Homeland “A Red Wheelbarrow” Review: Would the real bomber please stand up?

Super assassin lawyer man and Carrie discuss business on Homeland

Photo Credit: Showtime 

A quick review of tonight’s Homeland right after I change my routine TODAY…

It’s been two weeks since I’ve gotten the chance to write about this show, and boy, how far we’ve dropped. There’s just nothing on Homeland that I genuinely care about anymore and “A Red Wheelbarrow” has only made it worse. The writers seem so oblivious to what once made this show a fantastic thriller and thus they’ve degraded the show to all the worst things about it. It’s just simply a mess and “A Red Wheelbarrow” only confirms it.

The main problem with the show at the moment is that it’s trying to be surprising way too much, and thus none of the reveals feel surprising or worth caring about. The fact that we find out who the bomber is and then he’s killed by super evil lawyer man all in the course of ten minutes is absurd. We get a tiny glimpse of the bomber who is no more than a meddling plot devise and then just like that he’s capped by the lawyer assistant turned expert assassin.

The worst part is that none of this seems to mean anything at all. This season seems to have no idea where it is going at this point. There’s no clear villain, no clear plot thread, and no clear character arcs. The season doesn’t seem to be building to anything definite, something that a thriller type show like Homeland absolutely needs to do. There is nothing here but superfluous character reveals and way to many surprises that don’t seem to go anywhere other than just existing.

I mean the show spent a lot of time this week on both Saul’s marriage and Carrie’s pregnancy, none of which seem important or interesting. They’re just kind of there to be filler to an already short episode (running at just over 46 minutes) and neither plotline has any gravitas or character importance. They feel like arbitrary character stories added in over some need to give these characters some sort of emotional development. The problem is that, so far they don’t fit in with anything that this season has been doing and feels really tacked on and unnecessary.

Then, finally we get Brody back at the end of this one… It’s hard to swallow this since I’ve been waiting for this to just happen already for about three weeks or so and now it has.

Hey the good news is we get Damian Lewis back…

The bad news is that I couldn’t care less…

I’m going to try to be consistently week to week with these reviews until the end of the season. After the end of this season I might not be able to put myself through this show any longer.

That’s just me though. What did everyone think about this episode and the two that came before it?