'Homeland' - Seasons 1-5

Rooting For The CIA

Back in the 50s when the New York Yankees were truly dominating the American League, there was this complaint that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for US Steel. The might of the Yankees' organisational success simply looked as monolithic as an industrial giant. In a similar vein, rooting for the CIA is a bit like rooting for US Steel, but much less glamorous and satisfying.

The premise of 'Homeland' is rooted in enough real world problems that the show is compelling from episode to episode, but there's something really odd about watching a show where we are emotionally pulling for a protagonist with fairly dodgy ideological credentials. Especially when there's at least one level of insanity thrown into the mix.

It's even harder when you binge-watch a TV series going from start to finish. There aren't exactly a whole lot of series that can withstand that kind of continuous viewing and this one was a challenge all of its own. This show gets very high marks from critics and audiences alike but there are moments where one wonders outlaid where everything is going and how could they possibly sustain 4-5 seasons of this stuff with these characters.

What's Good About It

The show is very current and abreast of the political and diplomatic problems of its subject matter. You keep watching because you genuinely want to know how the show is going to tackle these ideas and resolve the plot. The characters are interesting, and in many ways very challenging to digest. The performances are generally good across the board; Mandy Patinkin is always superb. Claire Danes is a bit scary.

Each episode has a requisite amount of intrigue which keeps you engaged, even as some less than stellar acting goes on in parts. It's not a winner scene to scene to scene, but it's definitely intriguing and interesting.

What's Bad About It

Some of what goes on is really hard to relate to, in any kind of emotional way. This is an odd complaint from me because usually I'm okay with shows that run with hard decisions over what the heart says. I do struggle with shows where I fundamentally disagree with the philosophical outlook of the protagonist, so this one gets pretty challenging when I have to endure being shown the consequences of a decision with which I as an audience member disagree. This isn't 'Desperate Housewives', this is a show about how the CIA ensures security for the Western hemisphere. It gets held to a higher standard for the story areas it chose.

The other issue I have is that when Carrie pushes for a moral reason, I can't help but think it reeks of hypocrisy because she herself is willing to do pretty immoral things for national security. When she pleads for special understanding, I can't help but think that she's overreaching because she never cuts anybody any slack - which is a virtue - so she shouldn't be pleading special cases. That she can swing so wildly with her moral outlook in any given season suggests the writers actually haven't got the character down completely.

It's a minor quibble. But it's a quibble.

What's Interesting About It

As the seasons progress, the main character Carrie Mathison gets crazier and crazier. She does have personal quirks that stick out as being possibly personality disordered as well as being clinically bipolar. It's not entirely explained just how the condition does not get discovered earlier and thus gets her disqualified from holding a position in Intelligence. Having to rely on a fairly regular supply of anti-psychotics puts Carrie into a lot of vulnerable situations where somebody who is normal might not suffer as much.

At the heart of the series is a personality issue wrapped in a mental health issue wrapped in a secretive agency that's used to manipulating people and information. It can get amoral faster than can get immoral, and the sort of choices these characters make can really make you think about the price of having something like the CIA do our society's dirty work.

Is The CIA As Good As Claimed?

The FBI comes in for some ridicule by this series. That would be the same FBI that we've been made familiar through all the other films and TV shows. The conceit of this series is that the people in the CIA are smarter and better informed than any FBI agent. So in light of that casual contempt, here's a quick question... does one prefer to work with Agent Dana Scully or Carrie Mathison? I'd pick Scully. She's far more professionally calm and sticks to logic and reason. Between the two, I think Scully's a lot smarter. Thus, being shown how dumb and unreliable the FBI are doesn't actually do the characters any justice.

Yet, the show proceeds with the uncontested assumption that Mathison as played by Claire Danes is super smart with an extraordinary intuition that never fails, and a special talent to be reckoned with. However, when you binge-watch the show, she seems to get by on wild intuitive hunches that happen to be right in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, because the writers need her to be right more than the audience. About the fifth time she refuses to stand down when ordered and she goes and just does her own thing, you feel like disowning her. Which, to some extent is what happens to her a couple of times; but it certainly isn't undeserving.

The other thing that sticks out at you is how awful it would be to work for any intelligence organisation. It really looks like horrible work, best avoided. If you are an analyst, you don't get to own your observations; if you are field agent, you don't get to own decisions; if you are a manager of operations, you don't get to own your conscience; if you are the director you don't get to own the politics. It's a bad scene all around. The nitty gritty of finding targets to attack with drones is bad enough. The weight of international politics and the incumbent diplomacy makes thing look simply impossible. If police procedural are supposed to make police work look glamorous, then this series certainly doesn't make the CIA look glamorous. It makes it look like a truly awful place to work, the glory be damned.

Anticipating Attacks, Anti-Terror, Anti-Psychotics 

Maybe I browned off Carrie Mathison somewhere around season 2. It struck me that what she thought she had to offer the intelligence service was overstated by her, while the evidence was clear that she was a terrible team player. The things that made her 'good' in her own eyes are in many ways a detriment to the service. Making things more complicated is the character setup where she is bipolar, psychotic and dependent on her medication. While interesting as a story point, it becomes glaringly obvious that such dependence places not only her but the entire service and by extension the state at jeopardy.

