What even is Homeland?
There is a part of me that thinks the people best equipped to enjoy season five of Homeland, which premieres Sunday night, are those who failed to see a single minute of seasons one through four. Better to come at this as a blank slate, without having in your memory how astonished you were at how excellent the show could be and how crushed you may have been at how, shall we say, not-excellent the show could be.
The series launched as this dazzling, tightly written and fantastically acted exercise in how-will-they-ever-keep-this-up-ness and then, in keeping with the bipolarity of its protagonist, veered wildly off course, crashing into plotlines that were absurd (Abu Nazir is in the U.S.! Carrie is seducing a teenager!) and mundane (Dana has a road trip! Chris has a soccer game!) in equal measure.
Through the middle of the second season, Homeland produced some of the finest hours of television maybe ever — “Q&A;” is enshrined already in my TV Hall of Fame — and was rewarded with hardware across the board as a result. But then, well, things exploded, in every sense of the word.
Season five brings us a Carrie stripped of almost every quality that defined Carrie in season one: She’s nine months sober (…for now), seemingly on her meds (…I repeat) and two years out of the CIA, working as head of security for the During Foundation, atoning in her way for her days as the Drone Queen by using her geopolitical smarts to help billionaires bring aid to refugee camps where Hezbollah wields more power than the United Nations. She is also a mother, playing house in Berlin with a cute redhead (no, a different one) and is on barely-speaking terms with her mensch of a mentor, Saul, since she’s still wrecked to know that he negotiated with a terrorist to protect his professional future.
For all its differences, though, this does appear to be a Homeland that has come back to its roots: The plot is driven less by star-crossed lovers — RIP Brody, who died too young but, also, stuck around way too long — and more by ripped-from-the-headlines developments. The first three episodes bring us, among other things, a massive data breach, a standoff between a crusading journalist and the CIA about where government concerns for security get to override legal protections for privacy, and an ISIL recruiter sweet-talking three teenage girls into abandoning home to join the cause.
And while in some cases it’s easy to tell who we should be rooting against — terrorists are clearly marked this time around — it’s not quite so obvious who, if anyone, we should really be rooting for. Carrie’s billionaire boss wants to bring food and resources to refugees, but not unless the cameras can capture his kindness in action; Quinn is a shadowy assassin who takes bad guys out by night, but his gig requires that he ask no questions before pulling the trigger — or, as the case may be, detonating the pipe bomb; the CIA is helping the German government root out homegrown terrorism, but they’re doing it by aiding and abetting illegal activity that violates the rights of all German citizens; a journalist outs this CIA-Germany arrangement to the public, but in doing so, may have freed a handful of known terrorists and lost track of thousands of others.
The grey area, though, is Homeland’s sweet spot. And not being able to tell anymore if something is good or bad or both at the same time? That’s a pretty fitting mindset for anyone sticking with this show.