Last week’s Homeland Season 3 premiere on Showtime ended with an intense portrayal of sheer disbelief. It’s a powerful emotion, one that can disrupt the foundation of how we see the world and our place in it. It leaves us speechless, incredulous, asking “why” but knowing that no answer will ultimately be satisfactory. As she sat alone in her living room at the conclusion of last week’s episode, Carrie watched as her mentor Saul sold her out in front of Congress and on television, revealing her bipolar disorder and lying that the CIA knew about her affair with the terrorist-at-large Nicholas Brody. All she can do is sit in stunned silence.
I’m not trying to diminish the feeling Carrie experienced, but it serves as a powerful metaphor for how I felt after watching this week’s episode. The hour is called “Uh…Oh…Aw;” that might as well have been a transcript of my initial reaction as the final credits rolled. Quite frankly, this was the most head-scratching hour of television we’ve ever spent with Carrie, Saul, and the rest of this suddenly thin cast of characters, which clearly has a Brody-sized hole that can’t be filled soon enough.
The show can be whatever its very capable writing staff wants it to be. But Homeland’s second act seems to be turning more and more away from the espionage spy drama formula that garnered so much acclaim. In a vacuum, that’s fine—it’s confusing, but we’ve grown attached to many of these people over the last two years, so the move towards “character drama” isn’t all that far-fetched. The problem, though, is that the behavior of many of these characters has been wildly inconsistent with what we’ve come to expect from them. We know a lot about these people now, so it was even more glaring when they acted out of character, defying every expectation, many in the worst ways.
Carrie is off the rails from the episode’s beginning—she storms into Saul’s house looking for him, but he’s too busy bro-hanging with Dar Adal and being INCREDIBLY racist to deal with her. More on that later. She’s twitchy, conspiratorial, argumentative, and completely unstable. In the past, this version of Carrie has a heightened intuition. In spite of herself, she acted decisively and saw what was actually going on even when no one else believed her. Now, she’s frothing at the mouth so much that it’s hard to take her seriously. She might be right about the still-absent Brody after all, but this is hardly the way to make us want her to be able to prove that.
And quite honestly, you can’t really blame the CIA for needing to shut her down before she reveals classified information to a reporter, can you? When police officers arrive wielding a “psychiatric detention order” (I checked—this is a real thing), it’s a convenient and necessary step to shut her down. But turning her handicap into…well…a handicap, particularly one that she succeeded in spite of (or thanks to) earlier leaves her completely powerless. I guess it’s nice that her disorder isn’t being treated like some kind of superpower, but she’s been able to work her way out of plenty of jams before. Not this time, it seems.
At the hospital, the CIA has consulted a group of fake doctors who lie about her condition. They schedule a hearing to decide whether to commit her or not, but with the state she’s in (and with Dar Adal threatening to “handle” her), it appears not to be in her best interest to be out on the street shouting about Brody’s innocence from the rooftops anyway. The only person who seems to get that, strangely enough, is Peter Quinn—the ex-“soldier” who has now, somehow, become the moral compass of the show.
When we first met him last year, he was a suspicious, secretive agent with questionable motives. Though the seeds for this turn were planted at the end of last year, Homeland with Peter Quinn as its moralist is a fundamentally different story than the one we’ve following. He was the one who rammed the knife into Brody’s hand during “Q&A;” whether it was in a fit of rage or to be the bad cop to Carrie’s convalescent good one, it was still pretty twisted. Later, he almost killed Brody on multiple occasions. Now, he’s taking every chance he gets to talk about his feelings. When we met him, he wasn’t supposed to really have them at all.