Dana Brody didn’t even appear on the most recent episode of “Homeland,” but the Dana haters on the Internet still came out in full force. Nicholas Brody’s troubled teen-aged daughter has been under attack from fans of the Showtime drama since at least midway through last season, when her budding romance with the Vice-President’s son, Finn, their ensuing hit-and-run car accident, and her subsequent attempts to make sense of that event provoked a rash of anti-Dana sentiment. Bloggers attacked her scowling facial expressions and tendency to nervously play with her fingers; a parody on “S.N.L.” included a memorably anxious caricature.

Since the big Dana reveal in the Season 3 première—that a deadly attack on the C.I.A. and her father’s presumed involvement led her to slit her wrists—and the Dana-heavy first two episodes of the season, there’s been renewed hostility toward the character. (Newyorker.com’s own Web editor, Nicholas Thompson, is among the character’s critics.) Some of the recent commentary has assumed an uglier tone. “The most disappointing thing about #Homeland is that Dana’s suicide attempt was a failure,” tweeted one viewer this week. “There’s way too much Dana in these new Homeland episodes,” wrote another. “Nobody cares, just die already.”

I happen to love all of Dana’s qualities that rankle other people: her long, straggly hair; her contorted facial expressions and whiny indignation toward her parents; the fact that she wore the same pair of clunky, long-tongued boots throughout the entire second season. Dana, played by the eighteen year-old actress Morgan Saylor, is sullen, annoying, messy, and self-righteous in a way that feels endearingly true to teen-age experience. (Her authenticity is somehow augmented by mere proximity to Claire Danes, the leading angsty high-schooler of an older generation.) Her puppy-love courtship with Finn was unusually natural and convincing—especially a scene in the observation deck of the Washington Monument, shot with Dana and Finn’s backs to the camera, their faces reflected in the window looking down on the city. (Dana even did the right thing and told Finn that she had to break it off with Xander before they could get involved!) Her more recent relationship, with Leo, a boy she met in rehab, is a frank and unencumbered portrayal of teen sexuality, with zero hand-wringing over Dana’s virginity, or the taking thereof.

I also appreciate Dana because she’s perceptive and honest: she single-handedly prevented Brody from blowing up the White House in Season 1, and she’s keeping it real in the Brody household this season, forcing her mom, who is determined to maintain her Congressman’s-wife poise, to acknowledge that their family is in shambles. Dana’s conflicted feelings toward her father—a mixture of love and suspicion, respect and disappointment, all registered in those oft-mocked facial contortions—provide one of the show’s moral anchors (the other, of course, is Saul Berenson), and are at the center of some of its most chilling scenes: Dana helping Brody bury his defiled Koran in the backyard, for example; or, more recently, Dana stumbling upon his prayer mat in the garage and kneeling upon it as if it might possess healing powers.

The conventional explanation for Dana hatred—like explanations of Skyler White hatred before it—is that audiences are unduly hard on female characters, maintaining their loyalties to the male protagonists of cable dramas while turning on the women who suffer the consequences of those protagonists’ reprehensible actions. (In an interview with the Daily Beast, Saylor told Andrew Romano—another Dana appreciator—that she was tempted to leave a note in the comments section of Anna Gunn’s Times Op-Ed, which addressed hostility toward Skyler White, saying “Yeah, I know how you feel.”) But if there’s a sexist tinge to viewers’ dislike of certain female TV characters—amplified, in the case of Dana, by the fact that she’s an adolescent female who is assertive about her opinions and her sexuality—I’d venture that there’s a less sinister reason for the recent anti-Dana flare-up as well: regular old impatience with subplots.

“Homeland,” like all the best cable dramas, spends ample time exploring the emotional and psychological lives of its characters, but it is first and foremost a spy thriller—a genre show whose most thrilling moments are driven by violence, intrigue, and a breakneck plot. Seasons 1 and 2 presented high-stakes questions from the beginning. Season 1: Is Brody a terrorist, and will Carrie be able to stop him from carrying out an attack? Season 2: Where will Brody’s divided allegiances fall, and will his terrorist activities be exposed? Season 3, by contrast, has had trouble establishing a compelling narrative: Brody’s cover is blown, his political career wrecked, his relationship with Carrie past the point of irresistible tension. You can’t blame viewers for being peeved when they turn on the third season looking for agonizing suspense and end up with Dana betwixt the sheets with a guy they’ve never met. Despite my fondness for Dana, I, too, am growing impatient. The key to “Homeland” ’s fun is when the betwixt-sheets action doubles as a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse.

Photograph: Showtime