6x05 Casus Belli

[9.0/10] In my write-up for the prior episode, I talked about how Homeland often offers stories on multiple tracks with thematic ties. And while there’s some of that here, as the main characters start to regroup and deal with the aftermath of explosion in New York, for the most part there are two stories: the intimations that Dar Adal set this whole thing up to leave the President Elect off-balance, and Quinn going nuts and getting himself embroiled in a hostage situation with the police. And both of them are intense and unnerving in a well done and very Homeland fashion.

Setting up Dar as the major villain this season is a stroke of genius. When you have F. Murray Abraham on hand, you’d be a fool not to use him to his fullest potential, and making him the mastermind behind a plot to commit false flag terrorism in order to preserve the status quo in the intelligence community is, admittedly, a little Bond villain-y, but Dar has the craftiness and the cravenness to pull it off.

I’ll concede that it’s one of those moments that takes the show away from realism and puts in more into 24 territory, but we’ve already seen pacemaker assassinations, terror attacks in a D.C. park that have been all but forgotten, and as we were recently reminded, puppet leaders set up in foreign countries through elaborate blackmail, so I’m willing to let it ride with the general tenor of the show.

But it’s still impressive how in control Dar seems, how perfectly this all seems to go off. As the Alex Jones analog at the top of the episode reveals, this kind of “attack” is well-suited to poison the public against the President Elect’s attempts to tamp down on the intelligence community’s activities and the U.S.’s war on terror, thereby preserving the state of play in which Dar works best. The fact that she is whisked away from New York City to an undisclosed location over her protestations both make her look like a coward to the public after her talk about not overreacting, and isolate her from her staff so that Dar has a chance to be her only conduit to the rest of the world.

And as though that weren’t enough, the implication is that he was the one who let the recording of the FBI informant leak to Carrie, which, rather than an act of mercy, seems to be a calculated move that (1.) gives Dar a pawn for the false flag terror scheme, (2.) makes it look like agencies like the FBI can’t do their job because they’re too soft on terrorism, and (3.) taints Carrie by her association with and efforts to release a young man whom the world will see as a terrorist.

It’s as masterful as it is horrifying. Dar has always had a certain mercenary quality to him, where he was willing to break eggs to make omelets in ways others were not. But the scope and success of his plan here is shocking both in how well he executed it, and how gallingly terrible what he’s accomplished and trying to accomplish it. This is one of those episodes that makes the slow set up in prior ones worth it for what it all amounts to.

Speaking of horrifying, Quinn’s holing up in Carrie’s home against reporters, protesters, and eventually cops is quickly and escalatingly unnerving. That part of the episode starts out so sweetly though! My initial reaction was that I would completely watch a season of The Franny and Quinn Babysitter Mysteries given the pair’s adorable rapport. But that sweetness was deployed for a reason -- to provide a plausible justification for Carrie to leave her daughter with a PTSD-addled killer (albeit only for 45 minutes) while she responds to the urgent call about Sekou. It still rings a little odd, but the urgency of the situation and the cuteness between the two of them makes the choice seem understandable enough.

The problem is that Quinn is not all there. He still has his CIA training, and many of the skills that made him such an effective agent still buried within his brain, but he’s no longer in control of them. He is almost atavistic, entrenched in such an instinctual loyalty to Carrie, and by extension, Franny, that when his judgment is impaired by his damage, he reverts to his base impulse to protect and defend however necessary. Quinn is not in control of himself anymore, and that turns a precision instrument into an indiscriminate weapon.

To the point, the scene where he manhandles the reporter who taps on the backdoor is truly chilling. Here is a man with incredible abilities who unleashes them on, admittedly, a pest, but someone who is completely innocent relative to the sort of disquieting physical violence he inflicts on her. It’s frightening when he shoots a protester throwing rocks, because while, as Carrie points out, Quinn’s a skilled enough marksman to avoid killing the guy, who knows what happens when he reaches his breaking point and starts trying to do just that. There’s even some fistpump glory when Quinn stymies an entire SWAT team single-handedly (literally), but it’s a testament to his instability, and how scary instability is in someone who’s been trained to kill.

And yet, there’s such pathos to Quinn. Carrie wants to protect her daughter, but also the crazy man with a gun who is effectively holding her hostage. She knows what he’s been through, and that despite his unhinged, dangerous methods, he is earnestly, if misguidedly, trying to “protect Franny.” Carrie, still living with the guilt of potentially being responsible for Quinn’s condition, takes the blame, telling him that it was her fault, that she told Quinn to protect her daughter and that his reaction is on her, not him. Homeland manages to make Quinn as much a figure of tragedy as he is of horror, that he’s doing these awful, disquieting things but they’re motivated by good impulses and caused by abuses and horrors he himself as suffered. It’s a gray area that “Casus Belli” does well here.

But, as Mrs. Bloom noted, it also flips the familiar dynamic between Quinn and Carrie. For once Quinn is the one who is acting clearly insane, violating rules and going on wild goose chases, and Carrie is the one dismissing his ranting and raving and just trying to protect him. He’s also right! Much like Carrie herself, his methods are suspect and self-defeating but his impulse turns out to be correct.

The fact that, at the season’s halfway mark, it’s this fact that seems poised to point Carrie in the direction of Dar Adal, makes “Casus Belli” easily the best episode of Season 6 so far. Adal’s (seeming) master plan unfolds with Machiavellian efficiency, and the individual poised to take it all down is a lunatic who had to be handled by the combined efforts of his conflicted crush and a police SWAT team. Rarely do Homeland’s threads within an episode not only dovetail together so nicely, but portend such interesting things to come.