It's interesting because somewhere along the way, it is a show where you lose confidence in the protagonist as the character who leads you through the story. I got disinvested pretty quickly once I lost confidence, and started to look for different things within the show to keep me interested. One of the more worrisome notions was that perhaps when Carrie is on her meds and 'sane', she actually displays signs of Borderline Personality Disorder. I know it helps the writers to have a drama queen generate the drama, but in many ways they're problems that would not be there if Carrie didn't behave in the drama queen manner that she does.

The Dodgy Ethics Of Drone Attacks

There is a great anxiety about America's use of drones to attack the terror targets. This anxiety obviously extends into America, right through to the writers who write about the CIA. It's hard to imagine if this anxiety runs right into the CIA, but at least the CIA characters wrestle with their consciences about drone strikes. On the one hands the issue of collateral damage. In 'homeland', this manifests itself twice: once in the secret bombing of a Madrassa school, and another in a mistaken bombing of a wedding in Pakistan. The collateral damage being non-combatant civilians, some of whom are children rests very heavily on some of the people.

Yet, the alternatives are not really spelt out. Putting boots on the ground is politically prohibitive as well as financially unviable. It's one thing for SEAL Team Six to train for 6 months to take down Osama bin Laden in his compound; they just can't whipped up and around at the whim of a station chief. Then there is the diplomatic difficulty of letting a combat group into Pakistan to do these missions. Inevitably the decision tree narrows down to drone strikes based on intelligence.

Drone strikes get the loudest opposition from the far left and the far right of politics, leaving a largely mute middle. The silence is understandable because the majority would rather not have the allies/coalition of the willing/the West go into an all out ground war. The expedience of the drone strikes is exactly in proportion to the degree they do not want to commit to yet another war. The middle does not wish for another World War, nor even a Vietnam or even the ongoing Afghan and Iraq wars. It is to that Drone strikes are somehow more ethical, it is that they are more expedient. Yet we depend on the expediency so that we can live our lives mostly unchanged, and unchallenged.

Interestingly enough, the tenor of the show is that it's against drone strikes, but the fictional CIA in this series keeps benefiting from drones, it is as if they are writing self-defeating treatises. In any case, the whole exercise makes you think if what precarious world peace we have comes from this constant active espionage and drone strikes, then it's an expensive peace that we should enjoy and appreciate a little bit more because we're most certainly paying for it big time.

The Futile Joy Of Terrorism

War, as Von Clausewitz had it, was diplomacy through other means. Then, we have to look at terrorism as a kind of war representing some kind of diplomatic action, except it is hard to sustain that notion given the poor rewards terrorism. I understand the position that overtime we give up a bit of our civil liberties in response terror attacks, we are giving into terror in exactly the manner they wish it, but truly that is too abstract a notion given the cut and thrust of a proper war. This is because in war, we are willing to undertake many means that would defy moral sanction. That, is the nature of war.

In turn, even the most successful terrorist acts do not result in diplomatic shifts towards a better result for the terror-initiating organ. What happens is a concerted effort to hunt the perpetrators like criminals and not apply the civil liberties - like, say the Miranda Rights or innocent-until-proven-guilty assumptions - which means the tangible returns on the acts of terror are hardly like the results of war. While war is immoral, it can be argued that war can be part of an ethical solution. It's hard to mount it and sustain it, but logically, it is possible. For instance, it is ethical to mount an argument in favour of going to war to get Hitler and the Nazis.

Terror offers no such position. Even with Hitler as the enemy, it's hard to argue a case for blowing up a bomb on the streets of Berlin to get Hitler's Germany. The distinguishing characteristic of acts of terror as opposed acts of war might be the absence of both moral and ethical positions. Acts of terror are imbued with Nihilism. It's not a long bow to draw between Gavrilo Princip and political nihilism. As such, it is interesting how often the characters in 'Homeland' try and appeal to the humanity of the terrorist not to go through with their terrible plan. One would think these arguments would fall on deaf ears, but the writers keep finding a way for letting this ruse work.

Doing Bond's Work

I've pointed this out a couple times in reference to James Bond, but Bond never goes to these kinds of places to do his work. By 'these places' I mean the Middle East countries with their attendant messy politics and muddy ethics and totally distorted sense of justice. James Bond is instead busy chasing fanciful villains in nice places with beautiful hotels and wonderful cars. 'Homeland' is like the antithesis to the Bond movie version of espionage. Carrie Mathison does the kind of gritty spy work that seems unfathomably delicate and dependent human frailty. She draws her gun on the odd occasion but the job often doesn't come down to her gunning down the bad guy in person.

Most of Carrie's work involves tireless hours surveillance and building a timeline that gives shape to the suspect's actions. If this espionage-proper, it is more like an elaborate adult-world version of Cluedo rather than a Bond movie. In some ways, it's the espionage series we needed to see.