Brody 2012 - Homeland

My nitpick was far more valid!

Well, I'm really confused as to what they're going to do on the next season. Sol is getting forced out of the CIA, Nazir is dead, and Carrie is still crazy (and thus can't actually be at the CIA). The next episode looks like a great series finale.

Yay for Dana saying that thing about Mike! I'm glad they're finally breaking up.

So, Quinn having second thoughts? I think he respects Carrie and he knows killing Brody will ruin her life!

Does this mean whatshisface is the mole cause he wants to kill off a congressman? I mean. He is a black guy. TV has taught me they're always the bad guys.

All the black guys on Arrow are good! So far!

I was a little annoyed with how far they went to make Carrie vulnerable in this episode. Yes, she was afraid of Nazir, but not so afraid that she didn't go running after him after she escaped, or went into the tunnels after him. Yes, she was very, very tired, but she still seemed pretty goddam capable to me. As soon as she went in with one FBI guy who couldn't radio back and she said she'd BE RIGHT BACK, I knew that poor nameless horror movie cliche was dead. Cos apparently Nazir is Arab ninja. I'm just glad they got him. If all of that stupid shit had lead to him escaping, I probably wouldn't have bothered with the season finale.

One thing that actually really bothered me was that Nazir ends up beating Carrie up, then right before he gets shot when he's kneeling on the ground we see that he had a knife the whole time (which makes sense since he slit the SWAT guy's throat) so...why didn't he gut Carrie?

I think he was disturbed while he was giving her a few digs, so it's not inconceivable that that was his end game.

Liked it overall but it got slooooow towards the end.

It would have been better if Dana had said that thing about Mike before going on her pouty little teenage "Wah wah wah leaky milk boo turn off your stupid game" rant. I respond better to characters that don't make me want to slap them through the glass door. She also seems to have done a complete one eighty on her mother, unless I'm inventing them kind of wanting to beat the crap out of each other a few episodes ago. I'm also not the biggest fan of Carrie's first response to screwing up the interview being to break down in tears. I would think that a hardened professional CIA woman wouldn't do that, because it really does pose a challenge to taking her seriously with as much as this show has had her do stuff like that. It was one thing when she was in private, but right there? I mean, Dutch at least got to his car on that episode of The Shield I saw yesterday. And it might have been nice if the strike team had at least tried something less lethal. I mean, there have to be some sort of options for that, right? Rubber bullets? Stun gun? How many brave operators have died trying to capture aliens alive for the research team for us to phone it in like this?

Today's stupid question: Shouldn't Brody - a soldier in a neighborhood with so many military folks around it - or the people taking care of his house while he's in custody be taking his flag in at night?

As for how the season will end - I don't know. Lewis is playing coy as to whether he's alive or dead. I'm kind of hoping for the latter. If we have to lose one of the leads, I'd rather have Carrie, because at least then the third season (already ordered) can involve Carrie getting dragged back in because of an asset that she knew from before, sort of like this year. It doesn't have to go Full 24 and have somebody try to take over the airport where she just happens to be hiding out in the vents or whatever.

So, that happened.

Yeah. So...no more Brody?

This show rarely puts me over the edge, but the last 2 minutes were....tough.

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Well that was meh.

Are you serious? That was jaw dropping! They killed SO MANY PEOPLE!

Also, Quinn may now be my new favorite character. That scene in the bedroom? Awesome. I saw what he had in his hand before he stood up and I was like OH MY GOD IS THIS GOING TO HAPPEN!?

I have a question too: so when you go to a passport guy for a new identity and he gives you a bunch of paperwork, say you get stopped. Does no one wonder WHY you have so much paperwork on you? I mean, I don't really travel with my passport and my social security card and my birth certificate and everything else.

To be fair, as he walked away into the pitch black Canadian woods all I could think of was "....and then he's eaten by a bear!"

Yeah I'm serious. I just don't buy the Carrie-Brody thing. Yeah they had the obligatory SHOCKING EXPLOSION, but at this point the show feels more like 24 than anything else. This season wasn't a third as good as the first season. :(

Welp. I liked it!

Other than advanced pacemaker technology that doesn't exist, I quite enjoyed this season. I was floored by the explosion and how they took out a major character with no warning.

Actually, it's an exaggeration of a technology that does actually exist.

I liked it, although because my DVR was all screwy I thought it was a 2 hour finale, so I was confused when it finished. The trailers for their 2 shows next year look neato!

