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Homeland Season 2 Finale…1 Brit Down 2 Left Standing

25 Dec
Homeland (TV series)

Homeland (TV series) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have a problem there is now a huge void in my Sunday night’s TV schedule and I am not sure it is going to be filled anytime soon, as  it is going to take something big to fill it.

Yes Homeland Season 2 came to an explosive finale on Sunday and when I say explosive I mean both literally and figuratively. 200 dead and the CIA headquarters in Langley blown apart. Abu Nazir’s wrath reached out from the grave and wrecked annihilation. Did this explosive end redeem Season 2?

After all the plaudits and accolades Homeland gathered in the first season, there was a lot to live up to in Season 2. In my opinion it struggled a bit particularly in the middle. Not because it was was not  great TV, it just that season one was stupendously great and often a great first season is very difficult to beat.

Brody’s suicide bomber plot to kill the Vice President had been uncovered and that pretty much killed off a major plot line and the question was where would it go from there.  There were many sub plots left but none of them alone with enough substance to drive a third season except maybe the mole and that is just what seemed to have happened.

Right from Season one we knew there was a leak in the agency, that deep in the Agency there was a ‘third man’ or men .  Who could be

Galvez -The ‘Muslim’ CIA operative, pretty much always under suspicion by people on the programme. He was fingered as a mole by Carrie when it was thought Abu Nazir has escaped but he would be the obvious answer and would be too pat an ending.

Carrie – Bipolar, scatty and at at times maddeningly irrational. Could she be the mole and she doesn’t even realise it, some sort of split personality manifesting itself as the antithesis of what she stands for?  It would be a big reach, but in the last episode she would have been in a position to move Brody’s car, and seemed to encourage them to leave the hall before the bomb went off.

Saul – It seem’s he is becoming the people’s choice for the Mole. His prayers for the dead at the end of the last episode sent social media into a frenzy as people assumed it was an arabic prayer (it was hebrew), but even if that was a red herring there is still the failed lie detector test from season one. I don’t know if it can be him, he just seems to reliable.

Estes – A mole deep in the top echelons of the CIA. That would hav been a massive coup. There is one problem he is dead and unless the mole plot line ended in season 2 it is unlikely. On a side note we have lost the first of the three Brits on Homeland in Estes (David Hartland). He will be taking Homeland Questions and Answers on his twitter feed on the 26th (https://twitter.com/DavidHarewood)

Quinn – The third Brit (Rupert Friend) in the Mix (alongside Brody and Estes). We all know Hollywood loves its bad guys to be Brits so that’s one thing that swings it in his favour. He is black ops specialist and his past has been kept very quiet. He works for  Dar Adul. Who is he?  Are Quinn and Adul some sort of unit that has gone rogue? Plausible but is it possible?

Whoever it is we know they are able to penetrate America’s most secure facilities and wreck havoc.  Interestingly using Brody’s car to move the bomb pulled him right make into the picture just when he thought his life was all coming together (shades of Arlignton Road there). To compound matters Brody’s suicide tape has been released to the media.

All this gave the end season 2 the massive talking point it needed and redeemed the season while laying the ground for a new season, but in my mind changes the essence of the show.

Brody is permanently tainted and threat to America is now well and truly on home soil turning the programme into a mix of  The Fugitve and 24.

Season 3 is going to be more of a challenge for the writers than the last two seasons, but for me I am still in.

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Channel 4…Has Homeland hit a Nadir after the demise of Abu Nazir

19 Dec
Homeland (TV series)

Homeland (TV series) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Homeland’s latest season comes to an end on Channel 4 next week Sunday. Season 2 has been good but has struggled to maintain the same level of intense suspense you got with Season 1.

It was always going to be a struggle. The central and the most intriguing question about Brody “Was he or wasn’t he a terrorist” was largely answered at the end of the first season.

With Season 2 we got to know a bit more detail. We know that the CIA know what Brody was up to. We know Carrie Mathison struggles with her bipolar disorder but despite her increasingly erratic, slightly incredulous, bulging eyed almost maniacal behavior she still delivers when it really matters.

Most of all we know the main protagonist of the two series, Abu Nazir has been found and killed. Although I am still unclear as to why he came to the USA in the first place.

What we have left are the sub plots of Brody’s marriage breakdown, Estes trying to get Saul kicked out of the Agency, Peter Quinn plotting to kill Brody, and who the hell was the Mole?

Will these sub-plots be enough to sustain a third season or will the final programme of season two sow the seeds of a whole new plot line to drive it forward?

