Homeland‘s Season Opener Is So Laughably Bad It Almost Circles Back Around to Being Good

Homeland’s intrepid heroine, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), begins the series’ seventh season committed to #theresistance. She calls President Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel), probably rightly, a “fascist,” and nods when her niece compares POTUS to Stalin; she dredges up a source from her tumultuous past and attempts to arrange a meeting with a senator from the opposition. But the senator’s top aide is skeptical about Carrie’s cloak-and-dagger routine—the burner phones, the implausible wigs, the various feints by which our protagonist continues to elude those who would silence her. “Is this spy shit,” the woman inquires, “really necessary?”

Carrie’s retort notwithstanding—I’m surprised she didn’t sprain an ankle jumping down from her high horse—one could say the same of Homeland’s laughably awful season opener, which manages to be both didactic and goofy. In “Enemy of the State,” the series exaggerates the (at times) bracing self-awareness of Season Six until it starts to resemble self-parody, unaided by the episode’s thankless quest to pose Big Questions about American authoritarianism in the same breath. From the outset, with the frantic jazz that accompanies Carrie’s grimacing morning workout, it’s one nerve ending away from winking at the audience, before settling back into dust-dry conversations about marches and free thinkers and collaborators and norms. The entire hour follows this frustrating pattern; it’s as if the first draft of the script were written by an op-ed columnist and the second by the staff of Saturday Night Live.

Since we last saw Carrie being carried out of the Oval Office anteroom, bellowing through the door at an unmoved president, more than 200 former government officials have been arrested in connection with the attempt on Keane’s life. Her response to the threat has become a full-fledged purge, and in case you failed to notice that she’s out for blood, Homeland is considerate enough to make the metaphor literal: Keane appears at the sentencing hearing of the top conspirator, one Gen. McClendon, to demand his execution. This is already somewhere comfortably past subtle, but wait, there’s more! Later, when McClendon’s sentenced to life in prison, she directs her chief of staff, David Wellington (Linus Roache), to go full Godfather and take him out anyway. One of the episode’s funniest lines comes after he balks, and tries to convince her to, well, chill. “I didn’t bring you back from political exile,” she snipes, “to be my girlfriend.”

Meanwhile, conservative radio host / walking writers’ room crutch Brett O’Keefe (Jake Weber) is on the run from the feds and recording his program on the fly at a series of hideouts in what we know as Trump country. (Is it Keane country, too? For a series that’s become so much about politics, Homeland’s actually breathtaking mealy-mouthed when it comes to dealing with ideological specifics.) He’s nuttier than Keane is, though his accusation that the assassination was a false flag operation, designed to give cover for the crackdown, has the flair of a premonition—I wouldn’t be surprised to see it come true by season’s end. The fact is, gratuitous menopause digs aside, O’Keefe is a cardboard cutout, and not a particularly lifelike one, either. I suppose there’s a critique of Blue Lives Matter hand-waving in the fact that he’s rescued from U.S. Marshals by the local police (avid listeners, apparently), but I was chuckling so hard at the sheer convenience of it all that I must’ve missed it.