Season 4, Episode 6, “From A to B and Back Again”
Wow.
Aayan is dead, killed with a single bullet to the head, shot by the jihadist uncle he kept alive with stolen medicines. (“Don’t think I’m not grateful,” are the last words he hears.)
Saul — wincing in sunlight, possibly drugged — is in the hands of the terror chief Haissam Haqqani, speeding off in an all-terrain vehicle, destination unknown.
Carrie, alone in her office with the Hefty-bagged remains of Operation Aayan, is riddled with rage and remorse, while the “boy” who loved her lies abandoned in the dust.
And Quinn is in command, having made a decision that may, once again, have placed his “squishy” feelings over the greater good. (But more on that later.)
Tonight’s “Homeland” episode had all the heart-racing excitement of a season finale. And, frankly, it was about time. We’ve all critiqued what has often felt, until now, like a lackluster string of narrative tricks that relied upon a gratuitous yuck factor to make up for paltry character development.
With this episode, however, the disparate strands of Season 4 finally come together. The arc that began when the Drone Queen locked eyes with Aayan concludes with his eyes turned skyward once more, as the full realization of Carrie’s duplicity shows in his face. As he falls to the ground, the full weight of her actions hits her with a sudden, genuine, heart-stopping gasp. Saul – “the head of the snake who bombs us,” in Haqqani’s words – is forced to look dronewards, too, his head yanked back for all assembled in the Islamabad station to see.
The intricate choreography of tonight’s climax, with its alternation of action in the sunny countryside of Aayan’s youth and the darkness of an Islamabad operations room turned video theater, gave new meaning to the phrase Quinn used last week, to explain Carrie’s manipulative tactics to Fara: “Using the enemy’s own weight to bring him down – that is the job.”
And it brought new meaning to the now-familiar words of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton: “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors.” How much evil can a nation do, in the quest to fight Evil, before the poison of its own actions proves toxic? In the next episode, Carrie may begin to find out.
This week, though, it was fascinating to see Carrie’s capacity for compartmentalization fall apart. Triggered by Fara’s use of the phrase “the boy,” Carrie quickly comes unglued (saying that Fara talks of Aayan “like he’s some kindergartener”), lashing out in a desperate, and grossly transparent, attempt at self-justification: “You know what I’d like to hear from you, for once? I’d like to hear you ask how you can help our effort, our collective [expletive] effort to make our country safe. Do you think you can manage that?”
Watching Carrie’s growing guilt, glimpsed last week, give way to screams of horror and rage after Aayan’s murder (“Take the shot! Take the shot!”), something became clear about Carrie that I’ve suspected all along: No matter how duplicitous her actions, her emotions are always, on some level, true. That’s why she’s so good at her job – the affective Wonderlands are genuine, even if, in the larger scheme of things, they are a fraud. That is also why, just like Nicholas Brody, Aayan really had no narrative choice but to die.
And now let’s cut to the chase and debate:
Do you think that Carrie should have gone ahead and ordered the drone strike to kill Haqqani, even though it would have meant murdering Saul? Should she have stood her ground for the sake of “our country” (to borrow the phrase with which she bullies Fara)?
Don’t you think Saul would have done precisely that? Remember, we’ve been told over and over again of late that she is his protégée – “his child, practically,” as Haqqani puts it to Aayan. (And let’s recall: Saul did allow Carrie to be locked up on a psych ward against her will and be drugged almost beyond recognition. He did dangle her out in front of Abu Nazir. And his behavior did upset Quinn – though not to the point where Quinn grabbed the reins of power.)
Furthermore, don’t you think that, by letting Saul live, Quinn and Carrie may, in fact, have set him up for a horrible round of torture? Think of C.I.A. station chief in Lebanon, William F. Buckley, who was captured in 1984, and tortured for months before his death.
I meant to leave this an open question. But I suppose I’ve made my own point of view clear.
The eggs are broken. Aayan is gone. To have walked away without making an omelet strikes me as utter madness.
A controversial opinion, I know. Leave your thoughts in the comments.