Carrie being dragged away on Homeland
Photo Credit: Showtime
A Review of Sunday’s episode of Homeland “Uh… Oh… Ah…” as
soon as I follow the money…
Originally I was going to write about the Homeland premiere
last weekend but thus one of the best television show’s of my lifetime was
ending in a hail of bullets so that kind of became the priority. Also much of
what I thought of the premiere is going to be echoed in this review as well so it would have been a little redundant anyhow…
“Uh… Oh… Ah…” (which is a pain to type) was a strong second
episode for Homeland’s third season, about three quarters of the time that is.
The episode moves the characters into interesting places (except one but we’ll
get there) setting up what’s to come. It also helps that the main arc of “Uh…
Oh… Ah…” is an emotional gut punch, a betrayal that should breathe life into
this season.
The betrayal being addressed of course is that of Saul
towards Carrie. It seems that Saul just needs to get rid of Carrie for the time
being as she is becoming a detriment to the overarching plan and however cold
it may be he is pressured enough by Dar Adal to actually go through with it. The
betrayal is emotionally devastating and it ultimately puts poor Carrie into the
darkest of holes.
The darkness of the situation that Carrie is trapped in is
what makes this feel like its territory that hasn’t yet been explored. Yes we’ve
seen Carrie go mental many times on this show but we’ve never seen everyone turn
their backs on her in quite this way. At least at the start of the series she
had some sane basis to go on, now to the masses she must look like a bumbling
lunatic. I hope the writers drag this out a little more and make it a situation
that’s not going to be so easily escaped; because if it’s easy enough to escape
then we’ve seen all of this before.
The things that didn’t work all that well but ultimately
worked better than last week was the Dana storyline. I’m still very skeptical
of the storyline as it seems all to similar to the one that didn’t work at all
last season, but this week it was ultimately better executed. The scenes
between Dana and Jessica Brody are better than the scenes Dana has with her
newfound asylum boyfriend though and thus is why the Dana arc worked better
this week. Once the show gets all in on Dana’s sure to be tragic relationship
though I have a very bad feeling of where this could go.
The final storyline to take shape this week was Saul’s new
Arabic analyst. It seemed silly that Saul would condemn her for her culture is
a little silly and I hope that down the line Fara becomes more of a character
and less of an archetype/villain/mole/tolerance lesson. We can hope and pray
she doesn’t go down the 24 route. Quinn on the other hand gets to be both the
softest black ops agent in history (proclaiming that he doesn’t like what’s
going on here) and the most awesome agent ever (confronting the banker). Who knows
maybe he’ll become a cohesive character one day. First though Rupert Friend has
to work on the accent a little as it seems like he was struggling with it a
little bit in this episode.
Ultimately “Uh… Oh… Ah…” (still a pain to type) was a solid
hour of Homeland. The show has yet to find what seems like a cohesive arc yet
as it seems like we are still stuck without much agency plot or a villain, but
it’s only the beginning of the season and there is lots left to be told. Also
it’s just good to see Homeland focus at what it’s ultimately good at, character
growth. Because we all know what happened when the show got more plot focused
last year…
But a promising start on almost all fronts…
Episodes without Nick Brody: 2
That’s just me though. What did everyone else think?
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