Homeland "Why Is This Night Any Different?" Review: Persons of Interest

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http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/1BrxVKsjSOzSedNXd3FKGQ--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3NfbGVnbztmaT1maWxsO2g9ODY7cT03NTt3PT EzMA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/cbstv.cbs.com/fbd95ddfbc4b23c6f471a4830625eb2a (http://news.yahoo.com/homeland-why-night-different-review-151000022.html)Homeland S050E4: "Why Is This Night Any Different?" For a show about espionage and subterfuge, Homeland isn't required to tell stories with the utmost sense of clarity. In certain instances, the less the audience knows about a potential big development, the better—especially if the show is trying to build to a significant surprise or wants us at home to feel like characters who are also stuck in the dark feeling around for any potential answer. "Why Is This Night Any Different?" relied heavily on confusion and misinformation in its two primary storylines, to varying degrees of success. SHOCKINGLY, Quinn did not kill Carrie. Who could have seen that coming?! Instead, Quinn snapped into hero mode, plotting Carrie's fake death—fashioned with a bloody cell phone picture and a video recording from Carrie to poor baby Franny—and trying to zoom her off to safety, potential burgeoning conspiracy be damned. Of course, if there's one thing we know about Carrie Mathison (well, other than she really knows how to chug Grey Goose), it's that once she gets hold of a thread, she won't stop pulling until the entire ball comes undone. Her dogged pursuit of who, exactly, passed her name onto Quinn, led to a fun, tension-filled sequence of the two them at the post office, complete with a mid-day firefight and minor vehicular trauma. Although maybe a bit disappointing after the previous episode's tight focus on Carrie's deteriorating mental state, there's little to complain about any kind of Carrie-Quinn reunion, particularly in a propulsive, goal-oriented formation. Maybe neither the audience nor the show is truly invested in them as a romantic pairing, but as once and future co-workers trying to solve problems in the field? They're wonderful together. Carrie's unhinged, conspiracy-focused mind nicely contrasts with Quinn's shrugging, "I just follow orders" routine, which made for compelling conversations about whether or not Saul could actually bring himself to order Carrie's death and the ethics of asking questions of your given task. Homeland has leaned on this rapport between Carrie and Quinn quite a bit in recent years, but it always pays dividends each time they return to it. The energy between Claire Danes and Rupert Friend is not quite electric, and frankly kind of weird, and yet it continues to be fascinating to watch. It helped that Homeland utilized the characters' confusion to build a fine little mystery regarding the identity of the person who ordered Carrie's execution. Once Quinn let Carrie tag along to the post office, it was clear that Saul had nothing to do with it, but the looming boogeyman that is Dar distracted from the true culprit: Miranda Otto's Allison. The episode successfully portrayed Carrie's jittery paranoia during the post office sequence, tossed in Quinn getting shot as a bit of temporary distraction, and then landed the hammer with Allison picking up the phone that Carrie grabbed from the botched town square assassination. That string of scenes again proved Carrie's competency, even in times of real stress, and then, at the last moment revealed the potential big bad of the season. Maybe? That's the problem with Allison suddenly trying to orchestrate Carrie and Quinn's murder and seemingly plotting to undercut Saul and Dar's plan in Syria—the show hasn't really sketched out the character in a way that explains her motivations. The A-plot, with Carrie and Quinn trying to search for answers, thrived because it was visibly a story about mystery and questions being answered. But the B-plot, with Allison and Saul strong-arming Syria's General Youssef to plot the latest CIA-led political coup in the Middle East, unfolded without much mystery at all. Allison and Saul created circumstances to bring Youssef to Berlin, Saul turned on the full-court press pitch, they helped save Youssef's ailing daughter, and then hoped for the best. In retrospect, the structure made sense. The dominant plot centered on answering a question; the secondary plot relatively simply set up pieces that the audience would presume to have moved around in future episodes (we've seen a multi-episode plan to unseat a foreign leader before on Homeland , after all). But in actuality, they were working in concert to produce a 1-2 punch of surprise, with Carrie learning of Allison's role in the plot to kill her and Quinn almost immediately coinciding with the explosion of Youssef's plane, complete with a VERY nefarious facial expression