TELEVISION
Popular drama series ‘Homeland’ returns for its sixth season with a plot eerily similar to real life.
Homeland, a series always conscious of current events, tries for some enforced topicality in its sixth season. Moving out of autumn for the first time, the show has a storyline pegged to its new winter slot and to the recent US election. The season is set during a presidential transition, with a presidentelect whose relationship to intelligence advisers is dicey.
Not even the most prescient of shows can see the future perfectly, though. The fictional incipient president is a woman (played by Elizabeth Marvel), and her politics appear to be dovish: She floats the idea of the United States pulling all its troops out of the Middle East.
Those details put quite a distance between Homeland and the reality of the real president-elect, Donald Trump. But it’s not gender or foreign-policy views that make the show feel out of tune with the times. It’s the courtesy the characters exhibit as they argue and negotiate, their automatic respect for the traditional processes of government. Life, at the moment, is scarier than fiction, and compared with the wholesale disintegration of civility taking place in Washington, Homeland looks quaint. It’s as if it were happening in another century.
And that’s not a bad thing. There’s something comforting about the normalcy of plot and counterplot, action and intrigue. Those have always been the series’ strong points, not ideas, and it may be easier to focus on them without worrying about how closely the story is mimicking events.
This peripatetic show is set for the first time in New York, where former CIA officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is working for an outpost of the German foundation that employed her in Season 5. Otto During (Sebastian Koch), her boss and (as far as we know) unrequited admirer, asks why she’s wasting her time doing small-potatoes work, helping Muslim-Americans negotiate the legal system.
The answer is that it’s where she can keep an eye on her soul mate, Quinn (Rupert Friend), who’s living in a veterans’ hospital after being sarin-gassed last season. The show’s usual roles have been reversed: Quinn is a crack-smoking mess, and Carrie, who appears to be safely on her meds, is the caretaker. By the end of the season premiere, Quinn has moved into her basement.
Early-season episodes of Homeland tend to be a bit laboured, as the elaborate machinery of the plot is put into place, and having only two episodes to review (presumably a defence against spoilers) makes it impossible to tell how well oiled the machinery will be.
Last Sunday’s premiere introduced two plot strands that we know will eventually, somehow, converge. A young Muslim video blogger (J Mallory McCree) is arrested on what seem to be shaky grounds, and Dar (F Murray Abraham) worries about a CIA mission that needs to be completed quickly.
Who’s the mole? When will Saul (Mandy Patinkin) stop doubting Carrie? In Homeland (as in 24, also from executive producer Howard Gordon), we look forward to the questions as much as to the answers. In the meantime, there’s more than enough pleasure to be had from the cast to keep us interested. Abraham and Patinkin, as his ever-hopeful CIA colleague Saul, have perfected their partnership: Their scenes together are masterpieces of gamesmanship and exasperation.
Friend’s performance of addiction may not convince every viewer, but it is, counterintuitively, fun to watch — he brings the same edge of sardonic humour to Quinn the junkie that he brought to Quinn the killing machine in past seasons. And Danes continues to deliver an interesting and sympathetic portrayal of a character whose trademark is her lack of humour. That’s a far more impressive trick than telling the future.