(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Homeland (Season 5)
Series creators: Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon, director: Lesli Linka Glatter and others, photo: David Klein
The American television series Homeland is in its fifth season, and has gradually moved well away from its original premise – without compromising quality. This time it also has even more big-day political news than in the previous seasons.
Remake. Homeland is a "remake" of the two season-long Israeli television series Homecoming (Hatufim), about two soldiers returning to Israel 17 years after being captured in Lebanon. IN Homelands In the first season, which came in 2011, US soldier Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) is found to have been "missing in action" in Iraq in 2003. Eventually back in his homeland, he is welcomed like a war hero, and reunites with his wife and children – without everything necessarily being as he left them. However, the big, exciting question is whether Brody is still a loyal servant of his fatherland.
Not least is this questioned by the main character of the series, the bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), who suspects that Brody has been converted by Al Qaeda. In her attempt to discover if he is making concrete terrorist plans, she eventually begins a relationship with the now Muslim soldier – in a line of action that worked far better in practice than it appears on paper. At least in two turns.
Bipolar. In the third season of the series, this premise began to run idle, and the series creators therefore made it wise to print Brody before the fourth season. Here the series was back in shape, now with a stronger focus on the relationship between Carrie Mathison and her overall father figure Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), who lay there more as a backdrop in the previous seasons. Moreover, it became increasingly prominent "no bullshit»Effective CIA agent Peter Quinn.
Homeland came at a time when there had already been inflation in female television characters with a mental diagnosis, in the wake of Millenniumseries Lisbeth Salander. But where Stieg Larsson's character has trouble relating emotionally to his surroundings, Carrie Mathison has to take lithium to keep her excessively rich emotional life in check – and consequently she is not perceived as a copy of Salander. Furthermore, Carrie's diagnosis has moved from being her great lack of character to almost becoming a secret weapon: If she is willing to take the unpleasant consequences of cutting the medication, she can see connections more clearly.
Hacker Attacks. Fifth season of Homeland takes place mainly in Berlin – a city that since the days of the Cold War has been a favorite scene for spy thrillers, in fiction as in reality. Two years have passed since last season, and Carrie has left the United States and the CIA in favor of a German boyfriend and a job in a private security company. But such film and comic book characters tend to be overtaken by their old lives, and Carrie Mathison is no exception. After the first five episodes of the season (on which this text is based), she is admittedly not back in the CIA – on the contrary, it has seemed as if forces within the organization have wanted her for days. But not surprisingly, she has once again come to the forefront of events involving Berenson, Quinn and several old acquaintances.
The launching event for the season is a hacker attack, in which a number of CIA documents describing extensive illegal cooperation between US and German authorities go astray. For Carrie, however, the new and presumably safer life will definitely end after a visit to a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon. Here she manages to save her boss from what they first think is an assassination attempt on him – but which she will soon learn was aimed at herself.
Political relevance. Based on US operations in Iraq Homeland from the beginning based on real conflicts, without being afraid to name either existing people or countries. This is in contrast to the related suspense series 24, which suffered from a striking lack of specific nationalities for its foreign "bad guys". Homelandthe creators' desire for political relevance then also led them to contact the Norwegian filmmaker Tonje Hessen Schei to see her at this time not fully completed documentary Drone, as research for last season.
In the new season passes Homelands screenwriters themselves in drawing on current political issues and ditto international conflicts. Mention has already been made of the influx of refugees from Syria, and the series also describes the CIA's attempts to bring about a coup against President Assad. Refugee-
the camp visited is in turn controlled by Hezbollah – at hand, of course. Among the more official authorities in the camp, Norwegian Tobias Santelmann also appears as a UN officer – albeit in a smaller role than other domestic actors have had in Game of Thrones og Vikings.) Furthermore, the action line with information that goes astray has obvious parallels to the Snowden case, which is mentioned in the series, but here reference is also made to both Chelsea Manning and Charlie Hebdo – in addition to the fact that the "hacker plot" eventually draws alternates on Anonymous-like activism.
Passing by movies. With this, the series shows a daily topicality that is rarely seen in feature films. Film production suffers in such a way that it usually takes a long time from idea via project development, filming and post-production to premiere-ready film. One might not think that it takes less time to realize an entire season of a TV series, but a lot of time is undoubtedly saved by the fact that production decisions for subsequent seasons are often made at an early stage, with large parts of the cast and production apparatus already in place.
In any case, it is difficult not to be impressed by the series' ability to address its contemporaries with a certain precision.
But even if Homeland so decidedly a political thriller with a high degree of topicality, the creators of the series are more concerned with creating suspense than conveying clear political messages. The series has one foot in the classic spy thriller and another in the political paranoia thriller, with well-known motives as agents who have to operate on their own, and uncertainty related to the actors' agendas and loyalty. During the first five episodes of the new season, the turning points have come close, and some of them have moved dangerously close to the limit of what we swallow of plot surprises (here I am referring not least to those concerning the characters' personal intrigue). This is nothing new in this series, but once again it seems as if it escapes with a certain credibility – well on its way because Homeland in general is so well researched and just rooted in real conflicts and conceivable scenarios.
Criticism. The series has not escaped criticism for its description of Muslims and people from the Middle East and other countries in Asia, and it is difficult to argue that Homelands basic premise was based and in part shrugged off the fear of Islamist terror. And although it is not as extreme as the previously mentioned 24, one can object that Homeland At times, torture is described as an undesirable but effective tool for obtaining necessary information when it is at its worst – contrary to actual reports in the field. But such torture scenes have not been particularly prominent so far in the new season, and in general it may seem that the creators of the series have gradually wanted to include more non-American characters with greater complexity. And in any case, it's hard not to be impressed by the series' ability to address its contemporaries with a certain precision.
Homeland is probably still not the place to go for the most in-depth and nuanced political analysis. But in its fifth season, the series constantly offers very well-constructed suspense, which is no less trembling by the series creators' courage and willingness to anchor it in a concrete reality.
Homeland season 5 is currently broadcast on TV2 Sumo and TV2 Zebra.
Huser is a regular film critic in Ny Tid.
alekshuser@ gmail.com.
