Homeland
I think we’re about halfway through the first season of Homeland, so it seems like a fine time to offer some impressions.
I was really excited about this show. It had Damien Lewis, an awesome actor who I think does not get nearly enough work, and he was playing a Marine and a veteran of Iraq, which certainly touches close to home, so to speak. It also had a premise that I felt held a lot of promise: you have this Marine who was a presumed-dead prisoner of Al Qaeda following his capture in the Iraq invasion. He’s found in Afghanistan, of all places, shortly after a CIA agent of dubious mental stability (played by Claire Danes) receives a warning that an American POW has been converted to the cause and made a terrorist. Naturally, she twigs to Brody, Damien Lewis’s character, after he’s rescued and starts a dangerous, quasi-official investigation into him starting from the moment he returns home.
I figured they could play this three ways, two of them being more interesting than the third. The first, was that Brody has not been turned at all. Yeah, he’s damaged. Sure, he’s rather angry at the Marine Corps and the government for seemingly giving him up for dead. But he’s no terrorist, and the real terrorists are using him as a pawn/stalking horse in their attempt to pull one over on the CIA and perpetrate a really nasty attack. All they intended to do was mess him up but good and plant the seed through Claire Danes and make the CIA chase their tails, distracting them from their real plans.
The second possibility is that Brody is sort of faking it as a turned terrorist. He can’t tell the truth to the CIA because they’ll only knock out a small part of the operation, and he thinks they could score a much bigger victory if he’s working as a sort of independent double agent-being a good mole/plant/whatever, but trying to work to undo the bad guys’ efforts from sorta-within. In there, there’s also the possibility that Damien Lewis suspects the CIA themselves of having a mole or a plant, so he can’t trust them with what he knows because the bad guys will just take him out and go on without him.
The third, and most boring possibility is that he really is a terrorist. The only way I think this could be redeemed is if they were setting him up to be a kind of Manchurian candidate, and there are powerful Americans behind the whole thing, using him through Al Qaeda, or whatever. Still, I think that’s still rather boring because it’s almost too straightforward. And the thing that makes me worry that they’re on this track is that they’ve portrayed certain moments which I think are ambiguous, but seem to be intended as shocking reveals of his true terroristic nature, such as an apparent conversion to Islam. I’m hoping it’s more nuanced than that, but for some reason I just don’t have that much faith in them.
Overall, the rest of the series has been pretty well done, and Damien Lewis, Claire Danes, and Mandy Patinkin (who has been offering up about a dozen reasons per episode for him to bail out at the end of this season or the next) have knocked out their respective roles. And the various subplots revolving around Brody reintegrating with his family and dealing with all the things he missed during the 8 years he was gone have been pretty engaging and well done (if a little obvious).
Ah well. We’ll see what the rest of the season brings. Good things, I hope.
Mirrored from Bum Scoop.