Homeland Review - E1, S10
13/03/2012
Show: Homeland
Episode: Season 1, Episode 10 – Representative Brody
Aired: Sunday 9:30pm, March 11th 2012
Channel: Ten
Recap
*SPOILERS – THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THIS EPISODE AND PREVIOUS EPISODES OF HOMELAND. CATCH UP HERE: https://ten.com.au/homeland.htm*
Brody gets a visit from the Vice-President asking him to accept Dick Johnson’s position as predicted by Nazir, but instead of a clear positive answer, Brody says Jessica has to have the final say. When he does ask her she immediately says no, worrying about the secrets that will be dragged into the public if he takes the position and the fact that he will have to be away from the family a lot.
Saul, Estes and Carrie decided Zahrani can be turned, using his sexuality as a bargaining tool, and set up an interrogation room at Zahrani’s bank where he owes a fair amount of money. Carrie is told she’ll run point on the operation and she goes home to study with Virgil where she gets a call from Brody. They arrange to meet at her place the following evening.
Brody tells Mike he forgives him for the affair with Jessica and then proceeds to emotionally blackmail Mike into convincing Jessica that Brody should take Dick’s position. Meanwhile Carrie’s interrogation of Zahrani goes south when he tells them he doesn’t care if they expose the fact that he’s gay. Struggling for leverage, she picks that his children are his weakness and threatens to deport his daughter who is studying at Yale. Not wanting to see his daughter back in Saudi Arabia, he admits that he has previously and can still communicate with Walker. Saul tells him to organise a meeting with Walker for the next day at noon.
Mike has a go trying to get Jessica to let Brody be a congressman but in the end her children succeed where he fails. And talking about failure, music, wine and lipstick are all the ingredients for a date and yet that’s not why Brody came around. Carrie is obviously disappointed when all Brody wants is for her to promise that their fling will never come out in a scandal, which she agrees to... but wait doesn’t Saul know? Even though Brody seemed cool in the house, when he gets to the car he seems to have a moment, echoed in the scene where Saul is eating ‘a peanut butter and cracker’ dinner alone in his office.
Carrie realises too late that the meeting between Zahrani and Walker is a trap, Walker isn’t the man walking towards Zahrani and we see Walker is in a building nearby with a detonator. When the area around the fountain blows up Carrie’s knocked out. When she wakes up in the hospital, Saul is waiting there and he wastes no time making the situation clear... the CIA has a mole.
Thoughts on the Episode
Switching between cold and professional while interrogating Zahrani to the devastation on her face when she realises Brody doesn’t want her, Claire Danes continues to prove she well and truly deserved her Emmy for this role.
It was nice to see Virgil again, I really loved his relationship with Carrie in the first few episodes and I’m hoping he doesn’t disappear again.
I liked the parallel between Carrie appealing to ‘what makes [Zahrani] human’ and Brody using the same tactic with Jessica and Mike, the two of them definitely have a talent for emotional manipulation.
Compared to other Homeland episodes nothing in this episode really surprised me, other than Jessica apparently knowing everything, which left me feeling anticlimactic. I knew they couldn’t use Zahrani to arrest Walker because he’s the centrepiece for the finale and can’t get trapped as early as this. Therefore when they set up the meeting it had to be a trap and bombs are the favoured choice of the Middle East apparently. We’ve known there was a mole for a while now so Saul’s comment in the hospital wasn’t a surprise either. While it was still an enjoyable episode I missed the thrill of getting information that gives me that eureka moment or shocks me.
The pace in this episode was back up with Carrie’s storyline and although Brody’s was still a little slow, it’s sure to pick up in the final two episodes.
What Did We Find Out?
The clues in this show seem to lead to more questions, but here’s what I found important:
- We’ve definitely got a mole somewhere in their midst and Saul tells Carrie it’s most likely the same person who slipped Hamid the razor blade. The only person we know who had trouble with the lie detector test, other than Brody, is Saul. And yet I’m still hoping someone else found a way to cheat the system.
- Jessica proved how perceptive she is, seeing through Mike and Brody’s games and revealing she knew about his relations with Carrie. Which leaves us wondering exactly how much more she knows? That her husband is a Muslim? That he’s been working with Nazir?
Hopefully we’ll get some answers next week. If you picked up anything else in the episode to hint at what’s to come, let us know below (but for those ahead overseas, please no spoilers).
Written by Libby Popper