6x02 The Man in the Basement

6.3/10. Carrie Matheson is always juggling, always keeping lots of balls in the air and hoping that none of them drop. So let’s take them one-by-one.

The most interesting of them is Sekou. As I said last week, it’s pretty gutsy stuff to take a character who is actively praising terrorists and make him sympathetic. The idea that he is just a kid who’s being railroaded by the system, set up, lied to, and made to face seven years in jail is intense stuff. You feel for Sekou, you feel for his sister and mother, and you feel the futility and injustice of all of this from the lawyer who tells Carrie that she’s doing Sekou a disservice by not steering him toward a deal. That lawyer’s been through this before, and the most dispiriting thing is how resigned he is, and how normal he seems about the unfairness handed to his client.

The plot twist that Sekou’s friend is actual an FBI informant who helped set Sekou up is a decent one. It twists the knife of that unfiarness, making it come from someone who was a part of Sekou’s and his sister’s lives, and who’s just the tool of someone else. The problem is that as soon as the lawyer emphasized that talking to him would be against the rules, you just knew Carrie was going to do it, so her emerging from the shadows had zero surprise or impact.

The other big problem is that it turns Conlin into a snarling villain. It’s not like Homeland has never had despicable bad guys before (paging Duck Phillips) but the idea of this guy who’ll set nobodies up in order to catch “terrorists” and threatens to have Carrie for interfering is some COBRA B.S. I’m sure it’ll turn out he’s doing it at the President Elect’s behest or something like that, but for now he just seems like a cartoonish villain, and it does the storyline no favors, even if Carrie getting to the bottom of who gave Sekou the $5,000 makes for a solid episode plot.

But that’s just one of the balls Carrie has in the air. Another is the fact that, as the Saul seemed to sniff out but then talked himself out of she’s advising the President Elect on the spycraft side of foreign policy. This is, like much of last week, more of a storyline that suggests some good intrigue going forward rather than anything especially interesting here and now. The prospect of Carrie teaming up with the President Elect to go against Dar and the rest of the intelligence community could be interesting, especially with each side thinking it’s playing the other by, for instance, having Saul manage the deal with the Iranian bagman, but for now it’s mostly a promise.

What is fleshed out, and arguably the strongest part of the episode, is Dar Adal doing what he does – playing games and being one step ahead of everyone else. The fact that he managed to play the President Elect’s advisor, tell a “bullshit story,” and smoke out that Carrie’s working for the Prez-to-Be makes him the crafty snake you can’t help but admire when the show gets all twisty like this. As I said last week, I appreciate the prospect of Dar trying to make a power play on behalf of the current intelligence apparatus, the old guard, against the newbies, and the fact that he’s keeping his knowledge of Carrie’s involvement from a trusting Saul just adds intrigue to the pot.

Of course last but not least in terms of the balls Carrie is juggling is Quinn, who is still setting up shop in Carrie’s basement and being recalcitrant and difficult to anyone who dares cross his path. I still don’t know how I feel about this storyline. On the one hand, I appreciate that the show is making Quinn earn his way back from the near-death experience the hard way, making it ugly rather than inspirational. You can’t just keep almost-killing your characters without there being consequences, so I’m glad that the show is committing to the notion that what Quinn went through is traumatic and not just doing a SIX WEEKS LATER title card and he’s suddenly all better like they did with Brody. What’s more, I’ve seen praise for Rupert Friend’s performance from folks who’ve experience combat trauma, so it’s nice to see those difficulties dramatized in a way that connects with the people who’ve experienced them.

It’s just not clear where they’re going with this stuff. We’re two episodes into the season, so that’s fine to some degree, but like much of this episode, a lot of it drags between the hints of what’s to come and the destination. It’s nice to see Max again for the first time in two seasons, and his steely but yielding dynamic with Quinn is a welcome one, but I’m not sure what the point of his misadventures at the bodega was beyond the notion that Carrie is trying to keep track of everything at once and Quinn’s miserable and a little
self-destructive, which we essentially knew from last week. Max gives the season’s second “Carrie, you’re bad for Quinn” speech, and maybe that’s building to something, but in the interim, it’s not especially compelling.

That’s the thing about Homeland though. There’s so often it can just skate by because folks like Claire Danes, Rupert Friend, Mandy Patinkin, and F. Murray Abraham are such good actors. The scene at the end where Carrie watches Quinn’s gassing video with him, and he asks her why she saved him could be Lifetime movie level stuff. But Friend is so good at playing this broken shell of a man, and Danes so good at selling the complicated pain of that question and the feelings stewing in the character, that the show, and the episode, get by.

But like those balls in the air, you can only get by on acting for so long. Again, we’re two episodes in, there’s plenty of time to pull the trigger on noteworthy developments and big moves. It’s worthwhile to be patient through the setup. Eventually though, Season 6 is going to need to make these stories compelling in the moment, and not just intriguing for what may happen down the line. “The Man in the Basement” can’t quite pull that off.