For a season that's been all over the place, that was certainly a strong finale! That was the season ender I was looking for in S1, glad it finally showed up.

Much as I liked Quinn's change of heart (and as mentioned, wow, the bedroom scene), it felt a little forced. The writing remains the one seriously weak area of this show; I'm with jeffd, there's a bit of a "make the characters fit the plot" problem that was glaring in 24.

I didn't see the trailers, so I'm hoping this means we're dropping the Brody stuff entirely and moving forward with Carrie as a station chief? I want to watch that show! But I expect that S3 will be all about the manhunt for Brody with side stories about Inara and the gang.

So I guess I should explain what I didn't like:

1) The Carrie/Brody romance just doesn't work for me. It worked in season one because it was the product of a pair of very stressed out people sort of falling into bed together. In season two they tried to shoehorn that into some great love story. I liked the Carrie who, in the second episode, determinedly told Brody he was going to pay for his crimes. I didn't like the Carrie who just moons after him endlessly.
2) As good as the bedroom scene was, am I to somehow buy now that government black ops guys have that kind of discretion? If it was that Dar Adal guy threatening Estes, that would at least make a little sense. As it was, this was just not believable to me.
3) The bombing just felt gratuitous. "We have to end the season with a bang!"
4) I'm not sure how Carrie goes back to work. She's been shacked up with Brody, he's the prime suspect in a a mass murder and they both disappeared for hours after the attack.. How is everyone not immediately putting two and two together?

So yeah, the show's writing really just fell apart in this episode, and to an extent over the course of the season. If they felt like they needed Brody off the show, they should have just had Quinn pull the trigger. As it was, the show has backed away from what it was (a fairly realistic portrayal of the war on terror, complete with the consequences thereof) and has gone toward 24 fantasy land. I expect next season we'll see Carrie Bauer shouting "Where's the bomb?!?!" while torturing people.

I liked the finale a lot. The tearful goodbye between Carrie and Brody was pretty corny, but the rest of it was great and the bomb going off was jaw-dropping.

Did you miss the scene between him and Estes that explained this?

Did you also add a scene where people welcome her back and aren't suspicious at all? We'll know in nine months what the fallout from that is. Also, Brody is presumed dead, so it's not like there's a big red flag that they were together.

The show has moved in that direction, but it's still far more Homeland than 24. But also, 24 was a good show too, sometimes, and if you pitched me a show that was just like the good seasons of 24 but with this cast I'd watch it. ;)

Not at all. I didn't get the sense that the order to spare Brody came from Dar Adal. It seemed like Quinn just watched how lovey dovey they were at the cabin and then saw Brody praying and man it was such a nice day and and then aww shucks I guess this Brody guy ain't so bad after all! It just didn't work for me at all; I don't buy that a black operative like Quinn would have that level of discretion.

Fair enough, we'll see. I'm willing to bet that it goes largely unmentioned, though.

The show is still pretty good, but it's gone a long way away from the show it was in its first season. "A not shitty 24" does, in fact, sound like a good show. But it's not at all Homeland circa season 1, and it's not the show I was hoping for in subsequent seasons.

No seriously, there's a scene in that episode where Quinn confronts Estes, explains why he violated a direct order, and threatens to kill him if anything happens to Brody. He explicitly does not have that level of discretion, and that is addressed very plainly in the episode.

I think jeffd gets that - his question is more along the lines (I presume) of 'what happens to Quinn now that he's done that?'

I don't know that anybody knows about that order that's still alive, do they?

Dar Adal presumably does, right? Unless Quinn was seconded to Estes service without Dar Adal knowing the specific reason.

I thought that's what the arrangement was. Didn't he just say to Saul something like "I don't know, he just asked me for the most unhinged psychopath I had?"

Edit: Homeland wiki confirms this.

Yeah I agree with extar and I think Quinn's change of heart had less to do with "omg they're in love!" and more to do with how he saw Carrie kicking ass and being right about everything all season long and the fact that Brody got them their guy. In the end the math didn't make sense to him: he kills the bad guys, right? Brody wasn't a bad guy. He was a confused guy. So I think Quinn realized that there was a shitload more at play here than was presented to him in the beginning and that Estes was being some kind of rogue agent with a grudge. I actually thought this was made really clear when he was on the phone with Estes and said quite pointedly "You've never made a mistake in your love life?" or something like that. Cause Carrie was Estes big mistake as we learned in season 1 and that is a big part of the reason he hates her. So I think Quinn realized that this was Estes getting back at Carrie and also wiping out some kind of loose end with Brody (Brody being the only other person alive that knew about/would question the drone thing, what with the VP being dead).

