‘Homeland’ Is Lousy With Insanity
Carrie Mathison might be crazy. But does she have to be so damn pathetic?
[WARNING: Spoilers for episode four, “Game On,” below]
Full disclosure: I’ve been working on an essay about Carrie Mathison’s mental health for the past few days, and the last scene of Sunday night’s episode (“Game On”) may have thrown a wrench in it. Or maybe it didn’t: That twist was so desperate and ill-conceived it felt more like a defibrillator trying to revive a near-dead story line after three aimless, repetitive episodes than it did the denouement that showrunner Alex Gansa says he and the writers had been carefully plotting all along. So far, we’ve seen Carrie go off her meds and become manic again and blab to a journalist and witness a silence-and-smear-Carrie campaign by the CIA, who have her committed to a mental hospital. Saul, previously her biggest ally, is at the helm of the campaign, having exposed her during his televised testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as a mentally ill agent who’d risked national security by having an affair with a known terrorist (though he doesn’t name her, everyone in D.C. knows who the perps are). (Incidentally: How do you come back from that? As creepy lobbyist Leland Bennett suggests to her, you don’t. You end up dead.)
But scratch all that, because, in the final moments of “Game On,” we learn that all of this is part of a big con. Saul hasn’t turned into an asshole overnight. He is colluding with Carrie, and has secretly enlisted her in an elaborate scheme to bait the mastermind behind the Langley attack.
Now, we know Carrie gets a rush from pulling off a scheme — we saw that in the season-two opener. At that point in the story, she was recovering from the breakdown that landed her in the bin (where she had electroconvulsive therapy. By her own request). She was still reeling from the heartache of her weird, clandestine affair with Brody. And she’d been fired by the CIA. Yet Carrie obliged Saul, who was desperate for her to take on a mission to Beirut (she saw it as an opportunity to get her old job back): One of her old assets, the wife of a Hezbollah leader, had resurfaced with crucial information that would lead the CIA to Abu Nazir,al-Qaeda’s operational leader (and the man who turned Brody), who was planning an attack on U.S. soil. The woman insisted she’d only talk to Carrie. Though Carrie was visibly nervous, she became invigorated, then emboldened, and managed to pull off a complicated mission that involved assuming another identity; meeting with her asset and delivering on her promise to get her out of Beirut; rummaging through the apartment of a Hezbollah leader to steal files and fending off the armed men who followed her there; helping to set up the plot to capture Abu Nazir. All this to say, Carrie Mathison can pull even her fragile self together during a frantic assignment — a short one. But can she pull off a protracted con?
From what we’ve seen of her so far, no. This season they’re portraying the F-bomb-dropping addled agent as feeble, delicate. This is supposed to be a CIA agent? How is she going to sustain a con as elaborate and sinister as this one. Though, let’s face it, she’s earned this breakdown: She bore witness to the Langley bombing, and might be suffering at least some modicum of survivor’s guilt. That compounded with romantic heartache over Brody who is on the lam and grief for her colleagues that were killed. And somewhere in her mind must be a nagging sense that Brody might have been involved. All of this would be plenty to push someone over the edge. But her illness would exacerbate this further — it’s truly a wonder she hasn’t once again requested electroconvulsive therapy to try to wipe away the memories, as she did at the end of season one. (Am I projecting my own sense of logic here? Perhaps. I have to remind myself that my logic and Homeland’s writers’ room logic aren’t necessarily in concert with each other.)
But Saul is playing an even more dangerous game than he did when he dispatched Carrie to Beirut, not simply by disregarding her mental state, but employing it — employing her, unhinged — as a weapon. He’s made sure he’s pushed her over the edge: Vilifying her at the hearings and in the press (presumably he’s the leak), and in his new powerful position as the chief of Middle East Division, given orders to have her committed, taking away her car, her passport, freezing her bank account, putting her on the TSA no-fly list. He’s not only cast her as a pariah at the CIA, but around the world. Yet no one at the agency is aware of his grand plan to offer up Carrie as bait by rendering her so palpably vulnerable and desperate that the Iranians might approach her with a proposition to spy for them, so that she could get a face-to-face meeting with the elusive mastermind of the Langley attack. Using human bait, especially mentally ill human bait — I don’t know, that just seems like a recipe for disaster, but whatever it takes to write yourself out of a corner.
