TV Review: Finale finality

Homeland’s brilliant third season closer resolves series-spanning threads

A quick word about television and the nature of this column: I spent more time in the last year consuming the myriad serial offerings of HBO, Showtime, AMC, Fox, FX, NBC, et al. than I did watching movies, which may be a first for me. And yet I don’t have cable. What I do have is Netflix, HuluPlus, a friend-of-a-friend’s HBOGo password, and a decent grasp on navigating the dubious cyber underground of streaming sites. The new way of watching is whatever I want it to be, on my schedule, and I take full advantage. Even without the conventional 700+ channel Cox digital package, I have access to more programming than ever before, ranging from the abjectly stupid to the sublime.

So bear with me. Television as a storytelling medium has never been more exciting, more sophisticated, more morally complex or intellectually challenging than it is today. It’s also never been more sprawling; I’ll always have a lot of catching up to do.

Homeland

Since its premiere in 2011, Showtime’s off-the-rails CIA thriller “Homeland” has been as wildly uneven, impulsive and occasionally batshit crazy as its protagonist Carrie Mathison, the bipolar spy portrayed with unhinged aplomb by Claire Danes. Danes is fantastic in the role, bringing empathy and a lived-in authenticity to a character who in the hands of a lesser actress would be an unwatchable, screeching mess, but the show itself has often fallen short of her courageous performance.

The first several episodes were quiet, brilliantly constructed mysteries that focused as much on the tortured inner workings of its characters as it did on the broader machinations of the CIA. The show begins when an Iraqi asset tells Carrie that an American soldier has been turned by al-Qaeda. At the same time, Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) is rescued by U.S. Special Forces after years of torture and imprisonment at the hands of the Bin Laden-like Abu Nazir. Brody returns home a war hero, but Carrie is convinced that his rescue was an orchestration by the enemy, a cog in the wheel of a larger terror plot of which Brody may be the key player.

Carrie’s frantic uphill battle to prove her hunch to both her superiors and herself and Brody’s heartbreaking struggle to reconnect with his family made for enthralling, addictive television.

But the “Is-He-Or-Isn’t-He” question was the engine that drove the show. That question was more or less answered by the end of season one, and season two — brilliant moments (the “Q&A” episode) aside — floundered without a solid through-line. The plotting became more outrageous, the character conflicts devolved into soap opera, and the shocking second season finale felt less earned than contrived. It seemed as if Fonzie was mounting the water skis.

With season three, showrunners Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon have, thankfully, offered a major course correction by sacrificing initial plot momentum in favor of slowing down to consider the consequences of season two’s events (and in the process, imbuing them with a retroactive credibility). They first focus on Brody’s shell-shocked family, particularly his teenage daughter, before shifting to the political fallout of last season’s Langley bombing and the subsequent ascent of Carrie’s chief mentor/sympathizer Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) to acting head of an all-but-broken CIA. Saul, always thoughtful and simmering, must now contend with grandstanding Sen. Andrew Lockhart (a scene-stealing Tracy Letts) and black ops specialist Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham), an ally whose allegiance to the agency routinely trumps human decency.

The thematic backbone of the show has always been one of intersecting and conflicting loyalties, personified by the mercurial Brody, but this season that theme has been both fine-tuned and amped up, and the resulting cloak-and-dagger intrigue — centered on an elaborate CIA plot to assassinate the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — has never been more compelling.

In many ways, Sunday night’s devastating season finale felt like the logical end to a series that’s always had an expiration date. It’s far and away the most accomplished episode to date, distilling the show’s themes and concerns into one paradigm-changing hour. For its brutal, audience-punishing inevitability, the finale earns a place next to the year’s other two most talked-about hours of television — Game of Thrones’ “Red Wedding” and Breaking Bad’s “Ozymandias.” But unlike Game of Thrones, Homeland’s central conflict has now been definitively resolved, and unlike Breaking Bad, it’s been renewed for another season. Where it goes from here is murky; the only sure thing is that when Homeland returns next year it will be a completely different show. That may not be a good thing.