What is Brody up to?Every week, I watch 'Homeland' and find myself caught up in the trajectories of all kinds of sub-plots and supporting characters, only to return in the end to that same question: What is Brody trying to accomplish? Who is this secretive, seemingly tortured soldier, really? What does he want? What makes him tick?
Though the episode was titled "Representative Brody," Sergeant Nick's story line was a lot less interesting than Carrie's this week. Things had been looking up for poor Carrie, but the what-goes-up-must-come-down logic of this show demanded that she must suffer, and suffer she did. Start with the look on her face when she realized what a fool she'd been to think that she and Brody might have a future together. She'd gone to the trouble of introducing a bottle of white to her desolate refrigerator and cueing up a bit of Miles Davis, and all he wanted was to make sure that she had no intention of ever telling anybody about their little weekend at the cabin. Claire Danes earned her inevitable Emmy nomination with the expression of tasered hope that crossed her face. I felt like crying for her.
What even she didn't seem to realize as she ushered Brody to the door with a final promise never to breathe a word about their romp in the hay is that she now holds the key to his eventual undoing -- something she is entirely capable of using, as she demonstrated in the sting operation against Sahrani, the Saudi diplomat who had been working with Tom Walker and Abu Nazir. I don't care how much you despise terrorism: you had to wince at the tactics Carrie and Saul so eagerly used to get this guy to spill. Talk or we'll tell your family and your bosses that you're gay. Oh, you don't care? Fine, talk or we'll deport your daughter and make sure she spends the rest of her life behind a burka. Remind me: we are supposed to be the good guys, right?
Unfortunately for Sahrani, his decision to cooperate with the C.I.A. was tantamount to suicide. (Honestly, has anyone in this show survived the decision to cooperate with the C.I.A.?) The operation to trap Walker at the square was as tense as anything in a "Bourne" movie but more realistic, I'd wager, given the lack of fictional whiz-bang tracking technologies. As usual, Carrie was the first person to detect that something had gone wrong, that an attack was imminent, and as usual, she was a fraction of a second too late to prevent disaster. Say what you will about Carrie, though, she is one courageous mama bear: when that suitcase bomb went off, she was running at the bomber, not away from him. And from the way she wept in her hospital bed, it wasn't clear if she was relieved or disappointed to have gotten off with just a bad concussion.
But back to Brody. He spent the entire episode methodically -- you might even say diabolically -- dismantling Jess's opposition to his run for Congress. Now that we know that he's running to send a signal to Abu Nazir, we have to ask: Why? Is he really letting Abu Nazir know that he's ready and willing to carry out a terrorist attack against his own country? Is that even what Abu Nazir wants from him? Is a Congressman, who must dwell day and night in the public eye, even capable of doing such a thing? Or is Brody playing a double game, building Nazir's trust so he can betray it later?
Or could Brody be targeting a specific individual inside the government -- one whose downfall might be good for Nazir and America.
Consider this: At the end of the episode, Saul tells Carrie that she was right, that Abu Nazir has a mole inside the United States government. At that moment, the camera turns to the TV, where Vice President Walden is introducing his new Congressional candidate, Sergeant Nicholas Brody. Are we meant to infer that Walden is the mole? He was there in the situation room overseeing the Walker sting that went so horribly wrong. But everything we know about Nazir and Brody tells us that they both despise Walden -- he killed Nazir's son and then lied to the world about it!
Still, I have to ask: How did Sahrani know that Walden was going to ask Brody to run for Congress? Whoever the mole is, he or she must be close enough to Walden to know what he's going to do next.
I'm not smart enough to figure this out, but I can't wait to see what you guys have to say in the comments, since you've outsmarted me every week so far. All I know is that I don't believe that Brody, who supposedly turned against his country after seeing a boy he'd come to love like a son get killed in a bombing, would abandon his own family in the interests of bombing his own country.
There has to be another explanation.
This week's Brody-o-Meter score: 50.
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