There’s no place like homeland

Homeland returned for a second series on RTÉ Two on Tuesday night to explosive fanfare. Actually, the explosions were generally aimed in the direction of Iran as Israel had bombed the country’s nuclear reactors. The fallout, however, was eerily reminiscent, considering the current anti-Israel and anti-Western sentiment in the Middle East.

Some time has passed since last season’s finale and things have largely grown quiet for our two main protagonists. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is living with her father and sister for one thing, still coming to terms with her mental illness and teaching English as a foreign language.

 

Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) on the other hand is now a congressman and somehow the potential running mate of vice-president William Walden (Jamey Sheridan) for the presidency, the same man he tried to blow up at the end of the last season. Things at home are also progressing nicely, well, on the surface at least, but there’s always daughter Dana on hand to throw a well-timed teenage strop to show there are still problems for the Brody clan bubbling away under the surface.

It’s not long until the CIA come in search of Carrie when one of her old contacts in Beirut comes out of the woodwork with information about a planned attack on the US. She’ll only talk to Carrie so CIA Deputy Director David Estes and her old pal Saul Berenson (the excellent Mandy Patinkin in a spectacular panama hat, which I hope is standard issue for spies worldwide) are left with no option but to get her back in the field.

It’s not long until Brody is back in the thick of things with Abu Nazir either when a journalist turns up with a message for him to steal an encryption key to a database of potential targets from a safe in David Estes’ office. He seems to have changed his tune in telling her that he is not a terrorist but instead going to try influence the laws of the land through office. He’s a conflicted man but, when faced with the decision to steal the information, he goes for it.

Carrie, meanwhile is not the same focused, self-assured woman we’re used to seeing. She’s disorientated, forgetful (side-effect from the ECT she underwent last season) and nervous of her surroundings. The episode was titled The Smile, though it took until the end to see one. And it’s Carrie’s.

Forced to make a run for it when she’s made by agents following Saul, some quick thinking and a precision knee to the groin of said agent elicits a giddy smile from Carrie and you get the feeling that, while she may not be fully back to the top of her game, the old Carrie is creeping through.

There’s a side-plot with Brody’s daughter Dana when she outs her dad as a Muslim at school in a heated argument with another student and Brody is forced to come clean to wife Jessica about his conversion. Jessica has been slightly intoxicated by being the wife of a congressman and she wants to be the wife of a vice-president.

She pulls back instantly in horror at the revelation and when she threw his Quran on the floor desecrating it, he looks deeply injured. Dana helps him bury it in the back garden and so Brody finds himself back where he began in series one, facing into a life with a wife who doesn’t understand him and that he can never be open with, his one ally left being his daughter.

What makes the show so good is the constant sense of having your fingernails stuck in your palms. You know this can’t end rosy, something bad has to happen for the plot to progress – that’s a given. So the audience is on permanent alert. Also, you can change sympathies with characters in an instant; the villains and heroes are complicated by the fact that you feel empathy for both sides. You’re not supposed to like Brody, he’s a recruited terrorist, but yet you do and you somehow want all this to work out for him. Equally the good guys are not always likable, Estes is clearly thinking of his career and even the great Saul can be a bit of a grey area. The rapidly shifting sympathies keep you from settling on a comfortable point of view.

The casting is also top class. Lewis and Danes are full value for their Emmys won the previous weekend for these roles and Mandy Patinkin plays Saul Berenson with absolute panache. He’s the antithesis to Carrie’s manic side but he plays the part with a weariness that could only come with 35 years of subversion and cover-ups at the CIA.

If you missed it on Tuesday, there’s always catch-up on the RTÉ Player or alternatively Channel 4 begins airing it this Sunday at 9pm.

One to watch
Keeping in a similar vein, Hunted starts this Thursday on BBC 1 at 9pm. Filling the Spooks void, Hunted is a BBC/HBO collaboration that explores the murky world of private security and corporate espionage. As a thriller about a paranoid female spy, this time played by Melissa George (Angel in Home and a Away, remember her?), Hunted will inevitably draw comparisons with Homeland.

However, where Carrie has those she trusts in – like her family and Saul – George’s character, Sam, trusts no one. In a world where security is being farmed out more and more to private companies that operate beyond the scope of governments, it’s an interesting world to explore. It’s created by Frank Spotnitz of the X Files and he certainly knows how to spin a tale. Looks promising.

Elsewhere, Fresh Meat returns to screens on Channel 4 next Tuesday. The first series of this was absolutely hilarious, and we return to the beginning of spring term.

Kingsley has returned with a whole new image, Josie has also decided to turn over a new leaf by becoming friends a girl from her course and a self-styled ‘mental dental’, while Paul Lamb ‘the Invisible Man’ left over Christmas and so a new housemate is needed quick or the rent goes up.