Well, now. There’s a surprise. There we were, wondering whether Carrie had been kidnapped again, and if so, how Saul and Quinn and Fara would ever find her since they appear to be actually pretty terrible at surveillance, and whether Javadi (Ja-va-DEE, if you please) is the kind of super-villain who executes people “humanely” or pulls out all their fingernails first.
But none of this is actually important at all because of the shockingly out-of-left-field news that Carrie’s pregnant. She is knocked up, enceinte, up the duff, with child—and with a child whose tiny unborn brain has already been so heavily garbled with drugs and alcohol that it may emerge from the womb smoking a pipe and clutching a copy of Vice magazine, no less. Postpone all your more urgent questions for now—who the father is, is it Brody, why Carrie hasn’t done anything about it other than hoard damning ClearBlue tests in a very unsanitary bathroom drawer—because we also have to deal with the fact that 16-year-old Dana Brody told her mother she was moving out to live with “Angela,” and after rightly being confused as to who Angela was, Jessica was like, “Cool.”
I mean, I try, really I do, but they’re not giving me much to work with here.
Obviously people were getting sick of Dana, but getting rid of her by simply having her move out of the house seems like such a transparently lazy solution that it’s actually laughable. Does this mean Dana’s out but we’re going to have plenty more scenes featuring Jess washing dishes/changing her hairstyle and Chris mastering a third facial expression? Because people may have reacted strongly to Dana overload but it’s not exactly like the rest of the Brody family offers abundant potential for Homeric drama. And if Chris isn’t watching basketball or trying pathetically to be nice to his sister, he’s clogging up the scenery, frankly.
Back to Carrie being pregnant for a minute, which I was confused by because some of the pregnancy tests appeared to be positive and some appeared to be negative and for the love of God, Carrie, why wouldn’t you have dealt with this already and don’t they look for things like this when they do the kind of major medical tests that they do when they forcibly admit people to psych wards? Which manly redhead is the father? I actually don’t know which might be worse—the heroin-addled ex-Marine whom everyone thinks is a terrorist, or the guy who Carrie boned twice before ripping off his wallet. Neither really screams “helicopter dad.”
Here are some other things that happened: Carrie told Javadi that they knew about the embezzled $45 million and the soccer player alias, and he looked like someone who was rapidly becoming aware that his sweet retirement in Caracas was combusting before his very eyes. She also spoke harshly with him, and he was like, “WOMAN. Saul should have told you to treat me with more respect,” or something like that. Saul gave Fara the Javadi backstory, which is that they used to be friends and worked together in pre-revolution Tehran, and when the Shah was deposed Javadi promised to help Saul get four of his best assets out of the country—only he killed them instead to manipulate his way into the new administration. Saul got his revenge by smuggling Javadi’s wife and son into the US, where they now live, and outside whose house Javadi spilled ketchup on his shirt in episode five. “I watched the man I thought I knew become an animal. In front of my eyes,” said Saul, and Fara, who had no lines in this episode consisting of anything other than prepositions, nodded.
Lockhart went to the CIA and met with his spirit spy, Dar Adal, a.k.a. the only man in the CIA who’s as unethical as he is. “Change is in order, no matter how painful,” said Lockhart, before expressing admiration for all the shady things Dar Adal has done in Somalia, Libya, and Uganda. And he mentioned wanting to instill fear in people again, so that doesn’t really sound good. I’ve seen J. Edgar.
Dana changed her name for the bargain price of $41.14, and the court official who did it wigged her out when he told her that she seemed like a nice young girl, and she must get that from her mother what with her father being a big Muslimy terrorist, and he would love her permission to pray for her. Jessica said sure, and Dana looked stricken and apparently got the idea that she needed to leave her family home and go and live with Angela, her friend from . . . Sidwell? Rehab? Book club? I can’t think anymore about this insane development lest my head explode.
Javadi was late to meet Carrie, and the team watched him take the wrong exit and immediately dispatched Carrie to go track him down and NOT LET HIM INSIDE THE HOUSE, which was the most imperative thing of all. But of course he got inside the house, and we knew a bloodbath was surely coming because Homeland does love gore when things have been relatively quiet for more than 20 minutes. Javadi shot his daughter-in-law in the head, talked to his grandson in a baby voice so creepy I will never be able to have children, and then stabbed his wife in the jugular with a broken bottle. Carrie got there just in time to stop the toddler from clambering all over the corpses, placing him in a playpen instead and presumably leaving nice golden hairs for the crime scene investigators to find.
The Scooby Squad were all understandably a bit perturbed by this development. Max looked like he was going to be sick in a trashcan. Fara looked disgusted. Carrie and Quinn were both horrified by the fact that they had to leave the kid amongst the carnage without calling the cops, even though someone did because they showed up before the CIA’s clean-up crew could get to work. And Saul punched Javadi right in the nose, which was the most obvious thing to do. If Peter wanted to go the season two route and stab him in the hand with a ballpoint pen, that’d be fine, too.
Thoughts:
Max is back, but I have a horrible feeling it’s because he’s going to be the mole. Remember the mole? Ugh.
Can we talk more about the fact that Homeland is accusing the Iranian government of committing an act of terrorism on US soil? Wouldn’t that spark some kind of major war? Why is no one saying anything about it?
Saul gave up on his wife faster than Jessica could usher Dana into the open arms of a girl she’d never met. What is wrong with these people? Alain is kind of dishy, though. I bet he’s the mole.
Polygraphs just aren’t polygraphs in this show if James Urbaniak isn’t doing them.
Why has Homeland spent thousands of hours analyzing Dana’s fragile mental state after her father’s supposed actions and yet spent nary a second explaining how Chris might feel? BOYS HAVE FEELINGS TOO.
What did you think of tonight’s Homeland? Let us know in the comments.
