6x11 R Is for Romeo

[8.6/10] It’s never easy to face someone you’re at odds with. It’s easier to keep them at a distance, to strike or question or dispute when there’s a power imbalance, when you don’t have to look them in the eyes while you dish something out or when they send something back. Meeting someone on a level playing field makes you vulnerable, but it’s also a sign of strength, an indication that you’re willing to stand up and take whatever comes.

That is why I’m willing to forgive the seemingly idiotic decision from President Elect Keane to go on Brett O’Keefe’s show. In a vacuum, it seems pretty dumb. For one thing, O’Keefe will have home court advantage, by being in a familiar environment, one that he can largely control, and use to rattle Keane with images of her dead son. For another, appearing on his program is just going to add attention and notoriety to someone who’s voice Keane wants to muffle not amplify, and his sitting across from the future leader of the free world makes him more respectable by mere association, no matter what she says to him. And lastly, it validates what O’Keefle is doing, justifies his rhetoric and tactics by giving him a spotlight and a ticket to time with the President Elect.

And yet, there’s an emotional and thematic logic to the choice that makes me more accepting of it. Saul’s big speech to Keane about how she has to face these things head on or she’ll get steamrolled is pretty trite, and again, based on the above, pretty misguided. But he grounds it in the CIA’s past misinformation campaigns and regime-toppling tactics all the way back to the fifties, which gives historical context to the actions from Dar Adal and his allies this season. More importantly, he paints her coterie as myopic about the way they are being overwhelmed in the court of public opinion, and that they have to stand up to it.

That said, Keane’s appearance on O’Keefe’s show is a strange combination of bravery and intimidation that makes for an odd combination. Again, O’Keefe is a smooth operator, and he knows the rhythms of his own show, so he’s able to evade many of Keane’s allegations or, as she notes, change the subject. You can tell she’s internally rattled when, once again, O’Keefe shows the footage, but she stays strong, and it’s subtle, but she rattles him too when she brings up the sockpuppets.

There’s two problems though. The first is, it’s not clear that calling O’Keefe on his tricks – whether rhetorical or strategic, accomplishes anything. It sounds like conspiracy nonsense and seems to put Keane in the muck, and it’s unclear how much of her accusations would stick. Second, I’m as much for ignoring the nuts as anyone, but Keane telling O’Keefe there’ll be no place for voices like him under her administration sounds like the government stifling dissent from the press which is…not great.

But again, it works from a thematic point. The accusation is and has been that Keanes, be they mothers or sons, run from the fray. Here is Keane, instead, charging headlong into the fracas. Whether she comes of better for it or just more scathed remains to be seen.

Two other players in this game come face to face in the episode. Dar Adal confronts Max after our favorite nerdy undercover operative is caught. Dar’s interrogation is pretty scary, and he’s more intimidating with one thumb that half the jackbooted thugs with assault weapons on this show are. But when it comes down to it, Dar wants Max’s help, because he sees O’Keefe poised to use Quinn as a part of this conspiracy, and that’s too much, even for him.

There’s not much to their part of the episode – it’s mostly just a reminder of a few things we know but it’s worth remembering at this stage of the game. The first is that Max is resourceful – he knows the system and he’s capable at this sort of thing. The second is that despite everything, Dar cares about Quinn and isn’t willing to let him be collateral damage. The third is that as much as Dar seemed in control earlier, this thing is getting away from him and he doesn’t like it.

But the most charged, affecting face-to-face confrontations come between Carrie and Quinn. Let me add my voice to what is hopefully a chorus – give Rupert Friend an Emmy nomination. Homeland is probably too long in the tooth for that to happen, but after starting off with a few too many tics, Friend has embraced the utter brokenness, the anger, the damage that has curdled within Quinn. And when he confronts Carrie with the knowledge that she was the one who made the call in Berlin, it all comes spilling out.

It’s an amazing scene, one of the most harrowing and heartbreaking the show has ever done, on both sides of the equation. Quinn is hurt and angry, not only because he realizes that a friend, someone he loved, would put his life and well-being at risk like that, but because he believes, not totally incorrectly, that all her kindness and care for him since his injury was because she felt like she owed him for doing to this to him.

At the same time, his declarations that she did this to him, that she caused his stroke, that she turned him into “a monkey” are absolutely devastating, for Carrie and for the audience. Carrie’s deal this season has been to confront the ways in which her choices have hurt the people around her, and here, the negative consequences of those choices are thrown back in her face by the person arguably hurt the most by them. It is painful all around.

Still, somehow worse is the scene that takes place after Quinn rescues Carrie from O’Keefe’s goon, and proceeds to pistol-whip him to death. In the aftermath, Quinn tells Carrie what happened with Astrid, and she tells him it’s not his fault. But Quinn doesn’t just blame himself for Astrid’s death – he rejects himself as anything more than a coldblooded killer.

Just like when he believed Carrie didn’t love him and he dove back into another mission, Quinn’s default setting, his greatest fear and harshest truth, is that the only thing he can do is to kill, to lead others to death. People in his life – Carrie, Astrid – have seemed like ways out of that, something that made him think he could be more, that he could love and be loved. But faced with the complexity of the reality of those relationships, the pain given and received, he sees himself as nothing more than a monster, a weapon of destruction, and he lays that all out for Carrie to take in.

That is the harshness of facing these things head on in another person. Sometimes you stand toe-to-toe with your adversary and trade blows, with neither seeming like a victor. Sometimes you find an unexpected ally in what originally seemed like a fly in the ointment. And sometimes you see the greatest victim of your decisions pouring out their pain, or a person who represents a false promise, the breaking of which leads you to misery. These are all hard things to take, hard things to accept, hard things to witness, made all the harder by the directness, the clarity, and the intimacy in which they are delivered.

(Oh yeah, and there’s a big explosion and people have been sent to possibly assassinate the president elect. No biggie.)