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'Homeland' Recap, Still With Brody-o-Meter: Episode 6, 'The Good Soldier'
by Michael Hogan, posted Nov 6th 2011 11:00PM
Who's playing whom? That is the question posed by 'The Good Soldier,' the sixth and possibly best yet episode of Showtime's domestic-espionage drama 'Homeland.' As the hour ended, the audience was left pondering two possible scenarios. The first is that Carrie (Claire Danes) is an Agency Black Widow, spinning a psychosexual web to entrap her pray, the unwitting Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis). The second is that Brody is the one stitching the net, and that Carrie -- willful, impetuous, hot-headed Carrie -- is the one in danger of being eaten alive. Let's examine both in tonight's 'Homeland' recap, shall we?On the one hand, you can view the episode this way: Having decided that her mission in life is to protect people from bad guys, Carrie un-empties her desk and starts looking for a way to prove her case against Brody, whom she is now convinced is a terrorist, based on her conviction that he passed Afsal Hamid the razor blade that allowed the detained terrorist to commit suicide and claim his allotted 72 virgins in Heaven. To that end, she suggests polygraphing all 11 of the people who had direct contact with Hamid, just in case, oh, any of them might not be able to correctly answer the question "Did you pass a razor blade to Afsal Hamid." Even Saul supports the plan, which will be important later.
Where can she find Brody to tell him about the polygraph? Why, Tom Walker's memorial service, of course, where the Marine is doing his level best to deliver a moving eulogy despite the fact that, as we know from flashbacks, he beat the poor guy to death -- under duress, we can only assume -- and buried his body. Brody chooses a rather unorthodox format, yelling out a roll call of the Marines in attendance and repeating Walker's name, Bueller style, until the widow breaks down and cries, but hey -- at least he didn't stand there and spout a bunch of platitudes.
After the service, Carrie buttonholes him and tells him about the polygraph, though she won't say what it's about. That's classified. He says he can't do it today -- post-memorial party at my house, dude -- but promises to go tomorrow at 10. Back at his house, the Marines are rapping, oddly enough, while Brody sits there looking miserable. Finally, they stop and raise a toast to Walker, and then someone asks Brody what happened out there anyway. He gives his official story -- "we were taking fire from all sides, we ate dirt and prayed" -- when an ex-Marine on crutches named Lauder calls bullshit. He hates the way Brody has turned himself into a recruitment tool for two bogus wars and demands to know why Brody came back and Walker didn't. Brody says it came down to luck, which may be true, in a sense. Who knows what might have happened if the Taliban had told Walker to kill Brody?
Lauder's drunken quest for transparency then finds a new target: "Uncle" Mike. Who starts throwing punches when Lauder says that everyone wanted to move in on Brody's wife, but only one guy did. Brody pulls Mike off, and then starts beating him in the face. "You were my friend," he says. Having wrecked yet another back yard function, he gets in his car and drives off.
It's not long before Carrie's phone rings: "It's me, Brody." He says he can't take the polygraph tomorrow: "I'm a mess. I could tell them my name and it would sound like a lie." She high-tails it to the bar, presumably eager to extract some kind of drunken confession from him. He's drunk all right, but she does all the talking. She says no one -- not even the boys -- could beat her in the games of chicken she played as a child on the train tracks. And she tells Brody that the polygraph has to do with Afsal Hamid -- he committed suicide, somebody slipped him a razor. And then Brody, a man who has so far proven incapable of making love to his ridiculously beautiful wife, takes Carrie right across the finish line in the back of the car. To be honest, they both look like they're having a pretty good time.
Have we mentioned that Saul failed the lie-detector test the first time through, after trying to wriggle out of it? He'll eventually pass it, but that may not prove anything, as we'll discover soon enough. Brody arrives as scheduled for his test after all and ... he aces it. Answers every question without setting off the slightest quiver on the machine's meter. Did he pass Hamid the razor blade? "No." Survey says: Telling the truth. "Ask him again!" Carrie demands from the booth. Same result. Finally, she has a brainwave: "Ask him if he's been faithful to his wife." "Yes." The machine is satisfied. So now Carrie knows that Brody can beat a polygraph. But what else do we know?
Carrie seems to be operating on a faulty assumption: that if she gets close enough to Brody, he'll tell her what he's up to. But if Brody is what she thinks he is, there's no way he'll do that. He knows she's in the C.I.A. He knows she's a terrorist hunter. So all she's doing by pursuing the relationship is playing chicken with the C.I.A.'s anti-terrorism program. Can she win this time too?
Let's examine an alternate scenario to the one spelled out above. Let's suppose that Brody killed Walker because he hates Americans. He will have to feign sorrow at the memorial, but that's no great feat: Marines don't really show emotion. Apart from that, the event is an opportunity to burnish his cover story and, if he gets lucky, collect some useful information. From the moment Carrie tells Brody he has to take a polygraph, he has one mission: to find out what question he's going to have to answer so he can get ready and beat the machine. This is a man, let's remember, who survived eight years of interrogations by the Taliban. With a little preparation, he could make an interrogator believe the sky is neon green. So now he has one mission at the post-service party: finding an excuse to leave, so he can call Carrie and get her to meet him. Which isn't too hard: Any time Mike is around, he has a pretext to get in a fist fight. Only after Carrie offers up the necessary information does he have sex with her. And yes, that gives her a tool to prove that he's beating the machine, but so what? The only person she's proving it to is herself. She has no actionable intelligence. Meanwhile, it's entirely possible to imagine Brody seducing Carrie, really getting her to fall for him -- she's alone, she's unstable, she's a slave in some ways to her emotions. Brody, on the other hand, is a trained killer. He's a man with a mission.
I'm not saying this is the right explanation, only that it makes Carrie's actions even more indefensibly reckless than they otherwise might seem to be. If Brody is a terrorist, she's risking her life and more to get close to him for dubious returns, and if he isn't, she's wasting her time. Lose-lose.
There is, of course, another possibility: that some third party is pulling the strings. I'm grateful to the commenters who pointed out last week (a) that Saul needs to be looked at carefully, and (b) that he was chanting the Hebrew prayer of death last week. So maybe he did pass on that razor blade. Why? I can't figure it out, but maybe the commenters will come to the rescue again.
This week's Brody-o-Meter score: 50
Random observations:
Poor Faisal. We were just getting to like him when he was blown away -- presumably by fellow terrorists worried that he would indeed turn himself in. Also: how relieved must the show's producers be now that they've been able to reveal that Faisal was taking orders from his white girlfriend. Any chance that will appease those who say the show trafficks in anti-Arab stereotypes?
Nudity Watch: I haven't been keeping a scientific record, but I do believe this is the first episode with no nudity. Still, Morena Baccarin does strip down to her skivvies before Tom Walker's memorial service. Is that supposed to make us feel as guilty as Brody does?
Graphic by Catarina Ferreira.
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