One Last Time - HL

Homeland episode 3-09 "One Last Time"

Written by Barbara Hall

Directed by Jeremy Reiner

I suppose there are two options after having Saul retrieve Brody (and I'm not sure if Saul knew where he was the entire time, if those are "his" people in Caracas, or if he found out some other way).  Option 1 is gloss over Brody's rehab via time jump in order to get on with the next steps of the story.  Option 2, which they took, is to dedicate an episode to Brody's rehab in the vein of Rocky.  Perhaps it was the execution, but this episode fell the flattest of perhaps the entire series.  It made me a temporary Homeland nihilist, thinking there is no purpose to anything that happens on the show.

For example, the story about Saul's home being bugged is going to be infuriating if that's all there is to it.  The show put an end date to Saul's tenure as acting director.  I understand inserting a ticking clock can be necessary and is often used to create drama.  These are the people who brought you -24- after all, which literally had a ticking clock at every commercial break.  But to seemingly arbitrarily move that deadline makes us question why it was there in the first place?  To create meaningless conflict between Saul and Lockhart?

Saul knows all apparently, and as I mentioned, it's not clear to me how he knew about Brody.  Perhaps Saul is being set up to have an enormous Carrie-CIA bomber level failure at the end of the season?  Will the show be re-booted again for Season Three, and will that re-boot stick?  Or will it be more like the re-boots on Alias where they kept changing the name of the organization but essentially kept all the other parts the same?

Carrie, infuriatingly, is still stuck on Brody and proving Brody's innocence.  I thought the show had moved past the Carrie-Brody dynamic and onto other things like a new villain and the re-building of the CIA, along with Saul becoming a part of This Town,  and Mira and Quinn's respective doubting of their own actions.  And maybe Carrie finally quits yo-yoing between insanity and whatever one level removed from insanity is, becoming competent for a longer stretch of time (like Tommy Gavin or Andy Sipowicz and their alcoholism).

But no, let's get a few more whacks at Seabiscuit's corpse.

Bullet time:

• Max and Virgil's PKE Meter made me chuckle.  But pretty much everything they do makes me chuckle.  And I shouldn't knock it consider an anonymizer turned out to be a real thing
• No coincidence this weak episode featured little of Peter Quinn, MVP
• Whoa, how about Brody ripping the chair apart to stab his arm?  Not the cry for help like Dana, that guy was going for it.
• This show works let a network show a lot of the time.  One is the on-screen credits during the opening minutes.  It always gives something away with guest stars.  When they flash that Chris Chalk (Tom Walker) is returning, it takes away from Brody's hallucinations.  Run them at the end.
• Oh!  Now that I look at his IMDB page, I am realizing that he is both Gary Cooper on Newsroom and played the fugitive Jody Adair for two episodes on the recent season of Justified.  Awesome!
• Justified, Justified, Justified.