Homeland - Episode 4.01 and 4.02 - Review:"I'm Not Alright"

It’s been a long time waiting, but Homeland’s fourth season is finally upon us. This week, Showtime blessed us, with the back to back airing of the first two episodes of the fourth season, “The Drone Queen” and “Trylon and Peris”. Last season left us definitely wanting more, dwelling on the direction the show will be taking after Brody’s very public, and graphic, hanging in “The Star”. There was no way he would be coming back from this. Add to Brody’s absence, Saul’s departure from the CIA to the private sector in New York, and Carrie’s obvious baby/Istanbul dilemma. Homeland’s fourth season was sure to be different, with a new A and B plotline.



The first moments of “The Drone Queen” left no place for interpretation on whether or not Carrie had taken the job as chef of station, setting up the fourth’s season’s mythology, and it’s really no surprise. She was always obsessed, always a workaholic, and a baby, wasn’t going to change that, not after the feeling she left us with in the third season’s final chapter. The last seasons’ efforts were focused on Iran, but the targeted location, like the rest of the show, is changing. “The Star” seemed to close the Iran/Javadi chapter. The political/war/terrorism plotline, what really drives the show and its characters since its first season, is now shifting from Iran to Pakistan. (Although Carrie is actually stationed in Afghanistan, for now.)

It’s clear Carrie is stationed in a war zone, with three armed, military men, in the car with her, the scenery surrounding them isn’t inviting. The streets they’re driving through don’t seem like a place I’d be caught wandering about. They’re empty and dirty, with garbage flying around and fires in trash cans. It doesn’t seem like a safe place to be, doesn’t seem like a place where you’d bring a baby. Carrie was always prominent at her job, she is obsessed and she is fearless, all the qualities needed to be a good intelligence officer, a good chef station, but none of the qualities to be a good mother.

When Carrie finally gets to her place of residence, don’ think it qualifies as a home, it’s clear how empty her life is, her room, her house, it’s empty, bare, symbolic of what her life looks like, outside of work. The only thing she has is her job, like younger, season 1 carrier-obsessed Carrie, it kind of feels like she’s regressing. She can’t sleep without her pills, and she’s still mixing booze and meds. Her daughter is back in the States with her sister, and you can feel the obvious tension between the two. The baby was supposed to come with her in Istanbul (I have no idea how that could have been a good idea, given that Carrie is… well Carrie) but instead she’s in the middle of the war zone in Kabul. Carrie though, she’s exactly where she wants to be. Maybe Istanbul was too tame, or maybe she just needed out. Having the baby, she hadn’t thought it through, she kept her because of Brody, to have a part of him, but she can hardly take care of herself. She can’t be mother. She has problems, major fu*king problems, accentuated in the second episode of Homeland’s fourth season.

I was always a little fuzzy on the military jargon and tactics. Don’t even try to explain to me how war works, I just don’t get it. But here’s what I get from the first episode: there are terrorists and they are a threat to America’s national security, so they need to be taken out, it’s as simple as that. You need to locate them, and once that’s done, by any means necessary you end them. Taking them out, that’s exactly what Carrie’s been up to since she got promoted to chef of station, even earning her the nickname of “Drone Queen” amongst her staff, a nickname she doesn’t seem all that pleased with. We knew she was going to be ruthless, fearless, but Carrie was never one to follow orders without questions. She isn’t answering to Saul anymore, she’s *mostly* her own boss, her colleague Sandy (Chef of station in Islamabad) tells her who to kill and when. He gets her the Intel basically, and she’s the one to call the air strikes, to drop fire on people. (Why not do it himself? Another thing on the list of things I don’t get.) The targets, terrorists, are numbers on a list you get to cross, a never ending hit list of people a threat to America and for Carrie, for Sandy, it’s a job, a mission, all for the “Greater Good,” but Peter Quinn, he seems to see things differently. People are people, right? And Brody, he was on that list for the longest time.

In a rush, with no time to verify any of the Intel, Carrie orders the hit on the farm house, in Pakistan, taking out number 4. She knows when she orders the strike, that the civilians in the farm house will be collateral damage, and somehow, everyone's okay with that. What she doesn’t expect, is that the building they bombed was hosting a wedding, which means major casualties. It’s the beginning of the spiral down for Carrie, the team in Islamabad, and our much loved friend Lockhart. She bombed a wedding, killed lots of civilians and that’s a major cluster f*ck as Carrie would say.

They thought they were bullet proof, it happened deep in the tribal areas, where no one would risk verifying, turns out they weren’t. Aayan, the invincible boy who survived a bomb with only minor injuries accompanied by his invincible IPhone (It would have been more believable if it had been a Nokia, no?) without even wanting to, causes an uprising throughout the Pakistani population. His whole family is killed, his mother and sister, gone and he’s got the whole thing on video. He’s just a normal boy (or is he?), studying to become a doctor, who wants nothing to do with politics, but when his friend uploads the video of the wedding to the internet, it goes viral, causing major headaches to the people high up in the US government.

