Sunday, November 24, 2013
Homeland, series three, episode eight, Channel 4, review
Cast your mind back, if you can, to Homeland's glorious first series. The tension was thick, constant, unyielding. Almost nothing happened in public. Every flinch, every private moment, every glance was loaded with significance. If Brody (Damian Lewis) nearly got found out in his garage with his Muslim prayer gear, it was enough to give viewers at home a heart attack. When Yorkshire Tea was mentioned at the wrong moment, it could have brought down the entire CIA.
Now fast-forward to the latest episode, with its Keystone Kops action scenes and its Inspector Clouseau subterfuge. The disappointment in watching it reminded me, in an odd way, of that dreadful second series of Downton Abbey, in which catastrophic spinal injuries came and went, and disfigured foreign cousins turned up out of the blue.
In this episode of Homeland, Carrie (Claire Danes) got shot by her own colleagues. I'm going to repeat that: the CIA shot Carrie. This is the show that once toyed so brilliantly with Carrie's bipolar disorder, that much of each week's drama took place in her head. Now they have to literally shoot her, in order to keep a mid-series episode limping along.
Fortunately for Carrie – and therefore for Homeland's dwindling chances at next year's Emmys – said CIA sniper was a terrible shot, so she only got a bullet in the bicep. On top of that, she was definitely pregnant, having turned up at the hospital for a scan. Next week: a miscarriage, perhaps? Or maybe, given the show's trajectory, the foetus will turn out to be a space monster and pop out of Carrie's abdomen, Alien-style.
Yet that wasn't even the episode's daftest plotline. For that honour, we'll even skip past Mira's (Sarita Choudhury) jilted boyfriend, and his Pink Panther-style escapades planting bugs at the Berenson residence. No, the most ridiculous moment came when Saul (Mandy Patinkin) announced that his sponsorship of Javadi (Shaun Toub) as a double agent was a ruse to achieve regime change in Iran.
This is a programme which once took pride in its ability to reflect real-life events in its stories, often with some subtlety. If it wants to keep any connection to reality, then Saul's plan is doomed to failure, full stop. Which, I'm bound to point out as a TV critic, rather drains the dramatic tension out of the storyline.
As this third series draws to its close – there are four episodes to go – it's time to speculate on what the big finish will be. Can Carrie exonerate Brody from involvement in the CIA bomb, and settle down with him to raise their lovely child in the North Virginia suburbs? Unlikely.
Are the nasty lawyers really as dumb as they seem? These are the people that are Machiavellian enough to be on a shady retainer from the Iranian government, and who will shoot their own in a motel room in cold blood, and yet apparently fall for Carrie's double-agent shtick without even scratching their heads. That motel shooting, straight after Carrie was wounded, surely had more to it than it seemed.
And then there's Brody, discovered by Saul at the very end of this episode, languishing in a cell just as he was at the very start of the series – only this time in Caracas, not Damascus. Saul surely has big plans for our ginger hero. Let's just hope they're a bit more plausible than the guff that populated episode eight.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/340d69cf/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctvandradio0Ctv0Eand0Eradio0Ereviews0C10A4655610CHomeland0Eseries0Ethree0Eepisode0Eeight0EChannel0E40Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
