Coming into television viewers’ homes shrouded in a cloud of paranoia and dread, Carrie Mathison’s introduction felt like a bold rebuke of Gansa and Gordon’s previous spy show during the Bush years, 24. Whereas Jack Bauer was a superhero with high-level security clearance, Claire Danes’ Carrie was painfully human and graced with a sense of perspective—of the world if not her place in it. Beautifully essayed by Danes as a bundle of exposed nerves always threatening to be scratched—be it by neuroses or a sometimes crippling sense of self-righteousness—Carrie is a CIA analyst who knows that the story of war hero Nicholas Brody, resurrected back from the dead after being freed from seven years of al-Qaeda imprisonment in Iraq, is too good to be true. Carrie is convinced Brody has been brainwashed and she’s going to prove it to her superiors, to the viewers, and maybe to herself.
It’s a gripping premise that is delicately explored with all the ambiguity viewers felt at that time about America’s legacy of still lengthening MidEast misadventure. Rather than running into a situation with a gun and bag of torture goodies to save the day, Carrie watches Brody attempt to rebuild his family and family home, just as we watch her, thereby creating as nesting doll of voyeuristic intent. We were implicitly judging our protagonist as she judged her potential enemy, who everyone, including Carrie, wanted to believe was really innocent. That is in no small part thanks to the anxiety-laden empathy Damian Lewis brings to the part of Brody in a performance so good it would appear the show expanded Brody’s role from two seasons to being a dual protagonist for three years.
Luckily season 2 delivered. If season 1 was about turning the screws of anxiety in viewers until they might confess anything to spare Carrie from more suffering, in season 2, she and Mandy Patinkin’s Saul Berenson finally turned the tables on Brody. Patinkin was as invaluable to the first season as Danes and Lewis, but the second season allowed his paternal relationship with Carrie to be cemented as the most important in the series as he laid the groundwork for Carrie’s miraculous return to the agency, and this in turn brought her face-to-face with Brody once more.
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While Keane might’ve been loosely based on Clinton in a few details, both her ascension and the negative reaction it conjured throughout the country was eerily prescient of the Trump era to come. First, the CIA’s disapproving reaction to a new POTUS who is hostile to our intelligence agencies plays into every far-right conspiracy theorist’s “Deep State” nightmare, albeit with F. Murray Abraham’s Dar Adal revealing his true colors by conspiring to assassinate a dove president as opposed to trying to undermine a reality TV blowhard making excuses for Russian interference in our election.
It also forced Carrie and Saul to evaluate their own individual legacies within the spy games and patriotic good intentions they’ve pursued their whole lives. The season begins with a high degree of fan service wish fulfillment as Saul seemingly solves America’s longest war in Afghanistan and Carrie at last gets the recognition she deserves from a grateful White House. Yet it ends in the ambiguity and shadows that made the show’s early years so haunting. Carrie and Saul are dwarfed in the darkness cast by past mistakes and lost friends and family, be it the deceased Nick Brody and Peter Quinn, an estranged daughter in Franny or ex-wife in Mira, or just the faceless bodies left burning in misbegotten drone strikes.
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After several seasons of declaring she was done with the CIA and wanting to settle down with her and Brody’s daughter, Franny, Carrie is now forced to choose between a domesticity she did not ask for and her nigh-fatal obsession with making sure “we don’t get hit again.” And she settles on the more unconventional answer. Yet it’s also the one that puts Carrie and Saul shoulder-to-shoulder again, thus it feels like the true endpoint of Carrie’s arc. Alas, this self-realization only lasts for a few episodes until a cliffhanger leaves her tortured and bedeviled by those blasted Russians.
The season that brought tragic closure to Nicholas Brody’s life and narrative arc, it is the agony of Damian Lewis’ tortured anti-hero that makes this season marginally worth watching. While the introduction of Tracy Letts as a particularly snooty politician-turned-CIA Director is fun, and that the show managed to serendipitously tie its Iran-focused plot into the then shocking breakthrough in the Iran nuclear deal, this season is ultimately just spinning its wheels until the inevitable ending: Brody dies a traitor despised by everyone except Carrie Mathison.
It’s a hell of a scene when Carrie watches the man she loves, and the father of her child, be strung up and hanged in Tehran in an echo of 1979, but it’s not enough to make up for how boring much of the rest of this overly thin storytelling is… especially whenever it cut back to Dana or the horrible choice to have Carrie almost kill her daughter.
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