Nicholas Brody, the POW turned agent of terror turned pawn of the CIA, is long gone from the cast of Homeland. But the character who was played by Damian Lewis continues to be felt in the ether of the Showtime series, including in last night's episode, "The Man in the Basement," where a very subtle nod to him was seemingly planted.
Before you read any further, please note that the following post contains very mild spoilers for this season of Homeland as well as major spoilers regarding the character of Brody.
Homeland's Nicholas Brody
Even though Brody died all the way back in Season 3 of Homeland, his memory has continued to haunt Claire Danes' Carrie Mathison. He almost literally haunted her in an episode of the fourth season, where Lewis made a surprise return as a hallucinated version of her lost lover, who also was the father of Carrie's child, Frannie. In Season 5 his picture was spotted briefly during a flashback sequence, another MIA soldier at the time who Carrie had not yet met. And now, even though we're only two episodes into Season 6, it seems another callback to Brody has been inserted by the Homeland producers.
When Carrie is visiting a sleeping Frannie in her room, in the background we can see a shining, yellow star sitting on her dresser. It's just an ornamental fixture, a night light, that you might find in any child's room, but it could also be perceived as referring to a very specific story point regarding Brody's life -- and death.
Carrie, Frannie and the star
Again, this is very subtle. But back in the great Season 3 Homeland finale, "The Star," Carrie says her last goodbye to Brody when he's killed in a public hanging in Iran. Despite his troubled, checkered past, he redeemed himself in his final days in the service of the CIA, and he paid the ultimate price while doing so. The episode then cuts to four months later, where Carrie is trying to get Brody the recognition at CIA headquarters that she thinks he deserves -- a star on the agency's Memorial Wall. (Yes, this is the same wall that our new president was standing in front of this past weekend during his visit to Langley.) The agency director declines to grant Brody the honor, but in one of the most emotional moments of the series' entire run, Carrie draws her own rough star on the wall anyway.
"The Star" is also the episode where Brody learns that Carrie is pregnant with his child, and after his death Carrie would struggle with the very notion of motherhood, at first leaving the baby for her sister to raise before finally embracing Frannie as her own. So now that Carrie has settled into a relatively normal domestic situation with little Frannie, doesn't it make sense that she would want some part of Brody to remain in Frannie's life, even if at the moment it's simply the symbolic shining light of his star -- the star that Carrie alone fought for Frannie's father to get? At first glance one might think that the little red-headed Frannie is all that Carrie has left of Brody now, but in fact both Frannie and Carrie have the memory of what Brody did and how in the end, despite all his hardships, he tried to do the right thing.
Brody's star on the CIA Memorial Wall
That star in Frannie's room is a tribute to the father she never knew, and one day maybe Carrie will share with Frannie what it really means.
Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura.
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