Homeland 3.03
Oct. 18th, 2013 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThis was the kind of quiet character study episode which I usually love, but perhaps because I'm miserable myself (in a laughably minor way, don't worry; I just have a cold and the headache and slight fever to go with it, otherwise things are fine), I didn't quite take to this time around.
Or maybe my tolerance for seeing characters relentlessly tormented is stil maxed out by the recent Breaking Bad final string of episodes. Then again, BB somehow managed the black humor even in the darkest of eps, plus, well, different paces etc. Anyway. Tower of David showed us what Brodie has been doing, and how, since last we saw him, intercut, after half the episode was over, with Carrie in the asylum. It was tightly focused on the two of them in their respective not-called-that-but-essentially-prisons, the increasing sense of being trapped and vain efforts to regain some tiny measure of control about their situations. For that to emotionally work, there couldn't be any scenes showing, say, Saul, Carrie's sister and father or the rest of the Brodie clan, I get that, but I still missed them.
Re: Brodie in general: I still say they needn't have kept him on beyond the s2 finale at all. Though of course Damian Lewis is as excellent as ever, and I couldn't help but being moved. I also like that the show writers and he really do their best to verify Brodie's s1 assertion that his conversion to Islam was not tied to his conversion to blowing-things-up; Brodie feeling the call to prayer he hears out of the noise of Caracas as soothing and comforting makes for a great silent and yet intensely played character moment, and his idea to seek asylum in the mosque follows logical from there. I also appreciate that the Iman of said mosque, not having the background information the show's audience has and thus only knowing Brodie is a wanted terrorist responsible for the deaths of 200 plus people, calls the police (thus going against the all too often used cliché).
The rest of Brodie's part of the plot is well acted but at the moment doesn't make much sense to me. Maybe it will, if, for instance, we find out just why Beardy Gang Leader Who Owes Carrie A Favour doesn't just kill him (along with the Iman, the Iman's wife and the cops) after Brodie has made his escape attempt to the Mosque. Why exactly does he want/need to keep Brodie around? (Can't be for the reward money, since in that case he could have handed him over right away, and he evidently doesn't expect Carrie to check whether or not he's helped Brodie, either.) And Creepy Heavily Hinted To Be A Pedophile Doctor Guy: why is he so set to make Brodie a heroin addict? If Brodie had money to pay for the stuff and/or was in a position to do something useful for him, it would make sense, but neither is the case. I mean, I get the symbolism, Brodie being in hell, the heroin as a parallel to Carrie being subjected to the meds against her will, and in the end Carrie demands the meds and Brodie appears to (though maybe that's a fake out) shoot the heroin, but that's all Doylist stuff, and I want the Watsonian explanations.
Before I get to the Carrie part of the plot: all that doesn't mean I don't feel for Brodie here which is by no means a given, btw, he's far from my favourite character. But when he realised that this was being locked in a hole all over again and said he can't do it again I flinched, because yes.
Meanwhile in the part of the episode which accesses one of my reliable fear buttons ever since I first read The Woman in White: being locked in a mental hospital against your will is just such a creepy concept. (Newly made relevant in non fiction world for us Germans due to a cause celebre that came to prominence in the last year or so, Gustl Mollath. Explanation would take too much review time, but let's just say it demonstrates you really can get locked up for years in the here and now in a psych ward with extremely dodgy medical justification and skeevy legal means.) Right now, my inclination is to say both the sympathetic nurse and the lawyer whom Carrie thinks was trying to recruit her for unnamed third parties were CIA stooges placed in order to test her loyalty, either by Saul or F. Murray Abraham's character or both, and since Carrie saw through the recruitment attempt and turned it down, I hope this will get her out of there. Because good as Claire Danes is at playing torment, I want to see Carrie doing something active again, using her mind to figure things out (that aren't set against her, I mean figure cases out).
Or maybe my tolerance for seeing characters relentlessly tormented is stil maxed out by the recent Breaking Bad final string of episodes. Then again, BB somehow managed the black humor even in the darkest of eps, plus, well, different paces etc. Anyway. Tower of David showed us what Brodie has been doing, and how, since last we saw him, intercut, after half the episode was over, with Carrie in the asylum. It was tightly focused on the two of them in their respective not-called-that-but-essentially-prisons, the increasing sense of being trapped and vain efforts to regain some tiny measure of control about their situations. For that to emotionally work, there couldn't be any scenes showing, say, Saul, Carrie's sister and father or the rest of the Brodie clan, I get that, but I still missed them.