He’s grounded, he’s reasonable and he’s on the USA’s radar, as well as on some shady people’s radar. Something makes me think he’s going to become either a CIA asset or a terrorist. He’s scared of something, of someone, and he’s hiding from someone, hiding something. We don’t know the story here (or is that just me? Sometimes I don’t read all the dialogue when they speak in a language I don't know.) Some men break in his room, and it seems like it’s something he knew was going to happen, like they’re the reason he didn’t want all the attention.

When he starts getting the mediatic attention he’s desperately trying to avoid, Aayan rushes to his room and hides some viols. (Anyone care to explain what they are? I assumed something medical. Either vaccines, medicine, or maybe he isn’t really one of the good guys and it’s a virus? I don’t know. I paused on the labels but couldn’t read what was on them.) What’s got him so scared? Who were these people? What is he hiding? More importantly, who is he? Is he the new Brody, appears to be a good guy, but is really hiding something darker? Only time will tell.

Obviously, the Intel Sandy received was wrong, the mission was fu*ked from the start and you can tell something very fishy is going on there. The Intel was good until then, but this time, it was majorly wrong, so wrong. No one has a clue where the information is coming from, but it’s going to be this season’s mission to find out who that is. And after causing a roar throughout the population, Sandy’s picture is leaked to the media. And when people are mad, when people are in crowd, they turn into savages, he needs to get the f*ck out. I honestly thought the first episode was going a little slow until this part of the episode. Quinn and Carrie try their best to help him out, even after getting boxed in by a bus. They try to fight them off, try to save him, but they can’t and the chef of station gets beaten to death. Maybe I’m soft, and I know this is only fiction, but scenes like these, it makes my heart hurt, makes it clench. Masses make for savages.

Quinn and Carrie are recalled back to the States and it’s obvious that Quinn isn’t taking what happened with Sandy so well, and I’m not sure I understand why he’s really beating himself up about it. Surely, it’s not his first mission that ends badly, the first time he’s lost someone he worked with in a war zone. Is it the fact that Carrie ordered a hit that cost the lives of dozens of civilians? Is it the fact that he had to shoot through the pack of Pakistani? The fact that he had to leave Sandy there when he realized Carrie was in danger? (He always did have a crush on her.) Is it because Carrie told him they could have done more?

Regardless of the reason, he isn’t dealing with it very well contrary to Carrie, who’s still all business, still on a mission. He doesn’t want to go back, wants to stay in the States. He just isn’t ready for war again, just yet. He’s an emotional mess. (PS, what the hell is up with that moustache, he used to be so fun to look at! ) He starts drinking and, in a drunken haze, has a one night stand with his building manager. He’s still a good guy though, because he doesn’t give her the boot in the morning, he actually invites her to breakfast. It’s in the restaurant that his emotional state is put to light, he freaks out and beats the crap out of a douchebag for insulting his date, earning, a little vacation in jail.

When bailing your friend out of jail actually brightens the day you were spending with your kid, you know you have a problem. The second episode portrayed just how bad Carrie’s relationship with her family is, with her daughter, with her sister. She hasn’t seen them in weeks (months probably) and just as she is about to knock, she hears Frannie crying, and realising she’s up, Carrie isn’t even sure she wants to go see them. She doesn’t feel the need, the pull, to go see how her daughter is doing, without her. Her sister’s mad, and it’s understandable, she’s caring for her sister’s baby when she didn’t ask for any of it.

Carrie’s recalled to the States indefinitely, which means she’ll get to know her daughter, to interact with her. But it’s not what she wants; she wants Islamabad. The scenes between Carrie and Frannie are awkward and it’s sad. (And I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to put a baby seat in the front seat.) The reasons why it seems so hard between them is explained when Carrie brings the baby to Brody’s old house.

“And I… I tried, to hold on to that. I mean, to feel it too, happy that you’re here. But with his being gone, I can’t remember why I had you. I loved him so much. When I close my eyes I still see him, here.” - Carrie

They were bonding, and it was cute, because she was actually trying, and I though it was going well between the two, that is, until bath time. It was an eye opener, and I’m not sure if it’s at that moment that she knew she needed to go, that she couldn’t stay.

Since the only person to be able to tell them why the fu*k up happened got stomped to death, Carrie makes it her new mission to find out herself. She tracks down a case officer who was fired from the Islamabad station, but he’s not very cooperative. But because she’s Carrie, and she’s good at that, her job, she gets him to talk. There was an intelligence leak, and someone was silenced, because Sandy wasn’t the golden boy, the American hero, he was painted out to be. He was getting his information, exchanging top secret information against the locations of some key strikes. And that’s well, that’s Carrie’s golden ticket, because that’s treason, and it got a wedding bombed and a station chef killed.

She wins, she gets to leave, gets Islamabad. She needs Saul’s help, so he wins too, because something tells me he’s the one that’s going to be joining her in Pakistan. (Yay! I always loved there dynamic.) He’s bored out of his mind in New York, isn’t happy with the private sector. (That was expected) He can’t let go of it, can’t let go of his job, the CIA, the war he invested so much of his life in. And he would leave everything behind in a heartbeat, I’m sure of it.

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” - Carrie

But she isn't, not really. None of them are.