Ugh, Brody. Not even the gloriously orange follicles peeking through your shiny bald scalp can make up for your emulating Carrie and going insanely rogue this week—and getting one of the handsome beardy Seal Team members (Jared Ward) killed in the process. Ugh, Saul, for chewing your lucky gum in the hope that it would make up for this ridiculously stupid and improbable plan. Ugh, Carrie, for getting all quivery when you thought Brody was dead (again). And ugh, Javadi, for being such a colossal douchelord, as usual. Thank goodness Saul’s resting all his hopes for peace in the Middle East on you, given that you take out human beings more wantonly than a sociopathic 15-year-old playing Grand Theft Auto.
Much of tonight’s episode, “Good Night” was conducted under cover of darkness, which could be a metaphor for the act of surveillance and the murky world of the CIA but was more likely just a convenient way to make a soundstage/abandoned field in Charlotte look like Iraq. Brody, now fully recovered from the drug addiction and the diseases and whatever else he picked up in Caracas, flew to the Iran/Iraq border with the Seal Team, from where he’d attempt to cross over to Iran and seek asylum as an enemy of America. On the way there he taught Handsome Beardy #1 (Donnie Keshawarz) how to turn his socks inside out and wear the fresh side, which is pretty fastidious for a guy who was sleeping on a bed of used syringes and stewing in his own filth not two weeks ago.
HB1 made Brody go over his back story, which like all good lies was actually pretty similar to the truth—after the Langley bombing Brody left in a car Abu Nazir’s men had stashed for him in the woods, then drove across to Canada, then stole a boat, then somehow got from Colombia to Venezuela to Iraq to Iran. Totally plausible! Never mind the inconvenient fact I can’t get past, which is that the Iranians were supposedly the ones who financed/masterminded the Langley bombing in the first place and therefore might know already that Brody wasn’t involved in the planning of it.
The CIA kept watch on Brody and the Seal Team with a few drones in the sky, and when one of them had a minor malfunction Carrie almost had a major meltdown and did a lot of stress exhaling. Some Iraqi cops came to investigate the trucks the Seal Team were driving around in, and when one of them started poking his gun in Brody’s conspicuously un-Arabic face, HB1 used the code word (“Good Night”) and all the other HBs shot the cops and killed them. Dar Adal’s White House liaison, Mike, was a little stressed about this but Dar pointed out that they were only Kurdish so who cares? Then Brody freaked out and tried to run away but HB1 made fun of him for being a woman and everything was OK again.
Lockhart, now positively meek in the face of Saul’s uncovering of his dastardly Alain Plan, came to the CIA to “help,” and told Saul that of course he was rooting for things to go well with this insanely stupid plan, because in a few days it would be his insanely stupid plan to defend in front of Congress. Everyone agreed not to tell the President what was going on, because why on earth would he need to know? Brody and HB1 went off together in a car, and HB1, whose name is Hafez Azizi, told Brody he used to be a bull rider in Texas, because that’s totally the kind of name that gets you accepted into a community of redneck cowboys. Then their truck went over a mine or an IED or something, and Carrie’s lip started quivering and threatening to precipitate a full-on Claire Danes cryface.
Luckily, Brody somehow survived the horrible explosion, and he managed to pull out HB1 and treat his injuries before they were both rescued by the rest of the HBs. Carrie stopped crying and started smiling, because she sucks. Then everyone got ambushed by some more Iraqi cops who shot red and green space bullets out of their guns, making everything look like a giant game of laser tag. Mike, the White House guy, wanted Saul to just nuke them all with his drones to help everyone get out of a major international incident, because as we know, drones are absolutely non-controversial when utilized to kill foreigners outside of US airspace. But Saul said no, and then everyone gave up on the mission and Lockhart was like, never mind Saul, you tried, instead of punching him in the face and locking him in a conference room forever with Carrie and a bottle of tequila and a Scrabble set with all the vowels missing, which is what I would have done.
Brody, being Carrie’s soulmate, refused to do what he was told, and told the HBs he was staying and planned to run through the gunfire across the border. Everyone agreed to give up on him apart from HB2 (Jared Ward), who decided to help stave off the guns with a distraction so Brody could make it. But then both of them were confronted by tons of people with floodlights and Brody had to give his speech about being a terrorist on the lam and an enemy of America, which suddenly had subtitles (first time this season). Both of them were taken by Iranian soldiers and thrown into a cell, and HB2 asked Brody what it was like being tortured and Brody basically said that it sucks, which may not have been all that helpful. But it didn’t matter anyway because Javadi showed up and shot HB2 in the head and then told Brody they were off to Tehran to kill the head of the Revolutionary Guard (the man Saul thinks is the lone impediment to Iran and America being BFFs).
So, yes. Saul’s idiotic plan somehow came off, and even he was surprised. Brody is still alive and on his way to kill a very important person who has tons of security, which luckily he has some prior experience with (RIP, Walden). And the CIA, which presumably has covert operations in every country in the world, has no safe place to organize itself in Tehran, which meant Carrie had to ask Fara if they could borrow her uncle’s guest room. I know Fara’s been neglected this season and they needed a way to make her relevant again but this is ridiculous.
Some thoughts:
- “It’s a little late in the day for your vagina to chime in.” I know this is sexist and awful but I laughed so hard I almost inhaled a ballpoint pen. Kudos, HB1.
- Still not enough Quinn. He got to tell Carrie that he snuck a look at her medical records and knows she’s 15 weeks pregnant, but that’s about it. They’d better be planning a spinoff in which he gets to solve crimes each week while shirtless. They could call it a Quinn-off. I’d watch.
- Carrie told Quinn the baby wasn’t Brody’s, which probably isn’t true but might be. I don’t know. This baby is doomed in so many ways that its paternal lineage doesn’t really seem important at this point.
- Man, Fara’s dad is going to be mad at this new development.
What did you think of last night’s episode? Let us know in the comments.