from Allison. Suddenly, this person who appeared to be just a moderate player in an endless story about Carrie and Saul might be running deadly operations on them both. As an endpoint to the episode and a potentially transformative moment for the season's long-term storytelling capabilities, those last few moments were damn good. However, while the show has purposefully kept Allison as a bit of a cipher to make this episode's reveal appear much more shocking and significant, her lack of definition as a character still raises some red flags. I like to think that I pay very close attention to Homeland while I watch it, but I have absolutely no idea who she is, let alone why she might have been involved in the things that "This Night" posited she's involved in fairly deeply. She knows Carrie and Saul pretty well, she presided over the major data leak, and she almost took the fall when the CIA and the German government needed someone to carry the water for the geopolitical and PR nightmares created by the leak. How does that result in a byzantine plan to murder a former CIA agent who, at least from a distance, seemed harmless, or the murdering of a Syrian leader and his family, right in the middle of terrible unrest for that country? To some degree then, the show sacrificed clarity and even minor character development to lull the audience into a false sense of security with Allison. That's not necessarily a terrible move by any means, but one that did cushion the ultimate impact of what were admittedly two very big moments happening within 20 seconds of one another. Surely Homeland will fill in the blanks with Allison in the coming weeks, whether that means providing context for her crusade against Carrie and Quinn (and maybe Saul), revealing that she and Dar crafted a much more nefarious plan than simply removing Saul from power in Europe, or installing another plot twist that asserts she didn't commit as much treasonous behavior as the cliffhanger here presented. And heck, maybe the show deserves some credit for returning to its original thesis statement: that all evil terrorists are not Islamic extremists or people from the Middle East. White people can be terrible too! Amid the messiness with the core characters and Allison, this episode snuck in some fun transitionary stuff involving the journalist Laura Sutton, well-intentioned hacker Numan, and another hacker, the supposedly famous and house arrest-bound Sabine. At its worst during the tail end of Season 2 and into Season 3, Homeland was a suffocating story, with Carrie and Brody swallowing every important thing in sight and leaving no story real estate for anyone else. This season, almost the opposite is in place: Carrie, Quinn, and Saul are in some ways stuck in the same old ruts, with very little in character development or difference to be seen. Meanwhile, there's still space for these secondary and tertiary characters to have their own plotlines, with Laura seeking out Sabine to try to contact Numan, who was dealing with a crisis of his own as his hacking buddy sold the latest round of documents to those pesky evil Russians. These scenes didn't take up that much time in the episode, but they also importantly didn't distract from the main action at hand. It's good for the show to represent a more fully formed world, with people who have goals and responsibilities that don't involve simply serving Carrie or Saul's seasonal story arc. That kind of stuff is a sign of Homeland 's growth, even if it's just a teeny tiny bit of growth. Homeland had an uphill battle trying to top last week's stellar episode (I liked it more as time went on), and "Why Is This Night Different?" tried to combat that by pushing the double-crosses and the secrecy to the forefront. It worked, mostly, but time will tell how effective the treatment of a character like Allison serves the season. NOTES — I love that Carrie kept the wig on even after arriving back at the hideout with Quinn and tending to his wounds. Never question her commitment to an operation. — Poor, poor Franny. We know that Carrie won't DIE, so that video was probably for nothing, but in the off-chance that was the show's attempt to write the baby out of the story, it was... fine? I also totally forgot that Quinn had a kid as well. Homeland is secretly about bad parenting and abandoned children. — I spent a lot of time talking about the show's treatment of Allison above, but I'm also not entirely sure why Saul does any of the things he does these days. Why does he desperately want a regime change in Syria? Should we even care? — You can add Jonas and Otto to the ragtag collection of new non-essential characters that the show still finds time to check in with every week. Although, they were mostly stuck in "talking about Carrie while Carrie's not actually on-screen" mode here, they sure are handsome. That's something!



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