Ruper Friend channels his inner-“Decline of a Western Civilization” in the second episode of Season 4 of “Homeland.”
Credit: David Bloomer/Showtime
The first image we see on episode two is Sandy’s body being wheeled in a flag-draped casket into an airport hangar.
Senator Lockhart tells Quinn and Carrie that Sandy had kids and they saw the YouTube video of their dad being stomped to death.
Yowch.
Lockhart wants to meet with Carrie and Quinn in the morning.
Carrie arrives at her sister’s house. She lets a deep sigh out and doesn’t seem too eager about the mother and child reunion that she’ll be providing for her daughter.
She walks to the door, hears crying and turns away.
She gets all Crazy Carrie when her sister opens the door and when her sister is like, “I didn’t know you were coming home,” Carrie is like, “I could stay at a hotel.”
Then we see Quinn boozing poolside at the condo complex where he paid his rent six months in advance. He throws the empty bottle in the pool. It’s a little bit reminiscent of that pathetic scene in “A Decline of a Western Civilization.” Rupert Friend plays a very amusing drunk.
The manager of the condo complex gives him a flirty hard time for throwing the bottle in the pool. Not five seconds later they’re having sex.
Then we’re back in Pakistan where the kid who survived the bombing is arguing with his friend about the consequences of posting the video. We learn definitively that his name is Aayan Ibrahim, when a newscaster approaches him and wants to get his thoughts on the justice that may or may not have been served with Sandy’s death. He is pissed and he goes back to his room and we see him taking some sort of medical supplies and packing them away.
It’s the morning after Quinn’s one-night-stand and he asks the condo manager if she wants to get some breakfast. Quinn’s date is explaining the nutritious merits of “dip-ems.” She then tells him that he was moaning in his sleep. He tells her it was a rough week, and then notices some guys at the next table are laughing at the pair.
He confronts them, and they explain what they’re laughing at.
“I speak dumbass, what is it?” Quinn asks.
“Since you ask, what I said was, ‘when she gets on the scale, it says, “one at a time, please.”’”
Quinn beats the crap out of the guys and is terrified by his own strength.
Carrie’s sister gives her daughter to her to hold. Carrie is super reluctant to hold her. It’s very forced. The baby, whose name is Franny, has full-fledged Brody red hair, but Carrie wants to just get out of there. Her sister is like, “We have to talk.”
Carrie goes into her meeting with Lockhart and Quinn hasn’t even arrived. She tells Lockhart that she wants to be the station chief in Islamabad. He doesn’t seem sold on the idea, based on the obvious reason that she was partially responsible for dropping a bomb on a wedding.
“How long am I back for?” she asks Lockhart
“Permanently,” he yells before saying, “Look at it this way, you’ll get to spend time with your kid.”
This so angers Carrie and she storms out of there. She goes back to her sister’s where the nanny asks if Carrie wants to change her baby’s diaper. She gets the call that Quinn is in jail for beating up the dudes in the restaurant. Carrie seems relieved not to have to change her daughter’s diaper.
“Honestly, this kind of brightened my day,” she tells Quinn. Is there some romantic chemistry brewing between she and Quinn? Seems like that’s something the writers want us to believe.
C’mon “Homeland,” do we really need Quinn and Carrie to be an “are they or aren’t they?” concern?
CREDIT: Joe Alblas/Showtime
Aayan Ibrahim is traveling on a bus again, presumably getting as far away from school as he can. He knocks on a door. Inside is the family of the female friend in his study group. Her father is pissed. Aayan asks his friend to look after the bag full of medicine. At this point it becomes clear that she is interested in him, romantically, something that wasn’t quite so clearly spelled out before. Well, not as clearly spelled out as they usually do on “Homeland.”
Carrie visits a guy named Harris in the archives department of the CIA. He is a former case officer in Islamabad. He has been demoted to archives, and he has no interest in talking about Islamabad.
Carrie goes back to her sister’s house. She’s late. Her sister is pissed. “We were all counting on you,” she says. “I have two patients I had to cancel.”
Carrie can barely look at her own daughter.
Her sister is chiding her for changing her plans and deciding to go into a warzone where Carrie couldn’t possibly bring her daughter.
