Berlin provides a refreshing series base after such a sustained period of sand and muezzin wails. Given that it was released in September 2015, season five’s theme of Isis attacks in Europe would become sickeningly relevant by the year’s end. He ends up as part of a humiliating prisoner exchange, which he theatrically flounces out on, only to be saved by a stale Hollywood pep talk about believing in yourself. Saul Berenson ( Mandy Patinkin) turns up in Islamabad to help Carrie, but, as a highly experienced CIA veteran, is immediately captured by a band of terrorist yahoos. New mum Carrie does what most new mums do when they go back to work – eases herself back with a posting as a CIA bureau chief in Kabul. The internal logic of every character is now visibly flaking. Photograph: Cour/Rex/ShutterstockĪs an exporation of the tribal zones between Afghanistan and Pakistan, season four sheds light on one of the most knotty and underlit corners of US foreign policy. Meanwhile, the scriptwriters have doltishly placed Carrie in Iran like a Sim, where she idles uselessly until her big hanging scene.Ĭarrie in Kabul. Brody is packed off to Iran to do some Seal stuff not long after he has been held hostage for a second time, because he is definitely not volatile or anything. Iranians? Nukes? The sense of a knock-off 24 is starting to grate, and suddenly we are a long way from the pathos of a returning PoW. We are introduced to F Murray Abraham’s deliciously amoral Dar Adal, and, in one of TV’s greatest public hanging love stories, Brody is sentenced to death in Tehran, as a pregnant Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) does her best wobbly-face. This horror is quickly superseded when new baddie General Akbari (Houshang Touzi) bashes his ex-wife’s throat with a broken bottle. Opens promisingly with Quinn killing a child instead of the Langley bombing mastermind. The blood is up, the gore is coming thick and fast. The closer the pair get, the more you realise they are both ghastly narcissists who should get the chair just on a precautionary principle. The grindingly inevitable grinding scene. In the pivotal interrogation scene, dark arts master Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) stabs Brody in the hand. For instance, hapless killing machine Brody nips out to stab his bomb-suit tailor in the woods while still on the phone to his wife. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) attempts to turn the vice president into strawberry jam with his suicide vest, before mammalian evolutionary programming saves the day, via a last-minute phone call from his teenage daughter – as if The Godfather climaxed with the Monty Python foot coming down on Michael Corleone.Ī smooth tension between plot and action. Rather than what it became – a frantic hail of bullets falling amid a fog of sarin gas – this is a psychological turn about the alienation of a returning PoW.Ī climax that’s a touch random. What’s striking now about Homeland’s debut is how slow it is. Photograph: Showtime/Everett/Rex Features Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) and Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes).
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