Homeland - Recap: Babies R' U.S.

Credit: Showtime

So Carrie (Claire Danes) is pregnant, presumably by Brody, although she did sleep with that one bang-buddy a few episodes back. I'd like to think this plot is going somewhere substantial, but I'm not entirely sure why this decision was made in the writers' room in the first place. Carrie Mathison is one of TV's most complex, fascinating characters. She doesn't need to be pregnant to be interesting, yet here she is with a toilet full of flushed meds and a bathroom drawer stuffed with used pregnancy tests confirming she's in the family way. It just feels like a total stunt of a storyline, a desperate, Hail Mary pass to hook viewers on the water cooler intrigue. ("Hey, man. You see Homeland last night? Carrie's pregnant!") Hopefully I'm all wrong and this serves some higher function, but I can't imagine how this storyline doesn't distract from any number of infinitely more interesting plots. Take, for example, the primary CIA plot with Saul (Mandy Patinkin).

Credit: Showtime

"Still Positive" basically follows the worst day in Saul Berenson's life. It starts with Mira confessing to Saul that she has, in fact, been sleeping with that Alain guy from last week, and has been since meeting him in Mumbai during her and Saul's separation. She then adds that she's happier when Alain is around, and Patinkin does a tremendous job in conveying just how hard Saul is trying to keep his anger, depression, and weariness under control, approaching life with a thick veneer of detachment. But even his work life is making it hard for him to escape his own mounting frustrations. Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) meets with Senator Lockhart (Tracy Betts) on Saul's behalf, and Adal conceals from Saul the very negative nature of the meeting, in which Lockhart rails against the lousy job the agency has been doing. Adal's reasons for being secretive were likely self-serving, but being spared a blow-by-blow account of Lockhart's yammering is pretty much the only break Saul gets, as the plot against Javadi (Shaun Toub) goes haywire in a hurry. Carrie essentially improvises and talks Javadi into letting her go under the pretense of recovering the files that reveal how the CIA ascertained the location of the six targets Quinn (Rupert Friend) assassinated in the premiere. Javadi was then scheduled to meet Carrie at a cafe in the city, at which point he would be taken in to meet with Saul, because apparently the CIA works on the honor system now. Of course, meeting at a cafe wasn't Saul's idea, as the plan was for Carrie to bring Javadi in directly, yet she wasn't able to swing it once Javadi explained that his men would immediately know something was wrong if he just left immediately with her. And so the meeting is arranged, and to what should have been the surprise of no one, Javadi doesn't show. However, in what should have been a surprise to everybody, Javadi's arrival at his planned destination leads to the most brutal bloodbath in Homeland history.

Saul and his team are tracking Javadi's movements, and quickly ascertain that he's going to visit his daughter-in-law, presumably to see his grandson. Saul, with great urgency, tells Carrie and Quinn they have to get a move on and stop Javadi from entering the house. But as hard as Quinn pedals to the metal, they're too late. Not only does Javadi kill his daughter-in-law, he murders the woman she was living with...his ex-wife, who was supposed to be in witness protection in California. The fact of these deaths doesn't shock anywhere near as much as the brutality behind them, as Javadi nonchalantly puts a bullet in his daughter-in-law's head, and then mutilates his ex-wife with a broken bottle to the neck. It's a level of gore that hasn't been seen on Homeland, and it's all the more disturbing because these acts are committed within a few feet of the two-year-old grandson's play area. Carrie and Quinn arrive and arrest Javadi, but Saul orders them to get the hell out of the house as fast as they can and simply allow the CIA clean-up crew to take care of the unfathomable mess -- that includes leaving the baby behind. Carrie is understandably conflicted, given her present condition, and she comforts the wailing child. It's an understated moment for Claire Danes, who conveys Carrie's inner turmoil over her pregnancy through her interactions with the child, comforting the little boy as if in attempt to comfort herself.

Credit: Showtime

So Saul's crummy day climaxes with the loss of two innocent lives, and the discovery of the gruesome crime scene by local police, who make it to the house before the CIA clean-up crew can get there. It's an embodiment of the institutional failure to which Lockhart is referring, and it plays out as an indictment of Saul's traditional approach to espionage, which has failed before -- most famously in a situation over thirty years earlier in which Javadi betrayed him by murdering four Iranian hostages Saul had been tasked with protecting. Saul got his revenge on Javadi several months after the incident by helping Javadi's wife and child escape to America, but the retribution cannot be completed until Saul forces his former acquaintance to answer for his crimes. And so Javadi is brought in for questioning, still drenched in the blood of his victims, and given the way Saul's day has been going up to this point, it should be no surprise that he's in no mood to put up with Javadi's boastfulness. Javadi says one wise word too many and gets decked by Saul, who towers over him like a god, a full-bearded figure of judgment looming above those who think they know better. It's the culmination of Saul's emotional journey in "Still Positive," and Patinkin is outstanding, emphasizing that he's every bit as valuable a component to the ensemble as Damian Lewis, the other man with whom he's frequently split "male lead" duties. With Brody gone, Saul now bears the weight of balancing out the very large shadow Carrie casts on every corner of the story, and Patinkin tackles the material head-on and makes the case that he's actually a more valuable asset than Lewis.

Credit: Showtime

As for what's least compelling about the episode, it's still hard to really care all that much about Dana (Morgan Saylor) and Jessica (Morena Baccarin) when set against the larger, more ambitious backdrop of a CIA investigation. Here, Dana reveals she wants to legally change her surname to "Lazaro," Jessica's maiden name. And so they go to the courthouse and fill out the paperwork, only to have an uncomfortable moment with the clerk, who offers to pray for them in what he feels must be a time of insurmountable hardship. Of course, the man doesn't recognize that he's contributing to that hardship by viewing Dana not as an individual, but simply as "Brody's daughter". Realizing that a name change won't allow her to escape her old life, she decides to move in with a friend named Angela, springing it on Jessica at the very last minute. Jessica refuses to let her go until Dana explains that she needs a fresh start, that the life she's lived in the Brody household is one to which she can never return. Simply trying to live that life again nearly killed her, and so she tells Jessica she's leaving...and Jessica lets her go, because she'd rather have Dana living with a friend than slashing her wrists in the bathtub again. It's poignant, but not entirely affecting, since Dana's storyline never really feels of a piece with the rest of any given episode. But Morena Baccarin and Morgan Saylor are tremendous performers, taking their material and imbuing it with more substance than was likely on the page.

"Still Positive" isn't necessarily a bad episode, but it doesn't leave me with a wealth of confidence going forward. I'm struggling to think of scenarios that would justify the writers' decision to make Carrie pregnant, and the continued presence of the Brody family is enervating in many ways. But the CIA side of things is just so compelling that it nearly makes up for all the episode's other faults. If the show continues to deliver on the Javadi front, this could be a season that surpasses last year's similarly uneven effort.