‘Carrie has no real option but to let the Taliban take Saul, but
it doesn't make the act of doing it any less unpleasant.’ Photograph:
Twentieth Century Fox/Ilze Kitshoff/Showtime
Spoiler alert: This blog
is for people watching Homeland series four. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen
season four, episode eight
Read the episode seven
blog here.
‘There
are only wrong choices’
A taut hour of spy games
shot through with moral complexity and character-driven drama – Halfway to a
Donut is the strongest episode of Homeland we’ve seen in quite some time, and
certainly the best of the post-Brody era. It’s also, not coincidentally, the
first time in a long while that Homeland has properly used its other great
central relationship, Carrie and Saul.
In Homeland’s early
seasons, that pairing – Saul as the bruised mentor, Carrie as the
self-destructive mentee – felt no less watchable than the relationship between
Carrie and Brody. So I’ve been quite disappointed by the lack of screen time
between Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin lately, with it limited largely to
Carrie and Saul briskly meeting in corridors. Perhaps the show has been
deliberately keeping them apart, figuring that doing so would make tonight’s
standout scene even more powerful.
Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison and Mandy Patinkin as Saul
Berenson.Photograph: Kent Smith/PR
If that was the intention
then it worked a treat. Watching Carrie desperately try to dissuade Saul from
putting a gun to his temple as the Taliban moved ever nearer was
stomach-churningly tense and desperately sad. We knew from the episode’s outset
that Saul wouldn’t willingly play the role of a bargaining chip for Haqqani.
His attack on the guard who spotted him dangling from the ceiling looked like
pure opportunism to me. He wasn’t hanging himself as some clever stunt to
escape: he was hanging himself because he would rather die than have six
Taliban leaders released from prison.
For a moment, I genuinely
thought Carrie would fail. That she didn’t underlined the closeness of their
bond, with Saul’s implicit trust of Carrie winning through. Of course, this
being Homeland, there was an added complication: Carrie didn’t actually lead
Saul to safety, as she promised him she would; instead, she allowed him to be
recaptured by the Taliban.
A number of critics have
drawn parallels between Carrie’s decision-making and America’s larger
conduct in the Middle East: every decision she makes, even the ones that are,
on paper, sound, have unpleasant or unintended consequences. That’s certainly
true here. Carrie has no real option but to let the Taliban take Saul, but it
doesn’t make the act of doing it any less unpleasant, especially with Saul
screaming “you fucking lied” down the phone at her. Which isn’t to say that
Homeland is providing some sympathetic defence of the US here – at times this
season the show has been truly damning in its assessments, Drone Queen birthday
cakes and all – but rather that ultimately it is an intractable situation.
There are, as Carrie says, only wrong choices.
It doesn’t help when the
people you’re supposedly working with are quietly plotting to undermine your
efforts. A separate conflict was taking place down the corridor from the
control room as the ISI officials faced down against Lockhart and Ambassador
Boyd. Lockhart is at his best when he’s in attack mode and here he briefly
thought he had an upper hand, before it was snuffed out with the realisation
that the ISI had already told the Taliban where Saul was. “I was really looking
forward to telling those people to go fuck themselves. But I don’t see that
happening now,” Lockhart said, gloomily.
Aasar Khan tells Carrie about Dennis’s treachery. Photograph:
Twentieth Century Fox/David Bloomer/Showtime
Still, Carrie does now at
least know who switched her pills, after Khan revealed Dennis’s treachery to
her in a Tinker Tailor-style meeting in the car park. Our former suspicions of
Khan have subsided a little: he’s aware of the ISI’s nefarious acts but doesn’t
seem to be actively involved in them. The same can’t be said of Dennis, who is
knee-deep in murk. How will Carrie deal with him? You’d expect her to force him
to play the role of triple agent, though that has its own risks. Dennis is far
less discreet than he thinks and poker-faced Tasneem is as shrewd as they come.
Notes
and observations
• “Halfway to a donut”
was how Dennis described a balushahi, a Pakistani delicacy. Not
quite sure how that plays into the episode title. Anyone have any theories?
• One minor reservation
in an otherwise strong episode: that line about Saul “ending up with his head
in a basket like James Foley” felt quite crass.
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