Homeland: Monkey Business

“R Is for Romeo” encapsulates the promise of, and the problems with, Homeland’s iterative approach to storytelling this season: On the one hand, its obsession with replaying the past, as if desperate to repair the damage, befits the series’ painful acknowledgment that the intelligence agencies have been decoupled from the national interest they ostensibly serve; on the other, the resulting sense of stasis produces the most ham-fisted attempt at “characterization” since Carrie (Claire Danes) and Brody’s twisted love affair came to an end in Season Three. I refer, of course, to Quinn’s (Rupert Friend) monkey business: His brief metamorphosis into a howling creature in that unfinished home strikes such a false note that it nearly upends the entire episode, an otherwise effective staging ground for next Sunday’s season finale. Along with his brutal murder of Astrid’s assassin, itself depicted in gruesome detail, the moment underlines Homeland’s unfortunate penchant for forcing the issue when a simpler approach will do. After all, it’s his other accusation that sends Carrie spinning through her personal history, one defined by the mission’s merciless logic. “You had no choice,” he says of her sacrifices on his behalf. “You made me this way.”

That he ultimately abandons this line of argument, claiming that the CIA shaped, or perhaps merely tapped, his deep reserves of rage, is the clearest indication that “R Is for Romeo” lacks the conviction to carry off Quinn’s sudden rupture; cut the first act altogether and the episode would still serve its purpose, which is to introduce the season’s final threat. As if to confirm that the writers are trying too hard, the hour features a slew of similarly misconceived devices, references to the real world that fit uneasily into the season’s arc. What evidence has Homeland offered to suggest that President-elect Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel) is viewed as illegitimate (“Not my president!”), rather than just unpopular? To indicate that a doctored video of her son’s death would prove so controversial that she’d be asked if she plans to resign? To imply that she’d be so shaken by the mass of protestors outside her hotel? (There is some precedent for the fecklessness of her Secret Service detail, which did manage to lose track of her in “The Return.”) In “R Is for Romeo,” the strain of the series’ effort to keep pace with current events is finally starting to show.

Still, the episode includes more than one interlude in which its exaggerated realism pays dividends, most notably as Keane appears on The Real Truth with Brett O’Keefe (Jake Weber) to combat the slander of her son’s reputation. No politician in his or her right mind (ahem) would submit to an interview with a conspiracy theorist of O’Keefe’s ilk, and yet, amid the heightened drama of “R Is for Romeo,” Keane’s stern rejoinder to the right-wing fabulist is almost stirring—in the same way it’d be stirring to see Hillary Clinton wipe the floor with Alex Jones. “Creating false stories doesn’t make democracy more equal,” Keane says, exposing O’Keefe’s bot farm in the process. “It harms it, deeply.” Indeed, though he doesn’t utter the word itself, Saul sees a coup in the making: He compares the disinformation campaign and accompanying false-flag attack to the U.S.-backed overthrow of governments in Iran and the Congo, Chile and Nicaragua, dating back to the earliest days of the Cold War. “You’re fighting for your lives here, do you get that?” he advises. “You can’t afford to remain silent.”

As Dar (F. Murray Abraham), for reasons that remain unclear, enlists Max (Maury Sterling) to gain access to O’Keefe’s next project—a website that will help pin the blame for what’s to come on disturbed veteran Peter Quinn—there’s no doubt that Homeland means us to take Saul’s warning literally. “Romeo time,” as Quinn explains to Carrie, refers to the East Coast of the United States, a piece of intelligence that sets her mind, and the camera, racing. As we follow her through the flag house in search of the solicitor general, the frantic pace that the series has held at arm’s length this season arrives in the nick of time; again, the word itself need not be spoken aloud to know that the Special Forces hiding out in Queens plan to assassinate the president-elect. This is where Homeland shines, an avenue one hopes the finale pursues with equal vigor: In the space between the lines and beneath the rhetoric, so terse, so spare, that it edges up to the border between suspense and horror. When the season’s second bomb explodes, interrupting Carrie’s panicked phone call to Keane’s chief of staff, the series seems ready to stop monkeying around. It’s about time.