It is a tricky situation because the programme has been sustained based on a central theme around Brody. This seems pretty much used up. How they close of Season two will be a big pointer as to whether Homeland goes on for several more seasons or bids us bye after a great Season 1 and good Season 2.

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More 4′s best kept secret….Southland

9 Dec

Some of the greatest TV shows over the ages have been Police Dramas  ”Cop Shows”.  The shows strength come for the vast artistic landscape available to them spanning gritty urban decay to the rarefied procedural depths of the court system, out of which an array of award winning shows have been brought to our TV.

From the critically acclaimed “The Wire” and the gritty ambiguity of “The Shield”, through to home grown favorites like the ground breaking 70′s series “The Sweeney”, Lynda La Plante’s phenomenal “Prime Suspect” and more recently the “Life on Mars”.

This pipeline of great shows is not showing any sign of drying up if the latest export from the USA to his our screens, Southland, is anything to go by.

Southland is in its fourth season on More 4, and has been worth every single second of the time I have spent watching it. In the USA it has had a somewhat troubled production history. Originally a show the NBC network it was dropped before being given a lifeline by cable network station TNT at the end of the first season.

Season one, two and three were defined by its uber-realism and focus of the show not being on any particular character, but rather the cast as a whole. This produced some incredible episodes, none more so than the “Code 4″ episode. It showed us the raw emotion of how a police officer deals with the death of his partner, and the lingering guilt that comes with it.

 

The smaller budgets of TNT have meant the cast has reduced and the show has moved more to a character led format with Regina King “Detective Lydia Adams”, Michael Culditz “Officer John Cooper” and Benjamin McKenzie “Officer Ben Sherman” emerging as the main protagonists. The show may have become smaller and less gritty but has lost nothing of its entertainment value.

For anyone out there that loves a good Cop drama I can’t recommend Southland enough. It definitely deserves a bigger audience!

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In Homeland there is no Movember for Abu Nazir!

26 Nov

In the much missed comedy series “The Fast Show” the character Swiss Tony was famous for comparing any situation he found himself as like “making love to a beautiful woman”. I was going to use that analogy to qualify how much I loved Homeland but like Swiss Tony I would simply not be making any sense. It is probably enough to say I do really like it.

I noticed that I have been getting a lot of folk from the US on my previous posts about Homeland. Just a note to say that the here in the UK we are running a week behind so my observations and comments on homeland are effectively at least a week old as far as you guys are concerned.

Back to the show. A few weeks ago I contemplated whether Homeland had jumped the shark, there was the massacre of the CIA agents and the sub plot with the Vice President’s son’s hit and run accident and Brody being turned. Where was it going go from there? Where was the suspense going to come from? Well I should apologise it hasn’t jumped the shark and I think I jumped the gun on that one.

This week we got an insight into where the series might be going. We see Brody weighed down by the pressure of being a double agent and the stress it is causing him, and his relationship with his family particularly his wife and daughter. As the stress becomes unbearable  he snaps and is prepared to damn the consequences and walk away from the deal he had with the CIA, only the timely intervention by Carrie using all the assets at her disposal to persuade him to stay the course.

However she made have acted too late as it seems his handler Roya had already become suspicious of Brody’s loyalty, this sets in motion a chain events which sees Brodie snatched from an open field in the countryside late at night bundled into a helicopter and flown to some destination unknown.

There he comes  face to face with man at the centre of all his travails, and the only adult in the whole programme who does not refer to him by his surname and that includes his wife. The man is Abu Nazir and he was clean-shaven, obviously not quite got the Movember idea.

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JR Ewing has left the building…RIP to Larry Hagman

25 Nov

The eighties would not have been the eighties without Dallas, and Dallas would not have been Dallas without Larry Hagman. Yesterday Larry Hagman lost his battle with cancer and passed away aged 81.

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Channel 4…Did Homeland “Jump the shark” yesterday?

12 Nov

Do you remember any of the following

  • When you found out in Heroes that Sylar somehow hadn’t died at the beginning of Season 2
  • In Only Fools and Horses, after Del Boy, Rodney and Grand dad finally became millionaires and then in the next programme had lost it!
  • When Who Wants To Be A Millionaire became a series of endless specials. Husbands and Wives, Mothers and Sons, Celebs, Bosses and Chauffeurs etc…

They are arguably the points at which great shows should have come to a dignified end but refused and ended like the proverbial Grand dad still strutting his stuff at a night club with kids who weren’t born when he qualified for a free bus pass.

Homeland has been a great show, but the lingering question after the Season One reveal was how will they keep the suspense and drama going. We all know knew what Sgt Brody was up to, granted there were still some unanswered questions like, the Mole and why he did it.

