Romeo + Boo-liet

The second season of Homeland has ended, and I think we will all be able to rank it among the worst sophomore seasons to follow great débuts, alongside Friday Night Lights and Downton Abbey. Will Homeland right itself in its third season like those other two series did? Jesus, I hope so.

It started back strong: "The Smile" was an incredibly satisfying return, assuring the audience that Carrie (Claire Danes) hadn't totally lost either her marbles or her edge. For Brody (Damian Lewis) to have actually managed to become a Congressman was maybe a bit implausible, but at least it raised the stakes for what a terrorist operative could potentially fuck up for the sake of his cause. But then -- in a series of events nicely documented by Kate Aurthur for Buzzfeed -- things went awry. I think I kept the faith up until Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban) personally kidnapped Carrie -- after making sure to get caught on a convenience store security camera, because why would the world's most notorious criminal get someone else to buy him his Vitamin Water? -- and used her to make Brody...make this face. After that, it was hard to believe the show would get out of its 24 groove, and it didn't.

To be fair, some of the finale's weirdest plot turns could possibly be fanwanked in light of the episode's conclusion. For example: Quinn (Rupert Friend) suddenly developing a conscience and/or personal stake in Carrie's love life, refusing to assassinate Brody ostensibly because now he's convinced that Brody is no longer an enemy of the state, and because Estes (David Harewood) has already "broken" her enough and now she deserves to be happy. Estes is (er, was) a prick, but he's not really wrong when he snottily asks Quinn if he's an analyst now. Dude, you're a CIA cleaner: fucking clean! But, given the car bomb, it seems possible that Quinn's change of heart/rejection of his mission is due to the fact that he's a mole who's in an alliance with his mentor, Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham), or Saul (Mandy Patinkin), or maybe both. The bomb certainly gets Saul everything he wants: Estes out of the picture, Saul's job back, public suspicion on Brody, and Carrie at Langley. (Of course, if that was Quinn's endgame all along, I guess it doesn't really explain why he bothered to say anything to Estes at all. Maybe Quinn just felt like being a badass.)

But the hardest plotline of last night's episode -- and the whole series -- for me to take is Carrie and Brody: star-crossed lovers. Earlier this season, I expressed my doubts that any of her declarations of love were really sincere, because Jesus, how could they be? Even as she fucked Brody's brains out for basically all her colleagues to hear, I thought there was still a chance that it was just a tactic, or at least hoped there was. The way Carrie acts when she talks about her future with Brody is so determinedly girlish -- the dopey smile, the tendency to uptalk, the giggles -- that I couldn't imagine we are supposed to think it's sincere. For Christ's sake, she's supposed to be a CIA agent, not a rally girl. This is not to say that women in powerful professions can't permit themselves to be vulnerable when it comes to their romantic relationships. But the notion that an intelligent government agent whose instincts in every other respect keep turning out to be sound would find herself helplessly in love with a proven terrorist has always been preposterous -- so preposterous that I continued to hope we'd eventually see that, in fact, Carrie was just working a long con on a tricky asset. After last night, as Carrie helped send Brody on the lam, all such hope was lost. (On the other side: I still think Brody is working Carrie, perhaps because it's harder to buy declarations of love when they are issued through such a parsimoniously tiny mouth.)

And also, doesn't it seem like the show thinks Carrie's love for Brody is bullshit? Last week, we had Roya (Zuleikha Robinson) spitting her contempt at Carrie for letting herself lose sight of her mission for the sake of a man; last night, it was Saul's turn to tell her some shit she didn't want to hear (in terms that recalled that famous Sopranos scene in which Edie Falco's Carmela visits a therapist who tells her, in no uncertain terms, that her marriage is a sham and that she can't pretend she doesn't know she's yoking herself to a murderer). Not to say that in order for a female character to be "strong" (ugh, barf, but you know what I mean) she must never make dumb or bad decisions. But Carrie is willfully deluding herself about Brody's motives to the detriment of the country she has sworn to protect. It sounded like he was pretty good at sex and everything, but the stakes are high enough that she shouldn't be putting her hot pants first. I mean, at least Tony (James Gandolfini) confined himself to systematic lawbreaking on a regional scale. Brody killed the Vice President Of The United States.

Despite my reservations and disappointments, I suppose there are still reasons to give Season 3 a shot. We still don't know who the mole is; we still don't know what Brody's going to do now that he's untethered from any sort of moral authority. But if the show's producers are determined to keep it the tragic story of a doomed love affair between representatives of warring factions as opposed to the story of those warring factions, I may not hang in for very long. Carrie is a woman with needs -- sure. But Brody is an enemy of the state. If she doesn't take him down because her girly feelings won't let her, we will have all been dupes for a worldview as reactionary as the very worst 24 had to offer, and what a bummer that will be.