The individual of Carrie Mathison is on trial in the final hours of Homeland. Yes, I am speaking about the arraignment wherein she is being thrown beneath the bus through ludicrous expenses. But there’s additionally a 2d trial that the finishing of Homeland is greater acutely pivoting on: Do her appropriate intentions and self-sacrifice cultivate extra damage than properly?
And is the machine she represents so heroically on television definitely succeeding at something beyond spinning deadly undercover agent games to their natural, separating outcome?
On the first point, plenty of tonight’s episode, “The English Teacher,” feels like what we’ve come to traditionally anticipate from latter day Homeland with its emphasis on ticking clocks and astounding White House ineptitude that could result in global catastrophe. In this context, Carrie Mathison is being turned into a scapegoat for the U.S.
Government. Beginning the episode in handcuffs, she is once more a step behind the relaxation of the arena as she learns that the CIA agents she got arrested in Islamabad have become cannon fodder for any other terrorist with an itchy explosives finger. Her lawyer—the usually welcome Chris Bauer—even informs her that this was days in the past and Jenna Bragg is now slated to testify in opposition to her.
The FBI seems to have so severely stacked the deck in opposition to Carrie that it’s a massive mulligan Homeland asks us to agree with in whilst Bauer broadcasts she is going to get out on bond due largely to the power of Saul Berenson’s National Security Advisor status. More absurd nonetheless is that the FBI could have no manner to song her moves as she runs around D.C., tampering with witnesses like Jenna Bragg—who is turn leaving Walter Reade with out her own eagle eyed feds escort—and then taking trips into the countryside. Considering that the Justice Department seeking to peg the assassination of the President of the USA on Ms. Mathison, this is a tablet so large to swallow it could choke a horse.
But down it should move given how sturdy a whole lot of the rest of the episode is, together with the moment where Carrie is eventually notified of her fees. In a stable courtroom, the choose reads off Carrie’s expenses like he’s ordering dinner at a restaurant he faintly disapproves of: more than one counts of imparting aid to a “overseas terrorist organization,” one depend as accent to the homicide of President Ralph Warner, and more than one counts of accessory to the murders of the CIA Islamabad team.
At the danger of sounding like a broken record, Claire Danes is outstanding in this moment. Within a man or woman she’s intimately essayed for almost a decade, she embodies patriotism to a point beyond sacrifice or self-interest; she’s a person who in every Homeland opening credits reminds us that even well into the primary term of the Obama administration, she turned into nonetheless scarred via 9/11. “I just want to make certain we don’t get hit once more.” And yet, right here she is being categorized a traitor in all however name and, worse, a fool used by the Russians to hit us tougher than any other unmarried terrorist act of the remaining 19 years.
The look of defeat and dawning horror on Carrie’s face is heartbreaking and infectious.