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Season 4, Episode 9: “There’s Something Else Going On”



Tonight’s “Homeland” episode could be viewed as the moment when Carrie Mathison finally stopped her well-perfected enfant terrible routine and began, grimly, to grow up. Claire Danes has put a toughness, groundedness — dare I say, centeredness — into her performance that I don’t believe we’ve seen before.

It’s as though, after going through the growing pains of stepping up to be the woman-in-charge, both in Islamabad and, arguably, in her own life, Carrie has stopped testing the boundaries of her relationships with Quinn, Redland, Lockhart, et al., and has finally stepped up into her new role. She has, perhaps, stopped fleeing the complexities of her contradictory and messed-up life by flying to emotional extremes and is allowing herself to actually stay with the troubling sorts of thoughts that Quinn has been wrestling with all season: Who are “they”? Who are “we”? Who, exactly, “put the vest” on the nightmare-ridden boy whose father and brother were killed by Saul’s C.I.A.?

She is shaken awake from the spectator sport that high-level spycraft has become in the age of drones (“The show’s about to begin,” is how Lockhart puts it as the prisoner exchange starts to play out on screen) by the concreteness of holding Saul’s life in her hands. Mira (Sarita Choudhury) calls Carrie to say “I’m asking you to remember … just normal life, and that I love him, Saul, my husband. … And I believe you do, too.”

A new sense of promise-keeping seems to allow Carrie to move through the looking glass — upending everything Saul himself has taught her and demanded of her — in order to trade five terrorists for his return.

“Tell me we’re doing the right thing?” asks Quinn.

“The right thing’s getting Saul back,” she answers. And she appears, unlike Quinn, in this episode, truly to believe it.

Carrie’s new solidity makes her a fearsome jailer for the ambassador’s husband and traitor Dennis Boyd, who literally cowers at the sight of her, alternately snarling and whining like a teenager, until his mama-wife shows up and spirits him off, pretending to pull rank on Carrie in the hope of wrestling a confession from Dennis in private.

It means that Martha Boyd appears to be willing to put aside the sardonic cynicism with which she first received Carrie’s transparent attempts at just-us-girls bonding; the ambassador’s “Bring Saul home” has none of her usual steely reserve.

It will be interesting to see if Carrie is capable of building some sort of real relationship with another woman. Her “hell of a time for him to discover a backbone” shot at the humiliated ambassador after she fails to extract intel from her husband suggests she may have some work to do in the friendship skills department.

Ms. Danes’s finest acting moment comes at the time of the prisoner exchange, as she makes Carrie change physically from a crouching mother soothing and cajoling her cross-legged little boy into a crying little girl, into the adult child of a weakened, vulnerable and defeated elderly parent, who has resigned himself to being gently led off center stage.

I imagine that there may be some disagreement among us about the meaning of Saul’s actions in those minutes awaiting the exchange: Is he being a hero in refusing to surrender to the plan to release men who will turn around and do their best to wreak havoc upon his country? Or, in his willingness to let the little boy right in front of him die – with “they put the vest on him” as an excuse — has he lost the moral high ground he believes he’s defending?

I did think that Carrie should have sacrificed Saul’s life when she had the opportunity to take Haqqani and his men out by drone strike. But I was with her this week when she urged Saul to connect, concretely, to the human reality right before him – just as Mira, and the ambassador, had begged of her: “This is not who we are. This is not who you are.” I’m sure it was lost on no one that her “What about the boy?” to Saul so closely echoed the question Fara asked of her three episodes ago.

Watching Carrie switch registers, you sense – I think for the first time – that all these changes are consciously chosen: Rather than getting the better of her, her emotions appear to be under her control. Even her order that Quinn stay behind and manage drone surveillance of the prisoner/Saul trade exchange felt like a real taking-charge – not a quasi-hysterical, manipulative scramble – which is perhaps why, for once, Quinn stopped protesting and obeyed her command.

What’s changed for Carrie?

I suspect it had something to do with that meds switch: “Maybe it was fair. Maybe it’s what we do to each other all the time. But it didn’t feel fair,” she told Khan last week. “Not at all.”

Or maybe she was touched by the rawness with which Khan reacted in last week’s episode to her continued distrust after he risked his own skin to give her shelter: “You make everything so hard, you know that?” he said. “Next time you complain about the distrust between us, you remember this. Right now.” Or maybe Carrie simply realized that sanity wasn’t something to play with lightly – that it was precious and worth working to maintain.

One wonders if Carrie’s new grown-up solidity is a precondition for going home and reuniting with her baby. (For we know it’s a precursor to something – Carrie can’t have been killed off in that car explosion when there are still three episodes left in the season.)

In fact, I’d be curious to know who – if anyone – you think was killed off in the final street scene, which pulled all the Marines out of the American Embassy, setting the stage for seems to be Haissam Haqqani’s invasion. If Saul has been killed, it would be just the sort of painful paradox with which the writers on “Homeland” have tortured their characters before. Remember how Saul’s plan in Season 3 to trap the evil-yet-strangely-elegant Majid Javadi (Shaun Toub) gave the Iranian Deputy Intelligence Chief just the opportunity he needed to slaughter his ex-wife, settling a decades-old score with Saul in the process?

But, as a reader last week commented, it seems unlikely that CBS (Showtime’s “sister” network) would devote a segment of its lofty “60 Minutes” to an actor just weeks before he was to disappear for good. (And let me just say as an aside: Having gotten a glimpse of the real Mandy Patinkin on “60 Minutes,” I am in awe of his acting abilities; the difference between manic Mandy – “Have you always talked so fast?” asks Bob Simon — and stolid Saul is nothing less than astounding.)

The show could, on the other hand, sacrifice Quinn, who, when you think about it, has been feeling kind of played out all season.

Any and all theories are welcome.

And while we’re chatting: Where is Fara?