If there were a special Emmy for prescience and conspicuous valor in truth-telling (admittedly, quite a mouthful for any TelePrompter reader), it would have to be presented to the brooding minds behind Showtime's Homeland, whose fifth season has anticipated the horrific headlines of the last few weeks with the uncanny foreboding of a crystal ball where the future is a black swirling cloud. Although the storyline was tripped into motion with the hacking of top-secret C.I.A. documents by a couple of porn-cam tech wizards, Homeland employed the Edward Snowden parallels more for propulsion than a standard rehashing. The hacked docs were the ticket into the labyrinth, and no knows the maze as well as Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend), whose eyes draw in darkness and emit no light. His opening set the tone for everything that's followed. For once not haunting the shadows or blending in with the foliage, this deep undercover C.I.A. super-op, dressed like a junior exec addressing the board of directors, took his seat in the conference room to brief his superiors on the situation in Syria, which, it soon becomes apparent, is a deep brown shade of FUBAR.

With the understated gravitas of a man who’s seen every variety of fiery shit go down during his two years in the Syrian field, Quinn cites progress in the program (an interdiction here, a foiled plot there) and tries to stick to the talking points so that he can exit this roomful of stiffs as quickly as possible, but one particular desk jockey, wearing a smug expression he's probably been whittling since college, wants more specific big-picture answers of Quinn.

Is our strategy working? he wants to know.

“What strategy? Tell me what the strategy is and I'll tell you if it's working.”

The makers of Homeland had too much class to lay crickets on the soundtrack as the brain trust microscopically shifted in the chairs to indicate discomfort with having to admit they had been perpetrating the papier mâché model of a coherent, anti-ISIS policy. So conversant are they in bureaucratic euphemisms, jargon, and acronym, that they hardly know how to handle a faceful of candor, but that's what they get:

“See, that right there is the problem, because they—they have a strategy. They’re gathering right now in Raqqa by the tens of thousands, hidden in the civilian population, cleaning their weapons, and they know exactly why they’re there....

“They call it the end times. What do you think the be-headings are about? The crucifixions ... the revival of slavery? Do you think they make this shit up? It’s all in the book. Their fucking book. The only book they ever read—they read it all the time. They never stop. They’re there for one reason and one reason only: to die for the Caliphate and usher in a world without infidels. That’s their strategy and it’s been that way since the seventh century. So do you really think that a few special-forces teams are going to put a dent in that?”

“Well, what would you do?” asks Mr. Helpful.

“Two-hundred thousand American troops on the ground indefinitely to provide security and support for an equal number of doctors and elementary school teachers.”

C.I.A. doofus: “Well, that’s not going to happen ... What else? What else would make a difference?”

Quinn: “Hit reset.”

C.I.A. doofus: “Meaning what?”

Quinn: “Meaning pound Raqqa into a parking lot.”

That last proposal excited a raft of war-boners across the right-wing blogosphere, which interpreted Quinn’s briefing as a bitch slap against the Obama administration, which seems a trifle politically parochial, since it would appear that the failure to reckon with the rise of ISIS is something every foreign-policy and intelligence apparatus in the West can share, apart from the few Cassandras who are always ignored, just as they were in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Shows such as Homeland assume a Deep State which goes about its dark arts regardless of the political froth that roils the surface.