I was starting the clock for their escape at the explosion, which occurred mid-afternoon. Incidentally, I think I've finally figured out what's bugging me. A lot of my complaints seem somewhat minor: Quinn's behavior, the Brodie/Carrie romance. But I realized in the shower today that what really got me to stop buying in to the show's premise this episode was the overall ridiculousness of the plot. Here's what seems to have happened: Brodie betrays Abu Nazir, Roy Hamad gets caught with the explosives from Gettysburgh, Nasir captured Brody and used him to take down the VP in what was obviously not an impulsive thing (he didn't just happen to have a guy ready to hack the VP's pacemaker, nor did he just happen to know where the pacemaker remote control ID number was). Nazir gets captured, then he has someone load Brodie's truck up with explosives that "match" the stuff from Gettysburgh to frame him for blowing up the VP's funeral. Brodie concludes that this latter bit was his plot all along, and that everything else was to just make them let their guard down. Note that this implies either that a) there's a secondary source of explosives other than the tailor (plausible) or b) the CIA is truly incompetent because they had a rough guesstimate of how much explosives were at the tailor's based on the size of the hidden compartment, and either the explosives found on Roya were or weren't near that estimate. That is almost the definition of a 24 plot. The hallmark of 24 was that the initial terrorist threat was never the real threat, it was just a decoy for the other two decoys before the real threat was revealed in the final four episodes. And it was a fundamentally obnoxious conceit because it required the villains to have Bond-level competency while the CTU/CIA is a bunch of nincompoops. It also sort of invalidates any achievement the heroes have mid-season because the audience knows the real threat is still lurking. Taking Abu Nasir down should have been an emotional high point for the show, when it turns out that being taken down was all part of his evil plan, it sort of removes that achievement. The plot in Homeland S1 wasn't at all ridiculous. Incorporate Brodie into society, get him near some high value targets, KABOOM. Sweet and simple. But Nazir's plot this season just wasn't... It was too cartoonish for me to take seriously. Which is why I think I ended up finding the whole episode so meh. :(
The conceit was so dumb I couldn't swallow it. We got introduced to every EVIL TERRORIST SCHEME only when it was in progress, no buildup whatsoever. "Look at my hand! The pacemaker is now diamonds! Now it's a bomb plot! I'm on a Canada." Or that team of latter day ninjas. WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT SHIT?! And a quantity of C4 large enough to vaporize a building is smuggled around like it's nbd? In _this_ country? Are you kidding me? But the moment where BroCar split up in the woods was the worst part. Nearly did me in with rage. All that awesome acting from the beginning of the episode, where the fuck did it go? I mean yeah Carrie did her "goan turn red and shit mah pants now" face which is possibly an emotional state and Brodangalo did his best REAL MEN OF MANLY ejection of a tear, but the lines were so wooden and awful I felt I was watching a high school play or Big Bang Theory or some shit. I've seen more pathos in turds as they're swirled down the drain. Whatever, this show has on average delivered more pleasure than brain scraping pain so I'll stick around for season three where we'll hopefully get more sharply scripted factional play within the CIA and fewer ridiculous plots within plits within plots within the man your man could smell like, if your man was in fact capable of smelling like a man.
As if there was any doubt that the creative force behind 24 was driving this boat, now we've blown up CTU. Does it count as biting another show's style when you were technically involved in both of them? Now I just wonder how long until Dana gets kidnapped. It has to happen. That or Carrie has a niece. I guess maybe her dad could get kidnapped too. Also, if you want a postmortem and where things are going, you can look here. It's the broad strokes of what they're thinking for Season 3. To keep it short, Brody isn't off the show, they seriously cast about for a central story this year, and fuck you if you don't like the implausibilities because you're watching the show wrong. Dumbass Question of the Day: Why is there a goddamn wagon wheel glued to the ceiling of Brody's lake house? Over the hearth? Is that like some sort of pioneer booby trap for catching mothmonstermen? Because I am like ninety percent certain that Jon Benjamin is way too expensive to reprise that gig at this point, though it wouldn't necessarily be the most implausible thing that's happened this season. Also, is it just me, or are Carrie and Brodie stilted, awkward, and generally awful to watch? I like them individually, but together I just hear the sound of a fault line scraping against itself in my head the entire time. Also, at what point did Carrie ever get back in at the CIA on any kind of permanent basis? The entire time she's agonizing over this choice, I'm just sitting here thinking, what choice? You are extra crazy. And why does everybody keep going on about how awesome she is at analysting? She's been off her rails for most of the series and all of her entire performance to date could be best categorized as a loaf of impulsiveness and ill-advised decisions. Even if she was any good (no evidence), what responsible intelligence agency would put a woman who throws a piston if she can't find her green pen in charge of any significant portion of an intelligence network? Nothing about her situation that would have been germane to her termination has changed. She still took a bunch of classified material out of the office and stapled it to her bedroom wall and she still failed to report a very real medical condition that would be of concern to the agency. The material reason for firing her didn't go away, so in what universe is she back now? So. Season three. You don't have to read that interview I linked to guess that the next season has to do with Dar Adal, because why else would you hire F. Murray Abraham to ride a bus and trade ten lines in a waffle house? When it turns out that he's masterminding a coup to supplant the current American government and put Dutch from The Shield in, I promise I won't be shocked. I do, however, hope that this has finally disabused anybody who might have still been suffering under the impression that this is a show to be taken seriously. It's not. It really is just 24 with occasional titties and fucksaying. Which, you know, whatever - I also watched every episode of 24, so I'll hang in. I can laugh at how dumb a show is and still have at least as much fun as if the show was being entirely good. The Emmies might have some 'splainin' to do, though.
