Contributor: Henry T.
Story by Howard Gordon and Chip Johannessen
Teleplay by Chip Johannessen
Directed by Michael Cuesta
This episode might have been better-titled as “Wrecked” in my opinion. So many of the characters spend the episode in a wrecked psychological state that it’s hard to ignore, and yet, hypnotic as well. “I’ll Fly Away” sounds much more gentle, though.
Everything that occurs here kept me on edge from the start, almost as if I was expecting the other shoe to drop on any given scene. This is less the case with what happens to Dana, but she is wracked with guilt after some dwelling on her actions, and the final scene with her mother is devastating. No, much of this episode is spent on Carrie trying desperately to keep Brody from falling off a cliff, blowing the entire CIA operation on Nazir, and keeping him firmly on their side, even as all the cards are still in favor of the bad guys.
It’s incredibly magnetic whenever the two of them are onscreen together. The line between agent/handler and asset all but disappears due to Carrie’s obsessive nature whenever Brody is around. What happens next may have horrible consequences for everyone involved, not to mention if Nazir’s imminent attack on the United States comes to fruition.
We are conditioned almost to a fault as an audience to root for the good guys in any story. This show in particular needs that because it would be hard to see catastrophe unfold onscreen. This conditioning sometimes prevents us from remembering the simple fact that Abu Nazir spent eight years slowly and methodically breaking Brody. The CIA has only confirmed that Brody is a traitor for a few weeks now. Brody is so crucial to each side that there seems to be a tug-o-war going on with each side trying to pull Brody towards them.
Nazir is afforded the luxury of time, waiting until all of the pieces are in their correct place before striking. So you see Brody cracking under this immense pressure. He’s getting it from everywhere. The CIA depends on him as their only asset in play. Jessica hounds him about his retreat from reporting Dana’s hit-and-run accident to the police (so much so here that I was worried Jessica would revert back to her shrewish manner from the first season; thankfully that didn’t happen). It’s understandable that Brody would resort to curling up in the corner like when he first returned to the US.
It’s absolutely understandable that he walks and stands so stiffly when first meeting Roya that a breeze might well knock him over. Roya should be rightly suspicious of him. So Carrie resorts to the last-ditch desperate measure of getting Brody to a safe house where the pressure isn’t going to get to him. It’s in this sequence at the motel that reminded me of “The Weekend” from last season. Only, this time, the CIA has bugged their room and is listening in on their actions.
That’s the crux of my belief that Carrie is playing a game with Brody. They are, in essence, gaming each other because it goes back to Brody’s conditioning under Nazir. He doesn’t feel an integral part of either organization, and that makes him a real loose cannon that Carrie is trying to rein in. Her obsession with Brody clouds her judgment, almost as if she lost her ability to compartmentalize her emotions whenever she’s around him. Given Carrie’s own psychological issues, this is a powder keg the CIA is also struggling to contain. Saul is begging Quinn to give Carrie a chance to keep Brody in play, but I think he himself wonders if she can really do this.
That leads to the tense final sequence when Brody meets Roya for the second time. Roya still seems to be sizing Brody up, even as Brody gave her assurances earlier over the phone that he was okay. I don’t know how I would have reacted if anyone on the CIA who was tailing Brody were to be seen by Roya or the mercenary who slaughtered government agents in “A Gettysburg Address”. It was more of a plot contrivance to get Brody in the same room with Nazir at the very end of the episode, but I don’t know if the CIA should have handled the situation on the road better.
Should they have moved in as soon as Max got the picture of the mercenary to Quinn and the group? Hard to say, but they may have missed their best chance to at least splinter the Nazir organization with the capture of both Roya and the mercenary. They have Brody in the same room with Nazir now, and my bet is that he will bend Brody back to his side. That would be disastrous for the CIA. But again, Nazir has eight years of time in his back pocket. I imagine this back-and-forth will continue until the end of this season, or for however long the writers choose to play this storyline out.
As for the other storyline in the episode, it’s much more contemplative than what’s going on with Brody, Nazir, and the CIA. Dana runs away and hides out for a little while at Mike’s house, which I find interesting because the two of them haven’t been very chummy since Brody came home. The unseen history of this show rears its ugly head again, as I had to remember that Mike and Jessica were close to moving in together and that Mike was basically a surrogate father to Dana and Chris.
I like that Mike was firm, yet a bit detached with Dana. He’s doing what Carrie told him to do: Be there for Dana and Chris because Brody will be dealing with his own issues. He drives Dana to the house of the daughter whose mother was killed by Finn and Dana. It’s not surprising to know that the Waldens paid the daughter to keep quiet, which doesn’t do any favors for her conscience. She’s mixed up in something that is wrong, although practically par for the course for politicians, and she’s learning the hard way how all of this works. It’s a lighter plot (if “Homeland” can really have one of those) than what’s happening with Brody, but at some point it has to factor into the larger fabric of the show.
If Nazir’s plan is contingent on Brody getting as close to the Vice President or President as possible, it would be a huge irony if something as small as a covered up hit-and-run felony involving the Vice President’s son ruined the entire thing. That seems to be the course of things happening here. It’s yet another house of cards built up only to suddenly fall.
Score: 8/10
