Carrie and the team return for a new season, even if one character should never have come back.
Full spoilers follow for the Season 6 premiere of Homeland.
“Fair Game” is an apt title for Homeland’s return in its sixth season considering that it feels like it’s not necessarily playing straight with its audience after the events of last year’s finale. Are we the fair game that the creators are targeting?
I’ll cut right to it and say that I’m talking about Peter Quinn’s return to the land of the living. When we last saw the character played by Rupert Friend in Season 5, he was seemingly on his death bed, having been poisoned by sarin gas and subsequently suffering a cerebral hemorrhage (because Claire Danes’ Carrie and Mandy Patinkin’s Saul insisted he be prematurely awoken from his induced coma). Carrie sat by Quinn’s bedside, perhaps considering euthanizing her friend, but either way he seemed to be doomed. As F. Murray Abraham’s Dar Adal told her, a vegetative state was Quinn’s worst nightmare.
Dar and Saul, together again
But not even Quinn could foresee the real nightmare, which was Homeland staging the most unlikely of resurrections for him. Yep, he’s alive if not well in the new season, disabled and angry after the experience of last year, and thereby ripping the already tenuous membrane of TV reality that Homeland too often struggles with.
So I enter this season already annoyed by Homeland, and I’ve generally been much more patient with the sometimes uneven Showtime thriller/drama than most critics. I do like the new setting of New York, and there are certainly some intriguing Homeland-y plot elements lining up in this first episode, though “Fair Game” is a pretty slow burn, not necessarily establishing enough excitement or intrigue for a show launching its sixth year to compel audiences to come back again next week. Much of that burden falls to the Quinn/Carrie plot, and if you don’t buy into that whole shebang then you’re in a bit of trouble so far.
Elsewhere, we see Saul and Dar together again and meeting with the president-elect. Showrunner Alex Gansa has cannily set this season between the U.S. election and inauguration day, bringing in actress Elizabeth Marvel to play the soon-to-be President Elizabeth Keane. Was the Homeland team expecting a Hillary Clinton win when they went with a woman prez? Who can say, and it’s sort of beside the point anyway as the first couple of episodes of the season will air directly before and after our real-life 2017 inauguration.
J. Mallory McCree as Sekou Bah
President-Elect Keane is ready to shake things up in her own way, it seems, and that makes some folks nervous… especially Dar, who’s always lived somewhere between Langley and the dark byways of his black ops past. By episode’s end, we see that a variety of senior military and political types are secretly meeting, presumably about countering Keane’s blossoming opposition to the military-industrial complex. And Saul is not invited. Is it going to fall to Saul to uphold Keane’s virtual dismantling of the very institution he has devoted his entire life to? Even if it means facing off against his old friend Dar? Probably.
Carrie, meanwhile, is still working to atone for her past sins, heading up a Brooklyn foundation which helps Muslims who find themselves on the wrong side of the law in the U.S. That comes to include J. Mallory McCree as Sekou Bah, a Muslim teen who makes videos about past terrorist incidents that he posts on the web. He claims that he does not promote terrorism and is simply exercising his right to protected speech; the FBI sees it differently. And Carrie has now found herself on the opposite end of the kind of fight she used to wage.
She’s more concerned with Quinn, though, who Carrie keeps coming back to throughout the episode. He’s a drug addict now, a sad sack to be sure, and by the end of “Fair Game” he’s living in Carrie’s garden apartment for some reason… even though he seems to kind of hate her now. “I'm not getting any better,” he told her earlier. “Let me go.” I feel bad for Quinn, I do. And Friend’s performance is spot-on of course, hovering somewhere between tragic, angry and pitiable, but the problem is I don’t trust Homeland anymore. Maybe it’s getting to be time for me to let Homeland go.
Carrie's gonna Carrie.
Some notes:
- I can’t tell if the return of Sebastian Koch as Otto Düring, Carrie’s boss, is just to awkwardly tie up the loose end of his weird proposal from last season or if he’s going to be a major player this year.
- Quinn's hazy POV shots are interesting. Is this how he sees the world now due to his injuries, the drugs, or both?
- Frannie’s back!
- Ed Snowden's a hero… in some circles. And Homeland maintains its close ties to the real world with this namedrop.
- Quinn, you really do need to take a shower.
The Verdict
Homeland’s Season 6 premiere doesn’t offer many sparks, but those with a vested interest in Quinn’s return are in luck. The rest of us will have to bide our time to see how the other plot developments play out, with the president-elect’s march to the inauguration being of particular interest considering the tense state of real-world politics these days.
“Fair Game” is available to stream now and will debut on Showtime on Sunday, January 15, at 9pm ET.
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