'Homeland' Season Finale Review: Terror, Death And Light
For a season that was a testament to real-world hard thinking about the nature of present-day world terrorism, the fifth-season finale of Homeland Sunday night had moments in which it floated off into the mystic.
WARNING: EXTENSIVE SPOILERS FOR THE SEASON FINALE EPISODE OF SHOWTIME’S HOMELAND, “A FALSE GLIMMER,” FOLLOW FROM THIS POINT ON.
The finale wasted no time — literally. It dispensed with the usual opening credits (goodbye, little girl scaring me in the lion mask!) to plunge us down into the Berlin train tunnel, the better to let Carrie avert the terrorist chemical-weapon attack — or rather, to let Carrie be the umpteenth person to benefit from the good conscience of Qasim, arguably the entire season’s true hero.
This crisis averted, all that was left was the mopping-up. And there was a lot of it. Saul had a tense but ultimately empty showdown with Russian Ivan the Terrible, and I’m sure Putin’s operatives will never be able to find a fashionably-stubbled Russkie in the Midwestern-U.S. witness protection program, right?
Jonas broke up with Carrie; she pleaded for a second chance for her and poor little Franny (who’d taken a shine to the boyfriend), but even Carrie’s super-power — the Amazing Tremulous Lower Lip — could not defeat strict German logic, and so she’s a free agent in every sense.
Laura the extraordinarily consistently-obnoxious American journalist (brava, Sarah Sokolovic, for never betraying your character by allowing us to like her for a nano-second!) committed what was to me the season’s most unmotivated act: No way would haughtily idealistic, egotistically moral Laura renounce her journalistic principles to save Numan, the hapless porn-site hacker. (By the end of the season, I was muttering “Numan!” the same way characters in Seinfeld used to mutter “Newman!” in contemptuous disgust.)
And we bid farewell to Quinn — or rather, Quinn bade farewell to us, via a voice-over/letter left for Carrie… but not before Dar Adal gave us Quinn’s Origin Story (orphan in foster home! Youngest agent ol’ Dar ever personally trained!). Quinn was also the spark for the episode’s two most mystical moments: Carrie’s spirit-quest visit to the hospital chapel, where she sees a mother and daughter (?) and digs her fingers into her wound sufficient to, what, cause her to pass out or simply see a blinding white light? A light that returned, even brighter, as she arranged Quinn’s death in the hospital room.
I’m assuming Quinn is dead. (The hour was called “A False Glimmer,” right?) Since we didn’t see him flatline, anything in Homeland is possible, especially the indestructability of Peter Quinn. But as the series has proven over and over, once you tell Carrie you love her (as he did in his letter), you’re pretty much on your way out of this show.
Related: The Best TV Dramas Of 2015
Oh, and that creepazoid proposal to Carrie made by Otto During? Was that a German thing, a billionaire thing, or a German billionaire who’s a budding psycho thing?
As for Saul, it seemed a bit much to have him don a black watch-cap and give the order to have the car transporting Allison riddled with bullets, all so he could see with his own crinkly eyes the dead body of his former lover. (And let us pause here again to give a big round of applause to Miranda Otto for being this season’s Most Valuable Player, totally pulling off every twist and turn of being a triple-agent who was victimized by sexism and the forced wearing of high heels in addition to all the other guff she had to put up with by men who were her lessers.)
Mandy Patinkin was clearly as rattled by this season of Homeland as any ordinary viewer, as well as more troubled by the ascendancy of Donald Trump than anyone this side of Jeb Bush. His Friday-night appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was one of those Mandy-thons in which the actor held forth (on fear, “fear-mongering,” calling for “a new paradigm” in the war on terror — the exact phrase Saul used this night!) as though delivering a one-man show set to some unknown Stephen Sondheim soundtrack heard only in his head. You may have known that he, Claire Danes, and the producers debrief high-level intelligence officials before the start of every Homeland season, the better to know how to scare the bejesus out of us. But in some quarters, he’s also being criticized for suggesting on the talk show that Americans take in a Syrian refugee family for a holiday meal.
I thought this season of Homeland was superb — remarkable in its awful prescience of ISIS attacks in Europe, excellent in the way it both implicated and sympathized with nearly everyone involved with The Way We Live Now. I’m glad Carrie turned down Saul’s offer, telling him, “I’m not that person any more,” because a separated Carrie and Saul are quite often the Carrie and Saul who will come together in a new season, in a new way, for new, unexpected explorations of the darkest aspects of the world.
