Carrie and Brody lost in the maze on Homeland’s opening credits.
As the weeks have gone by, I’ve become more and more hooked on the TV series Homeland. and the final episode ,aired on Channel 4 on Sunday night , was so tense and gripping it left me drained.
What made (makes) this drama so absorbing is that all the main characters have secrets and issues with CIA agent Carrie and Sergeant Brody (Damian Lewis) having more than their fair share.
Carrie, brilliantly played by Claire Danes, is a cocktail of positive and negative attributes – reckless, professional, brave, lonely, erratic, intuitive, manic, sexy and impulsive. Knowing that she’s a big fan of Jazz alerts us to the fact that she is no conventional heroine.
You don’t have to be crazy to work for the CIA – but it helps!
She suffers from bipolar disorder which is both a disability and a provides a credible explanation for her unpredictable methods. Paradoxically, the fact that she’s bordering on the edge of sanity is what makes her so good at her job. “I’m so over your detachment thing” she screams at the cool, collected colleague Saul (Mandy Patinkin) and being genuinely confused and alarmed by her actions is one of the things that kept me glued.
Episode 12 of Season One was real edge of the seat stuff which solved some of the mysteries but, with one eye on the viewing figures, cleverly left enough loose ends to leave me wanting more.
We still don’t know who the CIA mole is and Brody has turned so many times in the twelve weeks he probably doesn’t know himself which side he’s on.
One thing is clear is that the true villains of the piece are the politicians and the series is more of a ringing endorsement of Wikileaks than of American foreign policy .
Many viewers feel let down because they already knew that there’s a second 12 part series in the offing and complained that this took away some of the tension.
You might just as well say that reading the plot on Wiki ruined the enjoyment! The fact that the show has already aired in the US means that the truth is out there in Cyberspace for anyone who can’t be bothered to wait to see what happens next.
Personally, with shows like this one, I prefer to read and watch as little as possible . I limited myself to the Rebecca Nicholson’s Guardian blog was almost always on the nose and generated lots of witty and incisive observations.
“Is there something you need to tell me, Dad?”
Inevitably, there were plenty of quibbles over plot holes and far-fetched details. An example from the finale was to question the role of Brody’s 16 year daughter , Dana, who smelt a rat even before Carrie turned up at her door screaming that her dad was a terrorist. Dana’s phone call to the vice-president’s bunker was a turning point and some of the comments were rightly sceptical about this aspect of the plot:
- I can’t get a decent signal on my Blackberry in parts of Harrow, and I don’t live in a bunker.
- Dana couldn’t possibly have picked up on ‘something being wrong’….she’s 16 years old, dammit.
- to have Brody pulled back from the brink by Dana; okay, Carrie is bi-polar, but what form of enhanced empathy does Dana “suffer” from?
Contrived it may be (what drama isn’t) but the first-rate acting and intelligent script means that wild horses won’t be able to tear me away from season 2. Bring it on.
