What started as a great comedy series, ended as a struggle to finish an episode. Recommended but stop watching when it starts getting uncomfortable..
[9.0/10] There is a great deal of division in the United States right now. It feels like there has been for a decade and a half. But I will never forget the way this country was unified after the events of 9/11. The one silver lining from that horrific act that has forever changed American life is that for one all too brief, beautiful time, we truly were one nation, standing together in the face of national tragedy.
“The Return” is a pretty paranoid episode of Homeland, one that is starting to show how deep and dangerous the tendrils of this conspiracy are, but it’s also an episode full of people on opposite sides of a divide setting aside their differences because there’s a greater good at stake. Republicans and Democrats, Americans and Russians, FBI agents and…people who are constant thorns in the sides of other intelligence agents, all work together because there’s a greater threat, a sense of what’s right, that guides them past the things that separate them.
The biggest element of that in terms of the plot is Carrie and Agent Conlin working together to uncover the story behind the mysterious jeep that Quinn photographed two episodes ago. (Conlin himself puts it best when he says that they hate each other, but now they’re “practically partners” in a dryly comic line.) Conlin had been one of the weak links this season, but here, the character is finally turned from a one-note foil into a real character, and it’s his working with Carrie that does it.
In the episode, we see Carrie challenge Conlin, forcing him to admit that even if Sekou committed the bombing, he didn’t make the bomb, and someone else is out there. Conlin calls in his C.I., and faced with a desperate kid who will say anything to keep his spot, Conlin proves that he isn’t a villain, just a true believer who, however overzealously and misguidedly, wants to protect this country too. Faced with a hard truth – that the man from Quinn’s photo wasn’t working with Sekou – he accepts it, and tries to get to the bottom of what happened.
It leads to the most intriguing sequence in the episode, where Conlin traces the jeep to a building outside of town, where employees type in complex security codes and guys with security clearances are applying for jobs. Conlin’s reconnaissance shows that he’s an effective agent (even if he gets caught), uncovering that this is some sort of private espionage shop, tapped into scores of data flowing from place to place. What they want, why they set up Sekou, and what, if any, connection to Dar Adal they may have remains unclear, but the plot thickens, in a good way.
More to the point, it shows Conlin as a man of principle, someone who, with nudging and evidence from Carrie, is willing to put himself on the line, willing to dip his toe into tinfoil conspiracy theories, if it’s the truth and not a clean answer. Of course, in the episode’s other taut sequence, Carrie finds that he’s gotten a bullet to the head from the guy he was tracking for his troubles, which is a shame since he just started to be developed. But despite the paranoia this understandably induces in Carrie, it’s a sign that even the person she resents and is working against for the first third of the season can be won to her side when there’s a greater threat peaking out.
The same goes for Saul here, who is slowly but surely uncovering that he’s being kept out of the loop by his own people, enough to where he’s willing to consort with an SVR spook to get the real information. What he does with that information – and the knowledge that Dar is working with Mossad behind his back – remains to be seen. But the notion that there’s another guy across at least nominally enemy lines, yes looking to feather his own nest a bit, but also concerned about what the consequences for everyone from Saul’s seeming estrangement will be, shows the way this looming problem touches everyone in the show’s orbit, and is making for strange bedfellows all around.
(The same goes for Saul’s new duckling from the academy, who’s starstruck by “The Bear” but sharp enough to know when he’s being signaled and malleable enough to give Saul dirt when he asks for it. I’m curious to see where they’re going with him.)
But the best example of this tack, however, is the conversation between President Elect Keane and Marjorie on the way to New York City. The President Elect’s smuggling herself out of her pretend prison out in the country adds to the conspiracy tilt of “The Return.” Something is clearly amiss when Keane can’t get her chief of staff on the premises and can’t even get into contact with her people when the outgoing President is in public making statements about reauthorizing the Patriot Act. It adds to the sense that whatever’s happening extends to all levels.
Taken apart from that however, the conversation between Keane and Marjorie is one of the best depictions of the disconnects, but also the common ground, of the Right and the Left of this country. Both Keane and Marjorie are set out as strong, principled individuals, who happen to have different views, but those views don’t stop them from doing “what’s right” or listening to one another and talking to each other with respect.
Marjorie admits that she never voted for Keane, because she didn’t trust her. There was a fear that she didn’t believe in what our soldiers were doing in the war, that she wanted to cut and run, that she was ashamed of them. Keane admits she thinks it was a mistake, but that she’s never been anything but proud and reverent of those sacrifices, so reverent that she dared not make them a part of her politics. But they hear each other, and as Keane’s willingness to invoke their sons to explain her opposition to the Patriot Act indicates, they’re listening to each other as well.
That’s the beauty of an episode like “The Return.” Keane and Marjorie, Carrie and Conlin, Saul and his SVR counterpart are all people on different sides of this equation, with beliefs that run counter to one another. But they share a deeper belief, a deeper commitment to country and cause, that brings them together when it’s truly important. It’s a cliché to say that there’s more that unites us than divides us, but the conversation between a soon-to-be President and regular person who voted against her shows that there is a connection between us, between those of us who feel one way and those who feel another, even about very important things, that can transcend our differences in the most unexpected ways.
(As an aside, it’s a thrill to see Astrid peering over Quinn in the last scene of the episode, but it’s more of a hook than a real part of the proceedings, so I think we’ll have more time to talk about it next week.)