Also I totally buy Carrie and Brody, but I've said that before! I never bought Carrie saying "her eyes had been opened" or whatever. Even in season 1, when Carrie was absolutely convinced Brody was a terrorist going to blow people up (he was!), she still fell for him. This season he actually was a good guy trying to help and I have no reason to believe she ever lost her feelings for him. She was just covering up whenever someone (usually Saul) asked her about it.

Yes. I find that implausible in the extreme. That's what I mean when I say the show is becoming more 24 and less Homeland: shit like that would have happened in a hearbeat on 24. In Season 1 Homeland? Not a chance.

I think I just watched two people in a tv show have a relationship conversation that was entirely adult and mostly believable. I especially liked the "you interrupted me" line, talk about a fantastic little moment right there.

You're probably right. I just didn't think it was that bad. So in that finale there were like four bad minutes and two especially implausible minutes. That's just not enough to sink it for me.

I mean here's the thing: was Homeland season two a little bit of a let down? Sure, but that's only because season one was one of the best shows on TV maybe ever, and season two was merely a very good spy thriller. But it's still great and exciting and fun and I'm content to judge it on its own merits.

Probably my disappointment is that the show has flagged it's clearly going in a direction I don't like. I enjoyed the tense, tightly plotted drama that was about the consequences, both personal and big-picture type, of the war on terror. Instead it looks increasingly like we're moving toward a 24 retread. Which, like you said, I guess is fine. It's just not the show I wanted!

Also Aeon221 I agree; while I don't like Crodie (heh), that conversation was pretty good.

Everything after the twist was awful. If someone told me they had intended to conclude the series here but had to refilm after an unexpected renewal I'd believe it.

I liked it because there is no such thing as "getting the bad guy" in the story that they have told us. There is always someone stepping up to take the place of the guy you caught. This was a vast terrorist network that didn't just go away because the head guy happened to die. There are no happy endings. Things keep going. Keep happening. It never stops. There are consequences to people's actions re: Brody's tape. I'm glad that caught up with him, it would have made no sense for there not to be other copies out there.

I don't think we're going to see this show "go 24" or anything like that. We're going to see Carrie and what's left of the CIA have to pull themselves back together and track a terrorist cell that they are now only vaguely familiar with. Carrie was a Nasir expert. She's going to have to get up to speed on whoever this new guy is and if it hadn't hit the viewer before it should now: there is always another threat to deal with.

Another minor complaint: the explosion seemed to happen early afternoon, at which point Carrie and Brodie booked it for the Canadian border. Carrie dropped him off, then headed back and met Saul that night. Here is the problem: it is like a ten hour drive to the Canadian border from DC! Or at least I think it is; it's like three hours from my place to DC, and another seven from here to Canada. And we know the service wasn't early in the morning, because Brodie dropped by the house around one PM to pick up his suit.

Lucky for them, they didn't stop at your house on the way. Google Maps puts the closest land border with Canada at about a seven hour drive from DC. Is it still a stretch? Maybe, but given that we don't have a specific timeline for exactly when things happened, I think it's close enough.

Yeah, looking at the map they'd cut a bit east unnecessarily to visit me in NJ on their way to Canada!

Figure they left at three, fourteen hours plus an hour to get the passport and docs (lets say that guy worked improbably fast) puts them at about six AM... I guess it's plausible it might have still been dark when Carrie arrived. Winter, and all that!

Of course I'm picking nits here and I'm not really serious; this didn't inhibit my enjoyment in any way. It's just a little uncharacteristically sloppy of them.

What makes you think it was still dark when Carrie arrived? The final scene takes place in a large hall and I don't recall there being any windows or an establishing shot of the exterior. Plus, all of those bodies would have taken a few hours to cart in there.

Good point. I just sort of assumed it was; since every shot we'd seen before that point was in the dark.

To be fair, I kind of assumed the same and for the same reason; it was this discussion that prompted me to think that it wasn't really clear what time of day it was.

They were out in the woods somewhere before they headed back in, it's entirely likely that Carrie's backup plan was somewhere not actually in the District. It could easily be a self-storage area somewhere out where I live, away from prying eyes but also close to several interstates. (66 and 81) Then again, this show has definitely played fast and loose with VA geography, (see my previous posts in this thread complaining about it,) so fudging with the distance to Canada is no surprise at all to me.