know, TV plots ripped from the headlines are all the rage these days).
“This story is current,” creator Alex Gansa told the Hollywood Reporter last month. “With all of the stuff that’s going on just south of Berlin in the Middle East and to the east in Russia and Ukraine, it’s fascinating. Carrie is out of the intelligence business when the season starts and she finds herself in Berlin. It’s a center for dissidence – that’s where hacktivists go because German privacy laws are so strict. It’s hard to have surveillance on people there.”
Now the first full trailer has been released and confirms some of those details. Carrie Mathison is indeed working in Germany, as the head of security for a billionaire philanthropist, and there looks set to be a heavy hacking subplot, with Saul investigating some leaked drone data and Carrie finding herself caught up in it. Where the Isis-themed storyline comes into all this is unclear, but elsewhere all of those old Homeland favourites are in evidence: Dar Adal looking shifty, Quinn killing lots of people and Saul calling Carrie “naive and stupid”. Good to have you back, Homeland.