I’m being merciless to the writing here because I used to love Homeland. And then the series lost me somewhere in the middle of season two, when it morphed from an international thriller into a tedious romantic saga between a tortured, PTSD-ridden war vet and a once-brilliant agent now reduced to a blubbering man-crazy hysteric. I could bear her initial infatuation with him, and even their first affair — it tore her apart, because she believed he was guilty. But by the next season she got stars in her eyes, and became his fiercest apologist while we all believed he was guilty (and many of us were ready to see him die already). But this is what happens when showrunners capitulate to the demands of a network. Showtime insisted they keep Brody alive. He was supposed to have died at the end of season one, and again during season two. And it’s derailed the story, and turned Carrie from a complicated heroine into a shrill, pathetic anti-heroine (which I don’t think was the intention). She’s a hysteric, a looser cannon than she’s ever been, her judgment more impaired, her quiver jaw and cry face in full effect, as she begged for Saul’s forgiveness earlier this season (that being part of the act, I presume), and soon, I expect, will be yearning once again for Brody. When Saul was testifying against her, I have to admit I didn’t think it was such a bad thing. Carrie was out of control, indeed a security threat. And now she’s questioning her capabilities to Saul (in the final scene of “Game On”); I just want to slap her out of her self-eviscerating trance that’s taken hold of her. As my friend Amy said, “Jeez, it’s like a man is writing this or something.”
I hate hating Carrie. It’s too easy. But she’s got to grow a pair — of ovaries, of whatever. Having bipolar disorder doesn’t mean she has to be reduced to a puddle of tears and longing and self-loathing. How did she get to be in this testosterone-driven business if she is such a feeble weepy-peepie?
Ironically enough, what initially drew me in to Homeland is the very thing that’s pushing me away: its Cassandra complex conceit. Or I should say, its failure to follow through on it in these recent episodes. I loved the way Carrie Mathison’s manic, obsessive spells —manifestations of her bipolar disorder — led her to see what her fellow agents and superiors couldn’t, while her impulsiveness rendered her unreliable, thereby muting her dire warnings. When Carrie was proven right — which she was, as we saw in the season one finale — I’d share in her feeling of redemption. And not only because she was trying to prevent al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. soil. I was pulling for this lone woman in a man’s world, who is made to feel insane by her colleagues — all male — who are blinded by bureaucracy, their egos, and in some cases, sexual frustration and their unresolved romantic business with her.
And I loved hot-mess Carrie — she drank too much, picked up random guys for one-night stands — because she was just as brazen as any of her colleagues. (The smooth jazz was less forgivable, but we all have our foibles.) She shared qualities with Detective Chief Inspector Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison, on Prime Suspect — except Tennison’s reserve made her seem older, wiser, more authoritative, because she didn’t wear her vulnerability on her sleeve. But that’s a cultural difference between the two women. I forgave her for being reckless enough to become infatuated with Brody while surveilling his home as she built her case against him. For seeking him out, seducing him and having an impulsive, disastrous affair with him. Because it wasn’t all in vain — it was sort of a fact-finding mission, a dangerous one: Brody revealed his conversion to Islam and his link to Abu Nazir. And she stupidly showed her cards, confessing that she’d been watching him — bringing their tryst to an abrupt, brutal end. She paid the price: It cost her her sanity. But it was exciting and dangerous.She had chutzpah, in a cry-face, quiver-jaw kind of way. But that should have been the end of it.
Now we’re stuck in a retread lock-groove: Carrie’s lost her shit again. She’s in the bin. She’s been exiled from the CIA. And yet she’s doing work on the DL for Saul. It’s only a matter of time before Carrie and Brody hook up in Caracas — this is a love story, after all. Can we please, PLEASE move on? No more breakdowns! No more psych wards! No more romantic rekindlings! We need our emboldened, paranoid, omniscient Carrie back, our Cassandra. Oh, how I miss her.
I’m going to go against my cynical grain here and hold out hope: Sloppy though it was, last Sunday’s denouement may just do the trick and jumpstart, possibly even redirect the rest of the season. I mean, something has got to give. Please don’t make me hate-watch this show.
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