Homeland - Recap: The End of the Line

Credit: Kent Smith/Showtime

So Brody is back, and we spend the first half of the episode exclusively with him in Caracas, Venezuela, where he's recovering from having been shot by a mugger. He's been taken in by a militant named El Nino, who knows Carrie Mathison -- in addition to knowing Brody's identity, and the $10 million price tag on his head. It's never really made clear why he's helping keep Brody alive, other than that they both know Carrie Mathison. However, the trade-off of keeping him alive is that El Nino won't let Brody leave the compound in which he's imprisoned: the titular Tower of David, an unfinished slum filled with all manner of hopeless individuals, including a doctor who may/may not be a pedophile. The only real ally Brody has in this place is Esme (Martina Garcia), a beautiful young woman whom we learn is El Nino’s daughter. The friendship between the two is the best aspect of the episode, as her inherent desire to help Brody runs up against her fear of her father. Brody has seen firsthand what El Nino is capable of, having tracked down the mugger and tossed him off the top of the tower to ensure his silence. The message? Brody isn't going anywhere, and no one can be allowed to know where he is. “This is it for you," El Nino tells him with a sneer. "The end of the line.”

Credit: Kent Smith/Showtime

As Brody's situation grows more desperate, he decides to take matters into his own hands. He enlists Esme's aid to sneak him away to a mosque. In a heartbreaking little moment in an episode full of them, Esme pleads with Brody to take him with her. Realizing that she's misinterpreted his fatherly affection for something more, he explains to her, as simply as he can, that he can't take her with him. However, the plot doesn't linger on the moment, as Brody keeps moving forward: he is welcomed to the mosque by the Imam and his wife, and it seems as if Brody's prospects are finally turning around. Unfortunately, because this is Nicholas Brody, things go disastrously as the Imam turns Brody in to the authorities, scolding him for being a "terrorist." But he has a brief spurt of luck, as El Nino's men burst in and gun down the police, taking Brody back into their custody...but not without also killing the Imam and his wife. It's a gruesome scene that illustrates the destructive influence Brody has in the lives of those he encounters.

Credit: Kent Smith/Showtime

No longer trusted not to attempt escape, El Nino puts Brody in a dark, solitary cell and tells him, flatly, “Carrie won’t save you. No one will.” Left with no hope, and faced with reliving his experience in the dank hole in the Middle East, Brody succumbs to the crooked doctor's offer of heroin to dull his pain. “Everywhere you go, people die. But you always manage to survive, like a cockroach after nuclear bombs go off," the doctor tells him, leaving behind the syringe for Brody's use. As the doctor disappears with his boy to do Lord knows what, Brody is engulfed in darkness, with only a shaft of light to illuminate him in his time of despair. It's a harrowing storyline that's exhausting in its relentlessness, but it's genuinely compelling all the way through.

Credit: Kent Smith/Showtime

The same can't really be said for Carrie's storyline, as she continues to recover in the psych ward, readjusting to taking lithium again. The narrative goes a long way to establish the mundane nature of Carrie's daily activities in the hospital, particularly as contrasted to her more exciting work in the CIA. Fed up with building popsicle houses, Carrie continually asks her nurses to allow her to have visitors, especially when she learns that a mysterious man has been asking for her. Assuming that this mystery man is Saul (Mandy Patinkin), Carrie goes out of her way to get visitation rights in order to see him, and ends up making a real spectacle of herself in the process by lashing out at a nurse who refuses to allow her to leave the hospital grounds. Luckily, a compassionate nurse named Abby allows Carrie to meet with her visitor -- except it's not Saul. It's a lawyer named Paul Franklin, and we quickly explains to Carrie that the man he works for has an opportunity for Carrie. Paul is smooth, in his own way, but his language betrays his true motives, as Carrie quickly sees he's trying to manipulate her into being an asset for whoever he's working for, whether it's the Syrians, the Iranians, or whomever. Carrie may be a lot of things, but she's not a traitor, and tells Paul as much. She declares she'd rather die in the psych ward than betray her country. Yet it's becoming apparent that this very well could be her fate, dying alone in a psych ward with no visitors but people with designs on using her. As the episode comes to a close, Carrie is in her room, alone in a corner, bathed in a shaft of light similar to what illuminated Brody. The parallel is clear. These are two prisoners, arguably of their own making.

"The Tower of David" is a solid episode that draws significant parallels between Carrie and Brody, but without bringing them together. This is still a show that is setting the table for its overarching third season plot, even three episodes in. Homeland seems to be gradually getting the hang of where it's going this year, and maybe in retrospect, it will have made sense why the series needed to take such a careful, deliberate route in getting there.

Thanks for reading my recap and review of Homeland - Season 3 Episode 3, "The Tower of David"!