‘Homeland’ season 2, episode 6 review: Stonewalled

When you deliver a show that is so consistently fantastic, expectations are high for every episode to be a knockout punch. So when Sunday night’s new episode of “Homeland” season 2 felt like a small letdown, it was almost akin to going off the edge of a cliff. A weak episode of this show is still better than great episodes of most other shows, but the primary issue with “A Gettysburg Address” was that it felt like the writing was a tad coincidental at times, and that there was too much focus placed on stories we do not care about to the same degree as Carrie and Brody.

For one, there is the subject of Mike, who spent much of this episode on the warpath trying to find some way to implicate Brody of murder … only to repeatedly hit a brick wall first with the CIA and then with Jess at Brody’s home. The issue here with this is that Mike almost seems like too perfect a guy in a show stuffed to the brim with characters in the gray, and he is not someone who we sit around every week hoping that we see more of. What did we really take away from this story, save for him being yet another person who suspects something of Brody? At the moment, it’s nothing.

Then, there is the story about Dana, Finn, and the woman that they now know is dead as a result of the hit-and-run. This plot could be the endgame for Brody’s political career depending on who knows about the incident, but for the time being it is frustrating to spend so much time with a character like Finn who is so inherently unlikable. We do find Dana clearly much more of an interesting person now than we did three weeks ago; clearly, she wants to do the right thing in this situation, but she is scared to hurt her family and her father any further based on what they have already gone through.

Finally, we turn to the meat of this story, which was solid and contained plenty of the same trust issues between Carrie and Brody as usual. For whatever reason, though, there was just something missing from the climactic shootout in the tailor shop at the end of the episode. Perhaps the lack of interesting characters there save for Mr. Anger Management himself in Quinn kept the surprise attack from being as impactful as it could, or maybe it was just that we knew that something bad was going to happen here the first moment that Roya hinted to Brody that there was something important being hidden at the shop that would ultimately retrieved. Perhaps she already realized that something was up, and she is using Brody’s new connection as a means to cause greater chaos. For now, Quinn looks to be the only survivor of the shooting, but who knows how long that will last given his condition?

Moving forward now, our sole hope is that the lines here continue to become more blurred across the board, and that the writers remember what made this show the Emmy-winner for Outstanding Drama Series last year. Here’s a hint: it involves Damian Lewis and Claire Danes.

What did you think about this episode?