Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Homeland gives the long war a long goodbye
In the eighth and final season of Homeland, CIA officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) returns to Afghanistan and comes across the child of a contact she dealt with years ago. He’s growing tall now. When she last saw him, he barely came up to her knee.
Homeland, which returned Feb. 9 on Showtime, is about a lot of things, personal and geopolitical. But at its most powerful, the new season conjures that simple, sad feeling: My God, it’s been so long. All of this — the war, the fear, the vengeance — has been with us for so many years, it’s hard to remember a time without it.
That feeling was built into
Homeland. It began, in 2011, a full decade since the Sept. 11 attacks. 24 — the show’s precursor, with which Homeland shares creative talent — had by then aired eight seasons.
Where 24 flourished in the fight-or-flight rush of 9/11’s aftermath, spinning out cathartic fantasies of ever-bigger terrorist attacks on the United States, Homeland looked at the psychic cost of all those years of fighting and catastrophizing.
Jack Bauer, the tortured torturer of 24, took on the physical burden of the war on terror. He was a hard-boiled St. Sebastian, pin-cushioned with all the arrows he took for us over the years. Homeland, created by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa of 24 and based on an Israeli series, focused on the war’s internal wounds through Carrie, an officer living with bipolar disorder as well as lingering horror at the intelligence failures before 9/11.
As dicey as it can be to use actual mental illness as a symbol for national trauma, Carrie was a kind of synecdoche for a rattled America. She fought the shadow war for us and felt it — more intensely so when she took the case of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), an American prisoner of war turned by his captors into a sleeper agent, who became her target and her lover.
There could have been a version of Homeland that ran as a single, devastating limited series and went out a legend. This version did not. As it spun Brody’s story into a second season, then killed him off in a third, it began to suffer from implausibility and plot one-upmanship.
But even in its weaker seasons, Homeland was bolstered by a commitment to nuance, in its politics and its characters. Danes’ raw-nerve performance has been stunning throughout. And Carrie’s partnership with Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) has been one of TV’s most complicated pairings: They’ve been mentor and pupil, peers, surrogate family, adversaries and uneasy allies, their interactions charged simultaneously with warmth and with a necessary professional chill.
In the new season, Saul, now the national security adviser to the new president, Ralph Warner (Beau Bridges), is conducting negotiations to end the war in Afghanistan at last. When the peace process is undermined, he recruits Carrie, still recovering from spending months in a psychotic state as a captive — even though the CIA is concerned that she revealed information during the long stretch of her imprisonment that she can’t recall.
This setup brings Homeland full circle. Carrie, having sacrificed her sanity and even custody of her daughter by Brody in the service of her mission, has to readjust to fieldwork while wondering, herself, what she might have said while the Russians had broken her. She may, in a way, be Brody now, and one of her own adversaries is herself — at least, the mysterious, unmedicated version of herself lost to her own memory.
The first four episodes of the season have their wild plot lurches but also the gimlet eye for human nature of Homeland at its best. Danes gives us a Carrie who’s older and wiser (“I’m not as fun as I used to be,” she deadpans, ordering a soft drink) but also wrenchingly aware of her own precariousness. And the show is conscious of the collateral damage of the great game, as with the story of Samira Noori (Sitara Attaie), an Afghan woman whose husband was killed by a car bomb after she spoke out against government corruption.
There’s an elegiac feeling to Homeland returning to the site of a war a generation old. The season returns a number of characters from past seasons, but the long war, in a way, is the ultimate enemy — formless, multiheaded and endlessly able to reconstitute itself and survive.
There are glimmers of hope that this time might finally be different. But the show’s realpolitik worldview suggests that you not bet on it, as it demonstrates in a scene that captures the mindset of endless war in miniature. Bunny Latif (Art Malik), a retired Pakistani general who figured into Season 4, is sitting with a revolver in his garden, where to the consternation of his neighbors he has been shooting the squirrels who steal from his bird feeders.
Asked why he doesn’t simply stop filling the feeders rather than spend his free hours turning his backyard into a war zone, he answers as if the question were insane: “That wouldn’t be fair on the birds, would it?” In big wars and small ones, Homeland tells us, people can always find reasons to stick to their guns.