[ Season premiere this Sunday ]
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Homeland Is Good Again[/h]
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[h=2]For now, at least.[/h] By
Willa Paskin
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<figcaption class="caption">Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has always been a complex, troubled character.</figcaption> Photo by Joe Alblas/Showtime
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If watching a television show is like being in a relationship,
Homelandhas done everything it can to make you regret dating it. The show, which begins its fourth season on Sunday night, seemed, initially, like a true catch. The first season introduced audiences to CIA agent Carrie Mathison, brilliant, intense, indefatigable, bipolar, and played with extraordinary nuance and
exemplary cry-face by Claire Danes. Carrie, and only Carrie, became convinced that Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damien Lewis), a war hero recently returned from a long period of brutal captivity, was, in fact, a terrorist. That first season,
which climaxed with Brody in a suicide vest, had everything: a thrilling plot, outstanding performances, complex characters, forbidden love, and, most of all, ideas in its head, about, among other things, the surveillance state, torture, and the virtues of diplomacy over force. It was simultaneously an advancement upon and a rejoinder to all the great—and not so-great—
antihero dramas, a thriller with a conflicted, ethically challenged antihero playing second fiddle to a complicated, prickly, frankly heroic female lead, in a series that dramatized the way violence begets more violence and trauma more trauma.
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<header>
Willa Paskin </header> Willa Paskin is
Slate’s television critic.
</section> And then
Homeland lost its mind. For the first half of the sophomore season, as Carrie and the CIA broke and finally turned Brody,
the show seemed as strong and psychologically astute as ever. But by season’s end, Brody had killed the vice president of the United States by hacking his pacemaker in order to rescue a kidnapped Carrie from a speechifying master terrorist.
Homeland, the erstwhile catch, revealed itself to be overwrought, implausible, ridiculous. It became so obsessed with what it thought was most interesting about itself—Carrie and Brody’s love story—that it took leave of its sanity, and its quality. Season 2
limped into Season 3, with Brody, the world’s most wanted terrorist, on the run, and Carrie and her mentor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) conspiring to get her locked in the loony bin for reasons too complicated to briefly summarize. That far-fetched plot was shortly outdone: Brody, secretly a U.S. agent now, went to Iran to ease diplomatic relations between the countries by killing the head of the Revolutionary Guard. He succeeded, but was publically executed anyway, while Carrie watched, pregnant with his child. At this point,
Homeland was not just a bad show, it was a show that had burned its audience. It wasn’t just mediocre, it was a disappointment.
<aside class="pullquote"> As tense as some of the action sequences are, there is no scene quite as chilling as that of Carrie giving her baby a bath.
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Why, after all that transpired, would you let such a series back into your life? Season 4 of
Homeland appears to be genuinely engaged with this question. It seems humbled, implicitly apologetic about the mistakes that came before. The result is a series shorn of many of its complications, some of its over-reaching, and much of its implausibility. It is still psychologically astute, but it has become a much more straightforward, and largely effective, spy show. If you do not want to let
Homeland back into your heart, that’s understandable. But maybe let it crash on your couch for a probationary period.
The new season begins a few months after the finale left off. Carrie is the station chief in Kabul, where she is overseeing an operation hunting down highly wanted targets. She has just learned the whereabouts of one such target from Sandy (Corey Stoll), the station chief in Islamabad and, of late, a fount of good intel regarding the location of high-level terrorists in Pakistan’s border region. With very little time to vet the information, Carrie OKs a bombing run. The terrorist is killed—but so are many dozens of civilian members of his family gathered for a wedding. In short order, the bombing blows back on the CIA and the State Department. A young medical student who survived the bombing, and may be more than what he seems, has video of the wedding festivities—children dancing, women laughing—right before they were all killed. The video goes viral. Sandy’s source goes missing and blows his cover, raising questions about whether Sandy was being played. And CIA Chief Lockhart (Tracy Letts) wants Carrie back in D.C. to cover for him, just as she is beginning to smell a conspiracy.
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