Comparing this show to 24 is the laziest criticism imaginable. I would say all of you are better than that, but it's clear that a) Seiler doesn't even know whose cabin it is, despite there being several minutes of dialog across two episodes establishing this; b) Aeon calling them "BroCar"; and c) jeffd trumping up the implausibility of the plot re: amount of explosives when the only CIA guy who was even conscious when the crate got taken out of the tailor's shop had just been shot in the stomach, so obviously after that and the surgery and the what-have-you he obviously would have perfect recall of the exact dimensions of the crate and could guess its weight within three ounces because of how the baddies were carrying it and the way its gravity bent light around it.
Actually I'd assume they'd work out the amount of explosives based on the hollow in the wall. You know, since that's like, math and all that. Don't let me get in the way of your herpderp though.
Somebody check the tape: pretty sure the crate was smaller than the hole in the wall. In any event, why would they (or anybody) assume that any given hiding space is filled to the brim with explosives?
I'm pretty sure they mentioned in a previous episode how much explosives they thought were there and that they found some on some guy and that meant x amount was missing which was still enough to cause a shitload of problems. I could be wrong. And I think everyone is saying Carrie is awesome because she has incredible instincts that, I think we are meant to believe, are based upon her intricate knowledge of that particular terrorist group--which is probably some kind of OCD thing brought on by her condition in the first place, that huge focus. She's also really, really good at interrogation. Brody wasn't going to tell anyone else that information. Hell, he almost didn't tell her. So I don't think it's a stretch to believe that Carrie is an excellent intelligence agent that was right about every single thing she called in the entirety of the show.
Excuse me. Carrie's lakehouse. A million apologies. If it makes it any better, I'm a little bit tipsy. However, this is worth noting. These two guys are the showrunner and second most powerful creative force, respectively. There's a reason why this gets lumped with 24 - it's from the same people. The only person in an EP chair that isn't a 24 alum is the Israeli guy they had to pay for the premise. Also, here's some weird news - the creatives behind this show have a pilot at FX about a mideast dictator. That's with the Israeli guy. The 24 guy has a deal with Gordon for a FBI series at CBS.
I am aware of the previous work of Messrs. Gansa and Gordon. That is precisely what makes the criticism so lazy: "guys this show is exactly like the last show those guys made because everybody always makes the same thing over and over again amirite."
I suppose, then, that you were shocked and appalled when it turned out that the David E. Kelly Wonder Woman involved commiserating over ice cream and no practical understanding of the character? You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can use an appeal to the work immediately prior to the current piece you're examining as an expectation-frame for your examination. This is why no sane person reads a Stephen King novel expecting a super-terrific ending.
This discussion made me wonder if I was taking crazy pills, so I had to go back online and watch the end again. She's pretty clearly standing in front of windows in the daytime. I also agree that the harping about how people on the show also worked on 24 is kind of ridiculous. Jack Bauer shot more people in almost every episode of 24 than people died total in this entire series before that bomb went off at the end. I'm also pretty sure that no information has been gained using torture yet. The terrorist plot was also a tiny fraction of the insanity that went into 24's schemes, it was pretty much "Blow up the marine homecoming with Walden. If that falls through blow up Walden's funeral." Compare that to any given episode of 24 revealing plans within plans to nuke multiple sites and then take over the US government itself.
I think saying people are "harping about how people worked on 24" is disingenuous because that's not what people are actually saying. At least from my POV it's not that people worked on 24, it's that Homeland seems to be dragging in some of the lazy plotting that was characteristic of 24. They're still obviously not the same show and we won't see Carrie running around torturing people, but the comparison is still a fair one.
