And, like any Washingtonian (or suburban-Washingtonian) who thinks too much, I wonder which person or camera is watching me on the train and working up a profile. The degree to which we spy on one another supplies “Homeland’s” constant sense of paranoid anxiety.
Carrie deals in secrets and keeps a potentially ruinous one about herself: Once a day she pops an antipsychotic pill to stave off mental illness. If anyone knew, she’d lose her clearance. Her medicated equilibrium nevertheless betrays her when her obsessiveness over her unauthorized spying leads her to make poor professional decisions.
Carrie’s failures are stacking up: When the show opens, she is in Baghdad, rushing to a clandestine meeting with a condemned Iraqi prisoner. Just before Carrie is caught speaking to him, he whispers a dreadful bit of news: A soon-to-be-released American POW has been converted into a terrorist.
With no proof, and with her cover blown, Carrie winds up back at Langley assigned to desk work, under the watchful eye of a deputy director, David Harewood (David Estes), who doesn’t like her.
Then comes the news that a U.S. Marine sergeant captured at the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003 has been rescued — bewildered and bedraggled. It’s Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis, whom fans of HBO’s “Band of Brothers” may recall), who is brought home to a hero’s yellow-ribbon welcome. Even before his debriefing, Carrie is convinced Brody is the terrorist her source warned her about.
“Homeland” is absorbing and panicky from its start. It is a post-9/11 and post-bin Laden story — the al-Qaeda leader’s death is referenced in the second episode. “Homeland” is attuned to both the lethargy and relentlessness of the present-day war.
Which also makes it a post-Jack Bauer story. Certainly “Homeland” leans heavily on the technology at its characters’ disposal the same way “24” did, but it is not ridiculous about doing so. (Especially not since I watched this week’s “60 Minutes” story about the New York Police Department’s tricked-out, anti-terror surveillance unit. Did you get a look at that place? The future, my friends, is truly upon us.)
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