Homeland

This sometimes-erratic thrill ride is back in top form in its fifth season, plunging Carrie into a hornet's nest of topical intrigue, involving Syrian refugee camps and a leaked CIA data breech that imperils US relations with Germany. [28 Sep - 11 Oct 2015, p.17]

If last season was the redux, then Season 5 is peak Homeland.

There’s just a ridiculously satisfying amount of content in these first few episodes, and in promises moving forward, that make Homeland‘s cloak-and-dagger world one of the most easily absorbing right now on TV.

Like the excellent fourth season of Homeland, season five suggests a politically wise and deeply skeptical update of John le Carré's very best spy-centric work, seeing the fury, confusion, and accepted hypocrisy of international diplomacy with the same clarity as the lies and duplicitous acts the show's characters indulge in on a regular basis.

For now, at least, Homeland is back with a surprising show of force.

Berlin's an enticing setting for Carrie, and Homeland, having gotten back its mojo after a too-long dalliance with Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), seems once again headed in an interesting direction.

It’s the way third-episode writers Meredith Stiehm and Alex Gansa set up and execute this latest Carrie psychodrama that gives it the import and narrative propulsion that makes it well worth investing in the Mathison Mental Health Project once again.

At its best, what Homeland achieves better than most is tapping into not just the apprehensions raised by terrorism--and the sacrifices undertaken by those who combat it--but also the moral and political tradeoffs associated with that struggle.

The Edward Snowden-inspired plot is the most compelling story line this season, which is packed with conspiratorial intrigue and complicated questions about political and journalistic ethics.... But the second that Carrie yields to her first fit of mania in years, pasting newspaper clippings all over her house and searching for connections between them--surely, there are computer programs now that allow people to do this without ruining their wallpaper!--it’s d.j. vu all over again.

The CIA office politics are getting old, but the topical references remain gripping.

Syria and refugees are only the beginning of this season’s potent mix of ripped-from-the-headlines crises.... Carrie is, unsurprisingly, headed back to her old identity as master snoop on the hunt. Between that and the news focus, not to mention the glittering Berlin street scenes, welcome to the new Homeland.

With its masterfully prescient knack for melding international headlines with implausible tales of espionage, Homeland kicks off with parallel plots involving the Islamic State and a computer-hacking incident.... Carrie’s boss is demanding a high-security humanitarian visit to an ISIS trouble spot, and a viewer realizes that this updated Homeland runs the same as it always has.

Homeland works at a slower pace and the premiere mostly lets Carrie keep up the illusion that she'll be able to live a carefree life with strudel and a smile.... It's that third episode, in which Carrie realizes that past misdeeds are coming home to roost, that the shape of the season really takes effective form.

Some things do [change]. Homeland deepens its story for its fifth season, and this journey might be Carrie’s most treacherous.

Viewers will have to decide how much good faith the show earned with its redemptive fourth season as its fifth one crawls in the direction of a plot. If this is the season in which Homeland aims to resolve its own contradictions and to deliver to its tortured characters some measure of understanding or peace, it would benefit, as my colleague Willa Paskin has noted, from a little bit more crazy.

Those three central performances [Carrie (Claire Danes), Saul (Mandy Patinkin), and Quinn (Rupert Friend)], along with that of F. Murray Abraham as the C.I.A. sensei Dar Adal, still carry the show, though it’s starting to feel as if we’ve seen everything Ms. Danes has to offer as Carrie.