Carrie and the mysterious lawyer on Homeland
A quick review of tonight’s Homeland as soon as I go on a
car theft adventure…
“You’re an amazing person, Carrie Matheson”
-Saul
I would like to say before we get to tonight’s episode that
I didn’t get the chance to review last week’s episode, but in fact I quite
liked it. I thought the integration of Brody and the parallel between him and
Carrie worked well as a special, more thematic episode of the show. I’ve heard
a lot of negative criticism about last week’s show (on top of the positive) for
the show being too farfetched about where Brody is and as a whole it didn’t
work. In this case I would argue that the show has always been farfetched plot
wise and that last week’s plot revelations didn’t feel that way to me and I
ultimately enjoyed the episode quite a bit.
I say this in advance of this review because boy did I not
like “Game On,” not one bit. For the people who thought Brody’s situation
was ridiculous and farfetched then I can’t imagine how cheated one must be
feeling after the big twist at the end of this one. So Carrie, who has broken
down numerous times and has been locked in a mental hospital for a long stretch
of time, was really just working for Saul the entire time? Just to get in with
the Iranians so that she can play some sort of strange double agent role? This
makes absolutely no sense from any possible angle, and is quite possibly close
to the most preposterous thing the show has ever tried to pass off as a good
plot line (well ok not half as bad as the thing with the vice president last
year but still). First off how does that make any sense as a viable plan in any
sense of the word? How could Saul have figured that the Iranians would try to
take on an agent who’s mentally unstable and off the rails? Why would Carrie do
all of this for a plan that could have been much better executed in every way? The
whole thing just felt like a horrible cheat, one that was used just so that the
writers had an excuse to keep Carrie around for the long run. It’s another
massive contrivance, one that is hard to swallow after it seemed originally like the arc would
have a suitable pay off.
Then there is Dana, oh Dana. I’ve said it before but the
whole plot revolving around her and her now revealed to be murderer boy friend.
There is no reason, at this point in the series to be keeping Dana around at
this capacity, or arguably any capacity at all. It was bad enough in the first
place that we got yet another Dana’s got a strange boyfriend arc, but making
him a stone cold murderer makes it twice as bad if not three times. Like with
Carrie it seems that the writers are just desperately hanging on to Dana and
will risk increasingly terrible arcs to keep them around.
“Game On” was a compilation of all the worst parts of Homeland
wrapped into one episode (well other than Mandy Patinkin who is fantastic in
this episode despite the stupidity of it all). It’s going to be hard to swallow
what’s coming next considering it seems that the writers really have no clue
what made this show great way back in its first season.
That’s just me though. What did everyone else think?
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