Homeland, Showtime's excellent new show about the possibility of an American POW(s) turned to terrorism that just ran its absolutely bananas season finale this past weekend, is brought to you, me and everyone else by the creators of 24, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, and seems (to me at least) to be a full throated mea culpa for the world view presented in their previous terrorism related television show. Don't get me wrong, this is not an attack on 24. I watched regularly and thought it was a delightful piece of escapism... it just presented a very binary and dark world. There was Jack Bauer and CTU on one side and then there were terrorists on the other. Something really bad would be happening in the next 24 hours if Jack Bauer did not stop it. Being under this single day time crunch, Jack might have to toss some civil liberties aside, maybe torture someone, and just get the job done. This has unfortunately been an inspiration to many Republicans, who think its legitimate to cite a fictional TV character in discussions about proper interrogation techniques.
Everyone on Homeland, however, lives in increasingly complex shades of gray. Is Sgt. Brody a patriotic hero, a terrorist, a family man, suffering from PTSD, all of the above? Is Carrie Mathison good at her job in spite of suffering from bipolar disorder or do the manic episodes drive her to be great? Abu Nazir is a terrorist, but he showed Brody compassion and went into a quiet mourning period when his son died (or did he show Brody compassion just to turn him and go quiet just to plan an immensely complicated terrorist attack taking out most of the national security apparatus using two turned Marines?). David Estes and Vice President Walden have ostensibly devoted their lives to protecting the American people, but ordered a drone strike on a school killing nearly a hundred children, including Abu Nazir's youngest son, and then covered it up in furtherance of their careers. This is without delving too much into the intertwining relationships between Brody/Mathison, Nazir/Brody, Mathison/Estes, Estes/Walden, Walden/Brody and Mathison with her mentor Saul Berenson. Nothing is as it seems and clearly divided into good and bad.
Further, and more importantly in comparison to 24, Carrie's efforts to stop terrorist attacks on the nation do not involve torture at all. There is nary a gun to a prisoners head to be seen. Instead, she uses legal (most of the time) surveillance, legal (skirting the line, but still okay) interrogation, old fashion chasing of leads and hard work to connect the dots of why things have happened and how that indicates what is likely to happen. Even the turning of Brody indicates what type of interrogation is successful. Al Qaeda affiliates beat the hell out of him, but he doesn't turn and doesn't "talk" until he is shown kindness. In its willingness to look at the contradictions in life that make up the shades of gray, the multitude of mixed motivations for why people do what they do and its much more realistic portrayal of how terrorist attacks are investigated (or should be) and stopped, Homeland is like Gordon and Gansa taking a mulligan and promptly thwacking a hole-in-one. I cannot wait to see where this show goes next season and I can only hope that our lawmakers pay as much attention to the actions of Carrie Mathison and Saul Berenson (and learn a lesson from Walden/Estes) as they did from Mr. Jack Bauer.
Plus, I am pretty sure that Clare Danes never attacked a Christmas tree.
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