‘Homeland’ Review: Carrie, Up Close and Personal
As Homeland’s current season unfolds, the show is moving ever-closer to making Carrie Mathison’s personal life and mental state as central as any anti-terrorism action she’s engaged in, and in Sunday night’s episode, titled “Why Is This Night Different?,” it provided the high points of the hour.
I’m thinking, of course, of the recording Carrie made for her daughter Frannie, to be shown to the girl in the event of her mother’s death. It was a death that was supposed to be perpetrated by Quinn, who instead spared Carrie and helped set up the camera for this final message.
Not to be cynical but rather in the spirit of praise, this was Claire Danes’ Emmy submission clip. Looking straight into the camera (at us as much as at Frannie), Carrie talked about how much she suspected her daughter would resent, perhaps even hate, her when she got older and found out what Mom did for a living, how much of Frannie’s childhood was spent Carrie-less because of her mother’s devotion to her calling and her country. It was a superb performance by Danes, even after she’d donned that wig that looked like a dead muskrat.
Did anyone wonder, however, about the state of Carrie’s mind during this episode? Are we to have thought that she’s emerged from her lithiumless fog and is dealing with the world clear-headedly again? I’m not sure at all.
Perhaps even murkier is Quinn’s state of mind during all this. Carrie suggested to him that while he thinks he’s been carrying out Saul’s kill-list wishes when he visits that post-office box, he may be doing someone else’s bidding. Again: Are we to think this hasn’t already occurred to a smart cookie like Quinn? I’m not sure at all.
One thing I am sure of: This was a very good episode for Allison Carr, the Berlin CIA Chief who got to try on a couple of accents and help blackmail a Syrian general into becoming a U.S.-installed puppet to potentially replace Bashar al-Assad. That is, until a plane blew up. Miranda Otto is having a fine run portraying Carr, having thus far avoided becoming merely a helper and bed-mate for Saul.
Indeed, women dominated this week’s episode — written by the excellent film and TV screenwriter Ron Nyswaner — in its best scenes. The leaker-we-love-to-hate, Laura, had a run-in with German radical Sabine — the pair seemed like revolutionary geniuses compared to the two male dunces with their accidentally obtained intel, one of whom tried to sell it to the Russians. (Not for nothing does one of them use the online handle “gabehcuod” — hint: spell it backwards.)
Homeland airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Showtime.
