For a show that hid its main mystery for a season, “Homeland” is good at hiding its hand.
Sunday’s episode turned on a conclusive twist so deliciously unexpected, it set on course much of what’s been happening this season.
After last week’s unusual episode, that caught up on Brody’s ordeal, on the lam and seemingly trapped in Caracas, this week was all back in D.C., with all manner of old characters showing up, from Virgil to Mike.
It begins with Carrie preparing herself for a hearing for a discharge from her court-ordered psychiatric treatment.
Everybody thinks it will go well for her; her advocate, her doctors, an independent evaluator. But then Carrie’s dad and sister don’t show up and, following a break in which she sees F. Murray Abraham’s Black Ops dude Abu Nadal scurrying through the hall, spreading his evil influence everywhere in his single minded endeavor to shut her down.
On meds or off, she was learning the truth of Joseph Heller’s line in “Catch-22”: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
Her release is denied.
Her dad tells her he’d been told the hearing had been canceled – more sabotage! There’s no fighting his evil clutches.
Saul had pretty much told Nadal to shut Carrie down, seemingly eliminating any thought he still has a warm place in his heart for his former star agent. On the other hand, Saul cuts Nadal out of the discussion he’s having with the new investigator, tracing the money that’s been skimmed from an Iranian laundering scheme that has also funded terrorists.
It’s traced to a guy who has some connection with Venezuela and has been funneling the money into a big soccer club there. We’re pretty aware they’re setting the stage for a new plan of operation and target for the series, but so far it’s so many vague names and places. Saul says he wants to not just shut this guy down, but to get him in a room and get information face to face.
Amid all this Leo has broken out of his hospital, where security is clearly not as tight as that in Carrie’s hospital. Leo, you will recall, is the young man Dana has been crushing on, going so far as to break back into the hospital after she was released to see the dude and bed him down in the laundry room.
This time, Leo’s broken out, and all of a sudden he’s barreling down the road smoking with Dana at the wheel of her mom’s car. How much in love is the addled girl? She doesn’t mind when he tosses her cellphone out of the window to ditch any GPS tracking.
They’re practically Bonnie and Clyde when they try to trade in the mom’s car for another one that can’t be as easily traced (though “Natural Born Killers” is the movie she cites).
Leo’s angry parents thinks Dana is the bad influence – a daughter of a suspected terrorist can have that reputation. But before the episode is over Mike (!), who is back helping out Dana’s mom Jessica has some more bad news: The lad might have killed his younger brother, and is not just reacting to a suicide but the cause of his death.
So: Dana is out with a possible killer! And Leo is to her what the mountain lion was to Kim Bauer. And the side story is just as superfluous even as they stop by the brother’s grave and quote Coleridge or pause at the place where Dana lost her dad: When he went into the Marines.
What’s most interesting about the Brody domestic group is that Morena Baccarin is so obviously pregnant by now, they try all kinds of ways to try to hide her growing belly with big blouses and odd camera angles.
Back at the hospital, Carrie is surprised to learn she’s been sprung by order of the 6th circuit of Maryland. Which is doubly surprising since her release hearing was conducted by a judge from the 6th circuit of Virginia.
(I thought I had caught some huge “Homeland” gaffe here, but Saul questions the jurisdiction in a later scene).
She’s freed by the attorney representing the agent of a foreign entity, the same oily dude who had showed up last week. Carrie rightly saw through his ploy – that he was preying on his vulnerability and weakness and trying to get her to provide secrets to the other side.
They’ve got connections. They got a judge to issue a 24-hour release so she could meet the partner to discuss his proposal. Carrie indicates she is no more inclined to help the cause, but she is tempted by the freedom.
She agrees and gets a ride home (a home that doesn’t look at all like Adams Morgan, where she says her place is). Immediately she starts packing and grabs her passport. But things are tough: her bank account is frozen, her credit cards canceled, her car towed away.
She calls her old pal Virgil and asks to borrow his van. He hints that he’s being watched too by asking how her mom is.
Carrie ends up at the door of the one night stand we hardly remember from a long-ago episode just to have a place to stay and to shake the two sets of eyes that are on her: the CIA bent on discrediting her and the local representative of the foreign concern.She picks his wallet for some cash in the morning like a common streetwalker.
A big black SUV rolls up and she takes her meeting with the partner at a fancy house in Potomac. They want information, such as how the CIA found out out about the six operatives whose deaths began the season. Carrie says she won’t consider betraying any confidences.
Then the guy, whose name is Lee Bennett, says that she may not have a choice: The CIA is going to chew her up just as they have been, sullying her name, ending her career, maybe rubbing her out.
“I’m not a traitor,” she says.
“No, what you are is a liability to a lot of people with a lot to lose,” he tells her.
She considered it and said she would help out on a couple of conditions: She won’t name names that would betray people in the field, and she would share this information with her client face to face only.
In the final scene, she ends up at Saul’s house, face to face. She doesn’t threaten him and he welcomes her. She said she took five hours to shake all the people following her in order not to be seen there.
And then she spills the line that undermines the entire season: “It worked, Saul!”
Oh my. The whole systematic breakdown of Carrie, from the Congressional hearing to her apprehension at the newspaper office to the psychiatric detention were all designed to draw out these people who would approach her for information.
It almost makes you want to rewatch the whole season to see if this holds up or is just something they just came up with. I mean, Claire Danes may be an Emmy-winning actress, but is Carrie Mathison just as good? She had to convince everyone she was breaking down all along.
And now Saul gets his dream of sitting in a room and having a one-on-one showdown with the Iranian guy, except that Carrie is going to do it.
Previews for next week show the Iranian guy on his way and some sort of confrontation, including one between Carrie and Mrs. Brody. (No hint at what happens with Dana and Leo, though; maybe they’ll drop that one altogether).
And the mention of Venezuela suggests an eventual connection to Brody himself, one way or another.