Homeland

What did he do to Carrie?

She rang him begging for help managing the case in the midst of a particularly bad period of manic depression, but he called her work on her instead, in the full knowledge that she was keeping the fact of her illness from them. He got her fired, shamed and discredited just as she was *this* close to unravelling everything.

It's a really powerful moment — particularly since Claire Danes was giving such a powerful embodiment of the mania/depression dichotomy. I felt it was really authentic.

edited 18th Apr '12 11:33:29 PM by Nicknacks

The show just really likes screwing with us, really.

I can't wait for the second season :)

I'm really enjoying the first series, but I'm frustrated by how bloody long it is. I can't read anything about it, including most of this thread, for fear of accidental spoilers.

I'm not sure how they plan to keep Claire in the show, seeing that the CIA found out she was nuts and and had her sectioned.

They're making Virgil a regular next season, so I reckon she'll be working with him a lot. Plus, Saul's not about to cut Carrie out of her life, and Carrie isn't above going through his briefcase. And I don't think her obsession with Brody is done with yet — though she'll probably be cautioned against that by some kind of shrink.

That's just season 1 spoilers and season 2 casting information. No actual season 2 spoilers.

edited 19th Apr '12 10:50:59 PM by Nicknacks

Well, so far I'm enjoying this second season. I don't really see how the Dana storyline is going to fit in with the rest, but I like her. She and Saul could teach classes on actual human decency together.

I'm surprised at how quickly everything fell apart for Brody, and how little input he had in that himself. He tried to hide his traces by getting the tailor out of dodge, but I don't know that the tailor was even an immediate risk. Why have a high value asset risk his cover for something that could be done by someone else? Why not inform the tailor of the method of his extraction? Nazir is supposed to be a chess master. This plan was a mess. And then there's Brody's recording. Why was that even in Lebanon? Either Nazir has suffered a bad case of villain decay, or Brody's downfall is at least partly his doing.

I guess I'm not yet sold on the plot for season two. There's a lot of stuff I could see going somewhere awesome, or maybe nowhere at all. Season one certainly delivered, and I'm hopefull this season will too. Where season two outshines season one so far is the character stuff, I think. Saul, Carrie, Dana, Estes, and to a lesser extent Jess, Mike and Carrie's sister and father have all had strong character driven scenes that really conveyed the motivations of the main characters and the way the peripheral characters relate to that.

I can't help but sniggering every time I see the bust ads for shows

Just. Look. At. Brody's. Face.

edited 23rd Oct '12 1:47:27 AM by joeyjojo

What asset? He lost Brody's martyr video in the lebanon operation - The custom official confirmed Saul had it, so not only is Brody burned, Nazir knows he is. The entire point of the tailor gambit was to get both Brody and the tailor to go to a given address in a calm state of mind so that they could be extracted or blown to bits (Nazir's safehouses have a trackrecord of exploding!). This failed to work because the tailor flipped out.

The latest episode was rocking on all cylinders. Fantastic TV.

I think some of the best interactions between two characters on this show are between Dana and Brody. The scenes involving the two of them (revealing he's converted to Islam back in the garage in season one, burying his Koran in the backyard) are among my favorite. I'm not sure if that's because the writers put such a heavy emphasis on their relationship to explain part of why Brody didn't go through with anything at the end of season one, but it seems like one of the most natural relationships on the show.

Also I knew at some point Carrie was going to spill the beans to Brody on the operation, but I didn't expect it to be that quick in the episode. My thoughts went from "Don't sleep with him again." to "Stop spewing before you blow the whole damn op." A lot of the evidence they have against Brody (while in our minds concrete) is fairly circumstantial and I don't really see how they are going to be able to convict him or keep hold of him for too long in the next episode. Maybe they follow through on Saul and Estes's plan of making him a double agent working for the CIA in some capacity?

edited 23rd Oct '12 7:16:07 AM by EagleFan

Oh Dana. What are you doing. What, what, what are you doing.

It was interesting to see Brody being systematically broken down during the episode. Seeeing him still clinging to the lies he told himself and then gradually being told another thing. It was an interesting study into pyscology if nothing else.

In a non-Homeland-related moment, about 1/3 of the way through the episode, all of a sudden the Jeff Winger quote "I'm doing a bottle episode" popped into my head. Because that's pretty much what the episode was. A Bottle Episode.

edited 29th Oct '12 8:01:02 PM by EagleFan

Car chase scene probably makes it not one.

Maybe not, but it's easy to forget that when they spend 16 minutes on one scene between two characters in a dark, abandoned basement.

Doesn't make it a bottle episode.

Bottle episodes limit the cast to a small location so they're "bottled in", usually for cost reasons. Stunts, chase sequences and location footage aren't part of the genre's remit.

Whatever it was, overall, I think it was one of the best episodes of the series. There was a lot of communication and easy-to-miss giveaways in the interrogation scene, even if most of it was non-verbal.

Yeah, I really liked it too.

Those Brody/Carrie scenes look like they take a lot longer to film than most other scenes on the show. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a more involved rehearsal schedule and I'm certain that the actors are allowed a lot of leeway with their choices. They probably come out as being very time expensive, even if they don't cost a lot to thread into a camera.

Now if Galvex is dead I have absolutely no clue who the mole is

The trailer says that Carrie has got a surprise for Brody. Please don't tell me she's pregnant.

man that would add so much drama into this

edited 8th Nov '12 5:51:26 PM by betraylawl

Apparently the actresses is actually pregnant so I wouldn't put it pass them.

If they do I'll stop watching. That's just a stupid twist, and honestly, compared to what the writers of Homeland have put out so far, frankly beneath them.

The way they're wrapping all these plot points up makes me really tense.

Okay, so I have one thing to say about the deaths of William Walden and Abu Nazir:

Still, it begs a big question. Two characters that were quite close to being Big Bads are dead. But there is going to be a third season that has 12 episodes. What will the plot focus on at that point?

I have only one thing to say about the latest plot twist in the Season 2 finale.

HOLY GODDAMN SHIT! I did not see that coming at all.

Massive spoiler, please don't read if you haven't watched:

Who the hell could have done that? To have access to Brody's car and planting so much C4 that it can kill 200 people?

edited 17th Dec '12 5:18:24 AM by Exploder