“You bring a life into this world, you take responsibility,” she tells Carrie angrily. But Carrie still doesn’t seem to get it.
Carrie tells her sister that she’s now been told she has to be in the U.S. permanently, and she can look after Franny the next day.
When the next day arrives, she tries to test out her maternal instincts, but is having some difficulty. She puts Franny in her carseat and chucks her in the front seat. If you’re not a parent, you should know that this is a big no-no these days. They drive by the Brody house, and Carrie tells her daughter a little bit about Franny’s dad.
Are any surviving Brodys in the house? Might we get to see what Dana is up to? That would be cool.
She tells her daughter, “I was arrested on that lawn. … He would have been a terrible father.” It’s kind of sweet and comical. She then tells her that the news of Franny’s arrival was the last thing that Brody was happy about. She then breaks down and tells her, “With his being gone, I can’t remember why I had you.”
Yowch.
Then we see Carrie running a bath for her daughter. She becomes quite aware that she could totally drown her daughter right then and there. She holds Franny underwater for what feels like five seconds. If you’re not a parent, you should also know that drowning your child is more of a no-no than putting the carseat in the front seat.
Seriously though, if you are a parent, this scene is terrifying to watch.
Then we see Saul and Dar Adal talking about CIA gossip. Dar Adal informs Saul that Carrie “is being recalled.” They talk about how Lockhart is a lousy CIA director, and he implies that maybe Saul will be named director when Lockhart inevitably gets canned.
Carrie goes to meet with Harris again. She’s in her car and yes, she has Franny with her.
Harris is pissed by the confrontation. He then sums up what the viewers have been thinking since the series premiere.
“You really are batshit crazy, just like they say,” he says. “Is that your kid? You brought your kid here?”
Harris admits that Lockhart moved him to archives when he reported an intelligence leak.
Carrie’s sister comes home to see Carrie playing with Franny and seeming like she’s actually happy. Carrie’s sister is quietly psyched to see her sister in mother mode.
Saul sees Carrie walking into the funeral. They stop to chat. She says, “heard he’s bringing you back,” as he motions to Lockhart. She says, “We’ll see.”
Carrie approaches Lockhart and talks about the details of Sandy’s intel system. She says how the good intel that Sandy got was good for Lockhart’s rep. But then when Harris reported the leak, he shut him down. “You didn’t want to hear how your golden boy was doing it,” she says, implying that Sandy was trading government secrets.
“You knew what was going on there, and that makes you complicit,” she accuses Lockhart.
He asks her what she wants in this blackmail deal and she reminds him that she wants to go to Islamabad as station chief.
At the funeral, Carrie tells Saul about her new post and asks if he can provide security for her team, leveraging his new posting in the private sector.
The whole time, with every little chess match move she makes, the viewer is completely aware that Carrie largely just wants to get the hell away from her daughter.
Her sister is livid.
“You’re her mother, which is not a choice that she made. It’s a choice that you made,” she tells Carrie. “She’s going to need her mother to be there for her.”
“I can’t,” says Carrie.
“There’s not even a diagnosis for what’s wrong with you,” her sister says.
This is another big “yowch” moment. Good to see we haven’t lost these in Season 4.
Carrie looks in on her daughter to say goodbye to her, but she approaches her kind of like an eighth-grader approaching a member of the opposite sex at a school dance. She simply says, “I’m so sorry” and leaves.
Meanwhile, Quinn is arriving home with his nightly bottle of hard liquor. The condo manager left a note with a lip print that says, “no one fought for me ever.” It’s kind of sweet.
We see Aayan in bed. Two mysterious dudes enter. They slap him and take his laptop. “No more interviews, no more videos” they tell him and give him a menacing look. His roommate enters the room and we see Aayan is bloody.
In the final shot, Carrie is flying alone in a small plane. A voice asks her, “you need anything, Ms. Mathison?”
She says, “I’m fine” as an answer to him. And then she tells herself the same thing, as though trying to convince herself.
There isn’t quite as much action in this episode, but there are a few good “yowch” moments, as we mentioned before. But this “I’m Crazy Carrie and I REALLY hate being a mom” plotline is a little rough. Final grade for this episode is a B.
