In 'Homeland,' It's the Men Who Suffer for No Reason

The opening credits of Homeland are usually a spectral pastiche of footage from real-life terror attacks—clips of the characters brooding mightily as jazz horns trill in some grayed-out distance, with audio of crackerjack CIA analyst Carrie Mathison doggedly insisting that "I can't, I won't" miss signs of the next 9/11. This season's credits, however, come across as some otherworldly love story. It ends with an image of Carrie embracing Peter Quinn, the mercenary who nearly died from sarin gas poisoning at the end of last season. "You saved me," Quinn says, with a breathless incredulity. It almost seems like an episode of Outlander, a tale of two equals fighting to protect each other against dire odds and vicious enemies.

Yet the way Carrie saved Quinn—using a grainy snuff video to determine where an ISIS cell has held him captive—was more about demonstrating Carrie's diamond-bright brilliance than it was about truly deepening the relationship between Carrie and Quinn. In this way, Homeland offers a fascinating inversion on the "Women in Refrigerators" trope, in which female characters are sexually assaulted, tortured, and murdered just to spur the menfolk to vengeance or greatness (whichever comes first).

On Homeland, male characters like Quinn, Nicholas Brody (his precursor in Carrie's affections), and Saul Berenson (Carrie's mentor at the CIA) often function as narrative whipping boys, whose suffering galvanizes Carrie into actions that establish her bullish, ruthless dedication to cause and country. We see this when she pulls Quinn out of a medically induced coma so that he'll tell her where ISIS will attack next; or in her reckless, desperate side—like almost anything involving Brody (but most notably, driving him over the Canadian border when he's framed for a terrorist attack, and serving as his handler when he's sent on a doomed mission to assassinate the head of the Iranian National Guard).

Quinn's plight this season—his deterioration from a Jason Bourne–level badass to a physically shattered shell of a man—could follow a seasoned killer confronting his mortal frailty. However, the show contextualizes his agony through its impact on Carrie. Though the question of whether Quinn even survived his gassing haunted fans in the months between seasons, the premiere focuses on Carrie's overbearing attempts to care for him—from cheerily badgering him to go to physical therapy, to chasing him to a crack den, to finally letting him live in her house. We get a few interludes of Quinn on his own buying drugs or trying to get a gun, but his story only gains traction as part of Carrie's season six redemption tour—which also includes working at a non-profit that helps Muslim Americans who've been unfairly targeted by law enforcement and advising the new president-elect against using drones.

The neurotic intensity of Carrie's attachment to Quinn, which is more about what he represents to her as opposed to who he truly is, also characterizes her relationship with Brody. Every aspect of Brody's torment—from his love of a murdered child to his Stockholm Sympatico with his captor—is another strand on Carrie's color-coded cork board, a way for the show to prove that she is far smarter than the other agents who simply want to embrace (and exploit) Brody as a war hero come home. Though he was ostensibly billed as a co-lead in the earlier seasons, Brody existed purely in tandem to Carrie, as her object of obsession. Indeed, the showrunners openly admit that they killed him off because they wanted to "see what happens to Carrie as a mother and as an intelligence officer."

Brody's death turns Carrie into an arctic company woman who can order a drone strike against a wedding party or seduce a young man into giving up intel on his uncle, a suspected terrorist. Saul Berenson's kidnapping by that terrorist will put the heat back in Carrie's blood. Though Saul is the one battered, bound, and humiliated in hostage videos, his predicament is filtered through the ethical choice it presents Carrie: Let him kill himself in captivity, or deny him the dignity of a quick death and, instead, risk a rescue mission.

On the surface, pushing men into the icebox seems feminist—a welcome reversal that finally privileges a woman's story. But turnabout isn't necessarily fair play. After all, Carrie and Brody's amor fati is often portrayed as part-and-parcel of the bipolar disorder that also endows Carrie with her genius—a very hollow, even dangerous, interpretation of mental illness. Unfortunately, the show has a propensity for treating subject matter that demands deftness and nuance with a hammer-headed simplicity—like its stereotyped depiction of Muslims as the architects of all this suffering. Homeland may reclaim a fundamentally misogynist trend, but the show's failures at intersectionality mean that it can never be authentically feminist. Not in the way that shows like The Leftovers, Outlander, Mad Men, or even Game of Thrones (when it's not torturing Sansa Stark, that is)—which give the suffering and triumph of all its characters equal weight—do.

The gender swap, in and of itself, isn't enough to redeem the fact that putting certain characters' pain solely in service to other characters' development can be poor storytelling. The show's fixation with the Carrie side of the Carrie-Brody dynamic didn't allow it to engage with some powerful questions—like what it means for a torture survivor to experience loving touch, or whether, brainwashed or not, Brody might've been right to hate the government that sent him to war. Quinn's current situation gives the show a chance to talk about what nations owe the people who will do the dirtiest, cruelest work "for the greater good," and about the repercussions of surviving—and doling out—so much violence. When Quinn finally talks to Carrie about the day she saved him, he asks her, "Why?" A man whose life's work was bringing death confronting his worth in the world; it's a genuinely dark moment—but as soon as the camera glides to Carrie's crumpling cry-face, her outpouring of guilt and grief, that moment is gone. And with it, Homeland's chance to be just a little more interesting.

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