5x02 The Tradition of Hospitality

6.5/10

Homeland is what it is at this point. It's still adept at doing tense scenes involving the threat of a terror attack. It's still adept at Quinn: the badass spy sequences. It's still adept at showing scenes of backroom politics in the CIA. What it's not particularly good at anymore is making me care about the characters involved in those types of sequences.

I have a hard time getting on board with Carrie's 5-minute (or 2-year) retirement. The show has to hammer the point home that no one believes she's really out, and maybe that's in keeping with the audience's expectations -- there's not a show if Carrie doesn't get involved with the CIA again, or, at least, there's a very different show. So the scenes where she calls back home, where she talks about having someone there waiting for her, meant to show that she's different, feel cheap because it seems inevitable that she's going to fall off the wagon in more than one sense of the term this season, and showing us "how far she's come" is only a weak sense to give that predictable fall from grace some stakes. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but maybe I've just gotten too familiar with the structure of these types of stories for them to have meaning for me anymore. Or maybe the show will subvert my expectations and I'll look like a fool. But I'd be shocked if she doesn't end up sleeping with Quinn and/or the head of the foundation and getting involved with the CIA again by the end of the season despite her Brody-expy waiting for her back in Berlin.

The journalist story felt kind of perfunctory. The character's pretty annoying, even when she makes good points, but perhaps that's intentional. The power struggle with Saul, Dar, and Allison has promise, as does the hacker character, but it's a big "withhold judgment until more goes down" on that front.

And Quinn's hunt for his latest target, who appears to lead a number of western girls toward some kind of attack, was intriguing as to where that seed is going to pop up later in the season, but the teaser at the end where Saul(?) is telling him which target to go after next seemed strange and a little hacky.

Overall it wasn't the most inspiring episode of the show, but as usual, there were some decent elements and the promise of both well-done and facepalm-inducing things to come.