6x01 Fair Game

6.3/10. I thought that Quinn was dead. In some ways, I was hoping he was, not because I dislike the character, who quickly became one of the show’s best, but because I thought it fit with the themes of Season 5. This type of life is difficult, both to live through and to escape. It forces people like Carrie, Quinn, and Saul to make hard choices, to perhaps even have to kill people they love. Saul had to kill Allison, a woman he cared about but was deceived and betrayed by, for the greater good. And it seemed like Carrie had to make a parallel choice, to kill Quinn, a man whom she, in her own fractured Carrie ways, loves, because she believes it’s a mercy when the alternatives are a difficult life he faces caused by her own choices.

The major theme of Season 5 was the quest for a normal life and whether it’s possible after all these people have seen. Including a major casualty in these events, let alone one caused by the show’s protagonists, seemed to drive home the costs of being in this world.
But Quinn, as you know if you’ve watched this episode or any Season 6 promotional material, is alive. And as I rewatched the end of the Season 5 finale, the intentions of that last scene were more ambiguous than I’d recalled. Carrie still seems poised to end Quinn’s life rather than face the difficult and uncertain road to recovery, but then there is that flash of light – the titular “Glimmer,” that seems to symbolize the possibility of a life apart from all of this misery and mayhem – and she pauses.

There is that same glimmer present in “Fair Game,” when Quinn is sitting in some drug den, looking squirrely, disheveled, and thoroughly not himself. He writes it off a glimpse of another life, a sign that he views himself as a lost cause. And after some reflection, I think the move works as a narrative choice, that it turns the final scene from an (admittedly compelling) symbol of the darkness that comes with this career choice, to a symbol of hope, that no matter how deep in you are, it’s worth the strain and struggle to get your head clear and your feet on the ground again.

The problem then becomes how Homeland depicts that path back to normalcy for Quinn and for Carrie. The idea of a guilt-ridden Carrie checking in on a resistant Quinn every day in the hospital gives us a cliché “let me go” story thread. Claire Danes and Rupert Friend are superior actors who can elevate the material, but it doesn’t make the setup any less tired. What’s frustrating is that there’s potential there. In my write up for the Season 5 finale, I compared Carrie to Tony Soprano, with the idea that both shows depict their protagonists as tainting the things they touch to some degree. The idea that what Quinn needs to recover is to be away from Carrie, and that Carrie’s guilt over being a cause, if not the cause, of his current condition prevents her from being able to do that, to Quinn’s detriment, is an interesting one.

But the depiction of Quinn’s downward spiral is hokey as all get out, with this damaged individual going full Riley Finn/Trainspotting to signify the depths of his despair and his hopelessness. Again, Friend is a great actor and makes these scenes work better than they have any right to, but it’s all just well-worn shorthand for rock bottom that doesn’t feel as real or pathos-ridden as it ought to. By the same token, Carrie and Quinn going full Odd Couple (with a side of Bubs from The Wire) has some mild potential given the themes in play, but comes off as more of a conceit to keep them around one another than a natural story development.

But that’s part of what a season premiere, especially for a show like Homeland, has to do – establish the plots and the premise of the upcoming season, even if it has to contort itself a bit to set everything up. We can see that in Saul and Dar Adal’s storyline, where the President Elect seems skeptical of the CIA’s “lethal programs” and proposes pulling out, or at least severely scaling back America’s military efforts in the Middle East and elsewhere. Dar Adal ascribes it to the President Elect having lost her son in Iraq, something she apparently would not discuss publicly and, if the closing scene where she lingered on a locket is any indication, it’s a good guess.

Saul is bullish on the President-To-Be though, wagering that she’s right where it counts and persuadable on the margins, while Dar is a “paranoid fuck” who’s chatting with others in the intelligence committee—without Saul—and presumably deciding how to continue on the same path regardless of the President. We only get the first wisps of this storyline in “Fair Game,” but the promise of a conflict between the President and the intelligence community (something that could only happen in fiction, clearly) with Dar on one side and Saul on the other portends intriguing things.

But it’s the other major storyline introduced in “Fair Game” that holds the most promise, or at least potential. Sekou Bah is a young American Muslim who is painted as a terrorist by the generic special agent who takes him in, but is, through the scenes where we’re introduced to him prior to his arrest, presented as a young man who clearly sympathizes with terrorist actions and is devout, but who is also principled, who believes in a seemingly justified different perspective, and who knows and appreciates his rights in this country.

It’s bold territory to not only present but to humanize a young Islamic kid who praises the actions of terrorists. While Qassim, the terrorist with the heart of gold from Season 5 felt like something out of a generic action movie, Sekou feels far more real, far more three-dimensional already, and, true to the spirit of Homeland, far more relevant to the current issues the country is facing at the intersection of radicalization and xenophobia. Again, this is Homeland, so there’s plenty of ways for this to go off the rails (and please, for the love of god, don’t have Carrie sleep with him), but it’s a promising start.

But “Fair Game” spends so much time on the poorly executed Carrie/Quinn business – Quinn’s unfortunate jaunt, Carrie acting as a civil rights lawyer(?) for people targeted by the CIA/FBI, and other “Hey! We’re in New York now!” moments that it drags the whole thing down. There’s a lot of dull setup that even the consistently good acting on the show can’t overcome.

If the theme of Season 5 was the cost of trying to get a normal life back, the theme for Season 6 appears to be the cost of trying to go it alone. Otto tells Carrie that she cannot make it as a loner (which feels like groundwork for she and Quinn getting together); Saul and maybe the President Elect are being isolated by the rest of the intelligence apparatus, and Sekou finds himself separated from his family, his home, and his life. “Fair Game” isn’t a great start, but like most of Homeland’s premiere, at least offers the possibility of interesting things to come, even if it presents them in a fairly uninteresting way. Let’s hope it can make good on that promise.