Re: Brodie in general: I still say they needn't have kept him on beyond the s2 finale at all. Though of course Damian Lewis is as excellent as ever, and I couldn't help but being moved. I also like that the show writers and he really do their best to verify Brodie's s1 assertion that his conversion to Islam was not tied to his conversion to blowing-things-up; Brodie feeling the call to prayer he hears out of the noise of Caracas as soothing and comforting makes for a great silent and yet intensely played character moment, and his idea to seek asylum in the mosque follows logical from there. I also appreciate that the Iman of said mosque, not having the background information the show's audience has and thus only knowing Brodie is a wanted terrorist responsible for the deaths of 200 plus people, calls the police (thus going against the all too often used cliché).
The rest of Brodie's part of the plot is well acted but at the moment doesn't make much sense to me. Maybe it will, if, for instance, we find out just why Beardy Gang Leader Who Owes Carrie A Favour doesn't just kill him (along with the Iman, the Iman's wife and the cops) after Brodie has made his escape attempt to the Mosque. Why exactly does he want/need to keep Brodie around? (Can't be for the reward money, since in that case he could have handed him over right away, and he evidently doesn't expect Carrie to check whether or not he's helped Brodie, either.) And Creepy Heavily Hinted To Be A Pedophile Doctor Guy: why is he so set to make Brodie a heroin addict? If Brodie had money to pay for the stuff and/or was in a position to do something useful for him, it would make sense, but neither is the case. I mean, I get the symbolism, Brodie being in hell, the heroin as a parallel to Carrie being subjected to the meds against her will, and in the end Carrie demands the meds and Brodie appears to (though maybe that's a fake out) shoot the heroin, but that's all Doylist stuff, and I want the Watsonian explanations.
Before I get to the Carrie part of the plot: all that doesn't mean I don't feel for Brodie here which is by no means a given, btw, he's far from my favourite character. But when he realised that this was being locked in a hole all over again and said he can't do it again I flinched, because yes.
Meanwhile in the part of the episode which accesses one of my reliable fear buttons ever since I first read The Woman in White: being locked in a mental hospital against your will is just such a creepy concept. (Newly made relevant in non fiction world for us Germans due to a cause celebre that came to prominence in the last year or so, Gustl Mollath. Explanation would take too much review time, but let's just say it demonstrates you really can get locked up for years in the here and now in a psych ward with extremely dodgy medical justification and skeevy legal means.) Right now, my inclination is to say both the sympathetic nurse and the lawyer whom Carrie thinks was trying to recruit her for unnamed third parties were CIA stooges placed in order to test her loyalty, either by Saul or F. Murray Abraham's character or both, and since Carrie saw through the recruitment attempt and turned it down, I hope this will get her out of there. Because good as Claire Danes is at playing torment, I want to see Carrie doing something active again, using her mind to figure things out (that aren't set against her, I mean figure cases out).
no subject
Date: 2013-10-18 10:28 am (UTC)I assumed the boss guy had told him to do it. Or perhaps the same thing is Doctor Guy's solution to being stuck there himself.
I have no clue about the "why keep Brody alive" question other than if there's someone else pulling the strings.
no subject
Date: 2013-10-19 07:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-19 07:43 am (UTC)Otherwise I'm worried the heroin was just put in so they could really hammer home the parallels of Brody and Carrie's situations.
no subject
Date: 2013-10-22 03:03 pm (UTC)I was particularly interested by this bit on the second season: "The success of Homeland took everyone on the production by surprise, and the success of the Danes/Lewis love affair upset the writers' planned trajectory. Lewis is pretty sure they had intended to kill him off by now, and had to change direction when the public responded to their weird chemistry."
It concludes "He is locked into Homeland for seven seasons, which doesn't mean anything in terms of security. 'You have to sign up for a long time, then they'll kill you at their leisure.' In fact, he wouldn't be surprised if he got the chop relatively soon. 'I think the writers are desperate to kill me. I'm a pain in their arses, because Brody is quite a difficult character to write. There's a high head count on Homeland. Any one of us could get it at any point.'"
no subject
Date: 2013-10-23 10:24 am (UTC)Re: quotes - sounds most likely to me (i.e. that the writers didn't mean to keep Brody alive and only changed their mind due to audience popularity, which sticks them with a character they don't have an actual plan for). But since show encourages a paranoid mind set: I could also see Damian Lewis cunningly giving a seemingly frank interview in order to lead the readers away from guessing the newest plot twists. :)
no subject
Date: 2013-10-23 10:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-26 11:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-26 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-26 04:48 pm (UTC)As to why the gangster guy is keeping Brody alive but offering heroin, I suspect that either he's still uncertain how far his gratitude to Carrie goes, or more likely that I think he has ideas about recruiting Brody for his criminal activities. (Tangentially, it's a bit creepy that a gangster in a country with a socialist government unpopular with the US owes Carrie for something, I wonder what she was up to there.)
no subject
Date: 2013-10-27 06:17 pm (UTC)