I wasn't one of those viewers who lost faith in Homeland (Channel 4, Sunday, 9pm) when it sidestepped an explosive climax to Season One, only to stumble on through Seasons Two and Three.
Granted, I could have done without the ongoing domestic dramas of the Brody household, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't moved by the final scene of Season Three, when Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) scribbled a black star on to the CIA's memorial wall.
I'm less sure that the show's latest reboot will deliver on the same emotional level. The is-he/isn't-he debate over the terrorist status of Nick Brody (Damian Lewis) is long gone, of course, and with it the central character dynamic between him and Carrie. Instead we're now in very unlikely territory, as she - a bipolar-concealing borderline alcoholic who had a child by one of America's Most Wanted - is made CIA station chief
in Afghanistan.
I can see why Danes - who's also one of the show's producers - would want to keep the scripts coming: she has won an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the role. But Carrie is now less of a character arc, more of a narrative
sine wave.
The first episode of Season Four launched straight into one of the great moral conundrums of our times. Sketchy intel has been received by the CIA in Islamabad, revealing that one of their top Taliban targets is currently in a farmhouse in Pakistan. Because the source has always been credible, Carrie authorises an air strike. They kill the terrorist but this time the bad guy really was attending a wedding - camera-phone footage taken by a young survivor who lost his entire family in the bombing has been uploaded to the internet - and a deadly diplomatic incident follows.
Carrie attempts to be stoic, claiming that a terrorist knowingly puts his family in danger if he attends such a function; Danes frowns and looks twitchy. Black ops hero Peter Quinn is more suspicious about the intel; Rupert Friend frowns and looks protective. Carrie's former boss Saul Berenson is now out of the CIA and working for a private military contractor to provide expensive assistance to the US government in these hotspots; Mandy Patinkin frowns and looks anguished. Meanwhile, the Pakistani survivor of the attack and his college friends look like the cleanest-cut of movie stars.
Homeland seems to be setting itself up to put the morality, success rate and financial cost of drone strikes not under the microscope but under the camera lens of a TV drama. Perhaps that will prove more effective than the analysis given by certain US news channels. But without the character of Brody, I can't see where the focus will fall at a personal rather than political level. This might turn out to be a season-long debate about a nation's troubled conscience.
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