In the continued absence of Brody, “Homeland” remains a drama about women. Of the three strong-willed women in Sunday’s episode, one was taken in cuffs to a hospital, another broke into a hospital and a third, a newcomer, tried to find her place at the CIA.
Carrie is still off her meds and on the rampage. She starts by pounding Saul’s door at home, demanding to see him. She’s still quite angry about “being sold down the river in front of a Senate subcommittee” last week.
When she goes to a newspaper to tell her story, she’s all crazy-eyed and ready to fly off the handle and cry conspiracy. The reporter shrinks back and is skeptical. The D.C. cops show up with a psychiatric detention order.
Carrie is sure it’s Saul behind this, but it’s actually his dark ops colleague Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) who told Saul that she has to be stopped.
We hate seeing Carrie like this but it gets worse: cuffed to a gurney at a psychiatric hospital, yelling at the doctor who tries to explain the commitment hearing the next day.
So Saul places his own house call, trying to convince Carrie’s sister and dad, who are understandably angry at him, that he has her best interests at heart and that they should bring her medication to the hearing.
Carrie looks terrible at the hearing and her family do bring her the drugs, but she’s unhappy at this and that they had talked to Saul. She goes off her nut, screams that the whole thing is a sham and is in the end indeed committed. And when, at the end of the episode, Saul goes to visit her and apologizes but despite severe treatment that leaves her with severe cottonmouth and an overall inability to speak, she manages to tell him “forget you” or more vulgar words to that effect that are more effective on cable.
As bad a time that she had at her own psychiatric hospital, young Dana takes it on herself to break back into the one she was in so she can meet a guy there that she liked named Leo.
She had been trying to adjust to life at home but her mother had been on her like a hawk from the beginning and it’s a little testy there. But her night with Leo, after breaking into the laundry room is bliss for her. “I just really needed to see you,” she tells him.
They are discovered by security in the morning and Dana’s mom is kind of miffed. But Dana has had a realization and makes it clear to her mom: She wanted to kill herself before, but she doesn’t any more. She wants to be alive. Leo makes her want to live. And as mom, Morena Baccarin just cries. And it’s kind of a moving moment.
Later, when going through a box of old photos of her dad in the garage, she also stumbles upon his old prayer rug where she famously discovered him two seasons ago. She rolls it out and kneels on it in prayer, just to see what it feels like. It’s the closest she’s been to her dad in months.
Meanwhile a third woman enters the drama – a transactions expert named Fara Sherazi, whose headscarf causes some second looks when she enters CIA headquarters in Langley and also when she meets Saul and Peter Quinn.
Saul dismisses her as “a kid in a headscarf” and later browbeats her for not digging enough connections between banks and funding of Abu Nazir’s organization. Finally he yells at her for wearing a headscarf that is an insult to all the people killed in the CIA bombing.
She sheds a tear but goes to work. Fara is played by the quietly determined Nazanin Boniadi, an Iranian born actress who once played Nora on “How I Met Your Mother” and just may be most famous for supposedly being recruited by Scientology leaders to be Tom Cruise’s wife in 2004.
Fara finds direct connections between the bank and Iran and emails that say the bank should keep the Iranian connection quiet. She even declares that the bank has been “trafficking in human misery since the opium war.”
But the bank president, hauled in from New York, is not willing to accept this insinuation — especially from a woman in a headscarf.
“With all due respect, m’am, in this country that’s now how we ask for help.” And he leaves.
But Quinn, who witnessed all this, won’t leave it be. He’s already mad at the way the CIA has been treating Carrie and tells Saul he won’t stand for it much longer. “When this is over, I’m out,” he says.
Then he meets the banker out at a restaurant and threatens him to cooperate or something might happen. Suddenly the records all show up, and sure enough the Iran connections are there. But one portion of it is missing, and Saul, possibly still seeking the CIA mole asks Fara to research that part of it quietly and to keep it to herself.
So the the second episode of season three provides a reason for Dana and family to still be part of it and progress is made on the money connection, but some this is a serious bad hurdle for Carrie. Last time she was hospitalized like this, it took until the next season for her to recover. She’s got to act a lot faster now.
And indeed, previews for next week show her attempting to escape the hospital (the meeds work!). And there’s one other thing: Brody returns!