Season five kicks off with parallel plots involving Daesh and a computer-hacking incident in which thousands of the CIA’s documents have been downloaded from the agency’s German office.
Even the sleekest shows require constant maintenance under the hood. Sometimes the work that needs to be done in the break between seasons is as easy as quick trip through the Jiffy Lube (refilling a depleted story arc; replacing the filter on a subplot; adjusting for the loss of characters), while other shows require a trip back to the dealer for heavier work — the equivalent of needing to replace the transmission.
Showtime’s Homeland returns after some obvious tinkering and a hefty bill for parts and labour. Some of these tweaks hum right along with renewed zip, but (wouldn’t you know it?) it’s prone to cough and sputter.
Even though it routinely appears on viewers’ lists of favourite shows, Homeland always went a bit haywire during the last lap of each of its four previous seasons, which, if nothing else, can be blamed on the fact that it is, in the end, a show about a woman with a mental illness. (A show about a crazy person is supposed to be crazy!)
After a demoralising series of defeats in Pakistan, Homeland’s troubled heroine, CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), spent a couple of episodes in epilogue mode, trying to salvage her life back home in Washington. The result was a season-ender that ambiguously dangled rather than tantalised.
An obvious fix to Homeland is also the one most frequently used by other shows — especially espionage thrillers: Flash-forward, a little or a lot.
In Season 5, Homeland show-runner Alex Gansa and company have moved the story ahead two years and relocated its setting to Berlin. Carrie, who keeps her bipolar disorder in check with medications, is about as content as we could ever hope to see her — a peace that can’t possibly last. She’s in the private sector now, working as the head of security for a nebulously philanthropic corporation (reminiscent of the corporation seen in The Honorable Woman on SundanceTV), which is headed by Otto During (Sebastian Koch).
The job is meant to afford Carrie the work-life balance she never knew. Now she can pick up her toddler, Frannie (yes, Carrie decided to raise the kid, our last link to the late Sgt. Nicholas Brody), after preschool and enjoy quiet nights at home with a suitably mellow partner, Jonas (Alexander Fehling). She even attends daily Mass.
But this isn’t a show about getting cosy. With its masterfully prescient knack for melding international headlines with implausible tales of espionage, Homeland kicks off with parallel plots involving Daesh and a computer-hacking incident in which thousands of the CIA’s most valuable documents have been downloaded from the agency’s German office through the servers of a local pornstreaming operation. (In another one of those pleasant, real-world coinkydinks for Homeland, Edward Snowden just joined Twitter. I’ve always admired Homeland’s fortunate timing, rivalled only by The Good Wife’s flair for techie topicality.)
No sooner has the CIA hack been detected than we are back in the world of Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), who has once again found himself in the power chambers of the agency and who travels to Berlin to handle the crisis, which returns him to Carrie’s orbit — even though the two are no longer speaking.
And poor, haunted-eyed Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) is still out there, assigned to some of the CIA’s darkest and most off-the-book missions. For now, that means it’s up to him to keep Homeland at its best and most essentially Homeland-ish. Meanwhile, Carrie’s boss is demanding a high-security humanitarian visit to a Daesh trouble spot, and a viewer realises that this updated Homeland runs the same as it always has.
A van screeches up, someone throws a hood over Carrie’s head and she is whisked off to see a Hezbollah muckety-muck. So much for the notion that this newfangled Carrie would get to solve crises a different way. She comes home a little bruised several hours later; there’s just no pleasant “how was your day?” to be had in this woman’s life.
Her day was terrible, honey. All her days are destined to be terrible.
Don’t miss it
Homeland season 5 starts on October 5 at 11pm on OSN First HD.
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