When Homeland—the show about a schizophrenic CIA agent, Carrie Mathison (Clare Danes), assigned to the counterterrorism department—first began, the central mystery was whether or not Brody, a ginger soldier who became a Muslim while in captivity, could be a bad terrorist double agent. Carrie spent the first half of the season (when she wasn’t fucking him) investigating him, and what do you know?—he was actually a bad man. (Perhaps the creators of Homeland had forgotten about Timothy McVeigh and other white devils).
The schizophrenic turns of the first few seasons culminated with Brody’s death, and things were recalibrated last season in Berlin. Homeland has operated in an alternate universe, with events echoing our real life problems: last year, the Paris shootings and attacks in the Brussels airport were a little too close for comfort, as they mirrored Homeland‘s set pieces from the previous year.
This year, there’s a new President. She’s a woman (played by Elizabeth Marvel, the same would-be president in House of Cards), but she’s not quite a Hillary stand-in; she’s more a hybrid of Trump’s recklessness and Clinton’s shrewdness. Nevertheless, she has more Trumpian ideas than not. (Sounds like she haaates the CIA and FBI, and doesn’t think military action in the Mideast is necessary.)
Carrie’s back in Brooklyn, working a pro-bono case with a nonprofit and defending an American Muslim, Sekou Bah (J. Mallory McCree), a young African American man who has started a video blog where he revisits all the sites of terrorist attacks in New York and giddily recounts the perpetrators’ horrific successes. Naturally, he gets the government’s attention and is put in jail. But it’s not clear if all he wanted to do is give Jihadi history lessons or if he’s got something else up his sleeve. Carrie believes he’s done nothing wrong, and that it is a matter of free speech. (We’ll see how that plays out.)
In the meantime, super-agent Quinn (Rupert Friend), last seen in a coma, has become a drug-addicted mess, his body is mangled, and he’s just not having a great time. After a messy episode at the hospital, Carrie brings him to live and rehab in the apartment downstairs in her brownstone. Prediction: Quinn will be back to super-agent form by mid-season.
There wasn’t much forward motion in the season six premiere—it was more like a staging episode that set up the players and established the plot point to propel us forward into the darkness. Let’s hope this alternate universe is a bit less insane than our coming reality. Shouldn’t be too hard, really.