Homeland - Recap: The Word Is 'Infamous'

Credit: Showtime

So the episode sees Carrie getting placed on a psychiatric hold by Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) in order to prevent her from going to the papers about Brody being innocent of the Langley bombing. Carrie denies having stopped taking her meds, saying she set up a jogging/meditation routine with her doctor, but Carrie's increasingly manic behavior betrays her. I'd argue this is actually one of her worst manic episodes on record, as she lashes out at everyone, including her sister and father, who confront her at her hearing for not taking her meds. Carrie's paranoia and feelings of betrayal toward her family and the CIA undermine the legitimate grievances she has with Saul, whose paternal feelings toward her are at odds with his job, as Carrie is a very real security risk, between her mental status and her previous relationship with Brody. There's just no real way to ever trust what Carrie is going to do, as she's a person of such changeable nature, far more so than any person in a high level at an intelligence agency should be.

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Yet while Saul's testimony last week served as a catalyst for the relapse, it becomes gradually apparent that Carrie is wracked with guilt over what she perceives to be her failure to prevent the Langley bombing, an incident that necessitated Brody going on the run in the first place. Quinn (Rupert Friend) visits Carrie in the psych ward, and she becomes convinced he was sent by Saul to silence her. For his part, Quinn is still overcoming guilt of his own, having accidentally murdered a child during an assassination mission last week. Here, he tries to relate with Carrie, even going as far as to be the only CIA employee to appear at Carrie's hearing as a character witness. But all this gets him nowhere with Carrie, and her outbursts prompt him to suggest to Saul towards the end of the episode that perhaps they are the ones responsible for driving Carrie back to madness. It's hard to know if it's a nature or nurture situation here, but either way, it's not something Carrie seems willing to address in any meaningful fashion.

Carrie bails on her hearing right as it's about to begin, and is restrained by the staff, calling the entire proceeding a sham. Carrie's downward spiral ultimately culminates in her being strapped to a gurney and injected with her medication, after which Saul, who has come to recognize the error of his ways, apologizes. The moment carries with it a certain emotional punch, particularly when Carrie responds with a muffled, restrained, but nonetheless visceral "F*** you, Saul." The scene is rooted in the central bond between Carrie and Saul (a relationship which, in many ways, rivals that of Carrie and Brody as the anchoring dynamic of the series), and it's the gradual implosion of that bond that provides much of the dramatic heft for the scene, far more so than Carrie's four-letter word. It's a credit to Danes and Patinkin that this last moment feels as impactful as it does, since Carrie is mostly pushed to the margins of the episode as we focus on other matters.

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On the subject of those other matters, we have Dana (Morgan Saylor), who is still being handled with kid gloves by Jessica (Morena Baccarin), who is afraid to let her out of her sight. Jessica continues mothering her despite advice from Chris that she should just leave Dana alone. But following her son's advice ultimately leads to panic, as she discovers that Dana has snuck out of the house to the treatment facility to see her boyfriend, Leo. Searching for small pockets of normalcy in her life, Dana has sex with Leo on the grounds of the facility, and although it's a moment of pure, artless bliss for her, it inevitably comes to an end when they're caught the next morning. The weather here serves as a fitting indicator of Dana's well-being, as the rainy night represents Dana at her lowest point, while the next morning is beatific sunshine, to signify her change in mood. This change is solidified when Dana confronts her mother back at the house, dragging her into the bathroom and forcing her to confront the very real fact that Dana wasn't crying out for help when she slit her wrists. She wanted her life to end, and it was because of her father, who never stopped lying "from the minute he set foot in this house."

But as Dana explains, she's different now. She tells her mother that she wants to live, that she wants to be here now, and that Leo is the reason why (a contrast to her father being the reason she wanted to die -- of course, it doesn't really damage the character that her psychology well-being is so tied to the men in her life, as it's as much a byproduct of her youth as of her circumstances). Jessica breaks down to hear her daughter reaffirm her commitment to life, and while I'm not sure the whole storyline required as much screentime as it got, I found myself strangely compelled by it, largely due to the fact that Morgan Saylor encapsulates teen angst better than any actor on TV in years. Even when her storylines don't click, Saylor always delivers. In addition, Dana's situation resonates with Carrie's, as both women's sense of identity and well-being are rooted in questions of trust, betrayal, and the support of those around them. When Dana goes into the garage at the end of the episode and rummages through boxes of old pictures of her parents before kneeling on Brody's old prayer mat to explore her spirituality, it feels like an organic progression for the character, grounded in her complicated feelings about her father.

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We also get additional progress on the hunt for The Magician, as Saul teams up with the latest CIA recruit, Fara (Nazanin Boniadi), a beautiful young Persian analyst. Though she and Saul initially have trouble getting along (due to Saul's frustrated outburst about Fara's headscarf, in a confoundingly disingenuous scene), their partnership produces real results: Fara is able to identify a series of suspicious bank transactions that could potentially be a smokescreen for the funding of the Langley bombing. The bankers are brought in for questioning, but they keep mum about the nature of the transactions, leaving Quinn to intimidate the men in question (and Peter Quinn is really good at intimidation. You could ask David Estes if he weren't dead). Ultimately, the group discovers a transaction in the tens of millions of dollars to an unknown account, and it's concluded that finding the recipient of the millions will lead the CIA straight to The Magician. It's intriguing stuff, if for no other reason than that it gets us back to the rank-and-file work of intelligence, an element from season one that wasn't nearly as prevalent in season two -- at least not in this procedural form. It's all very compelling stuff, far more so than the creative minds behind the show might even realize.

Credit: Kent Smith/SHOWTIME

"Uh... Oh... Ah..." is an engrossing episode of television, although it's still hard to say how the show will move forward with the fracturing of both of its central pairings, Carrie/Brody and Carrie/Saul. The show is clearly changing, but it's still unclear whether the change will prove to be for the better or for the worse.