This season things have moved on a pace, and a gripping one at that. The CIA found out what Brody been up to, and he’s been turned.  Suddenly the most the remaining underlying uncertainty that propelled the show was rapidly fizzing away, where the taut, tense drama going to come from.

In yesterday’s episode Brody gave up the location the workshop of the tailor who provided the suicide vest to the CIA. He had also made contact with the reporter Royya Hammad (his intermediary to Abu Nazir) while wearing a wire and she had revealed that there was something of interest in the tailor’s workshop. Royya Hammad was latter followed and seen in discussion with a man with a vaguely middle eastern look, whom CIA tried to follow him but lost.

These three sub plots all come together to provide the subtext to the dramatic, unexpected, incredible and arguably  implausible (by Homeland standards) end to yesterday’s episode.

As the CIA agents were searching the Tailor’s shop a number of men dressed in SWAT type body armour and sub machine guns burst in and in the resultant gun fire all the CIA men were shot dead and the invaders retrieved a large case from behind  false  wall and escaped. One of the invaders was revealed to be the man Royya had been talking to.

That many agent killed at one go in a small town. It almost seems gratuitous violence to reboot the show – a “shark jumping” moment, psychological tension replaced by formulaic violence. We will only really know when we see how they follow on next week if this is a real change in the show’s direction.

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Just as Person of Interest gets really interesting, it’s gone!

16 Oct

I have already nailed my flag to the post on this one, I really like Person of Interest. I initially loved it because the show took its dramatic licence jumped into a Ferrari and stretched it to its max. I don’t mind a show doing that, as long as it is not pretending to be anything other than what it is.

The plot was interesting but formulaic, but in the last two episodes it has taken an interesting turn and veered away from the formulaic. Mr Reese who has all along been the hunter, suddenly in a dramatic turn of events has become the hunted. The CIA, his former employers, wants him and it seems they prefer dead rather than alive.

At the end of tonight’s episode he was caught in a trap by the CIA and only a last minute rescue by Mr Finch and, in a last minute change of heart, Detective Carter saved him from being taken out by the folk from Langley.

This set the show up for some very interesting forthcoming episodes. What does Channel 5 go and do? They decide to take a “mid-season” break till January. January!!! What a way to kill momentum.

Trivia of the day: James Caviezel who plays Mr Reese in this show, also played Jesus in the Passion of Christ, probably explains a lot of the miraculous escapes in earlier episodes.

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Homeland. Why did I doubt season 2 was going to be good?

14 Oct

Homeland is back. 2 weeks in and it has raised its level of excitement to unfricking-believable with two “Big Balls” moments.

Carrie Mathison swings between daring and delusional and sometimes it is difficult to tell when she’s which.

In today’s episode she’s in Beirut and after escaping fearsome milita henchmen at the end of last weeks episode. She meets with a former informant, a Hezobollah commander’s wife. The informant reveals that the terrorist king pin Abu Nazir is meeting her husband in Beirut.

With this information passed onto the CIA, Estes sets up a plot to capture or assassinate Abu Nazir.  It is such a big opportunity that a live screening of satellite footage is held for the Joint Chiefs  Of Staff in the Pentagon. Vice President William Walden a keen fan of US military covert action is not one to miss out on an opportunity for USA high-fiving and brings along his new best buddy Congressman Brody.

As the operation develops, Brody who was in the dark about the detail soon realises his mentor Abu Nazir is the target. Panic ensues. How does he get a message out to Abu Nazir? We get the first “big balls’ moment as Brody slips out his phone and sends a surreptitious text message to Abu Nazir from the inner sanctum of the Pentagon. The message reaches just as the CIA snipers have begun to engage their targets and Abu Nazir escapes by the skin of his teeth.

Action switches to Carrie who with Sol are racing across Beirut to pick up the informant and whisk her out of Lebanon. They find her and need to get out fast as they are in a Hezobollah neighbourhood and people around are getting curious.

Carrie however decides that if they are in the neighbourhood why doesn’t she just pop in, ransack the dead commanders study to see if she can unearth any document notwithstanding the scary looking goons in the vicinity.That’s what anyone of us would do, right?.  ”Big Balls” moment 2, she does just that despite Sol screaming his head off that they need to get out of the area.

Her headstrong decision almost cost her life in a chase scene across the flat roofs of Beirut. She comes away with a lot of documents which when examined later seem largely useless until Sol finds some kind of memory card in the lining of the bag Carrie used to gather the documents.

It contains Sgt Brodie suicide message from the end of last season. WOW! I can’t wait for next Sunday.

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