Homeland Recap: Carrie Mathison Could Totally Kick Mathias Cormann’s Butt

This article deals with specific plot points from last night’s episode of Homeland. Spoilers ahead.

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The look in Carrie’s eyes said it all: before she decided to seduce a CIA asset, she glanced at herself in the mirror and got on with her job. It was a fitting move by Homeland; in a world where we wouldn’t blink if a male spy seduced a target, why not have Carrie do the same?

When mouthbreathing MPs like Mathias Cormann make dumb sexist references like “girlie man”, or Family Feud offers up knuckle-dragging “Name a woman’s job” fuckbaggery, it makes you appreciate Carrie Mathison just a little bit more. TV’s most belligerently unapologetic fuck-you CIA arsekicker is many things, but at a disadvantage for being female is not one of them.

The fourth season of Homeland has been a titular slow burn, but Carrie has been great. As the CIA’s new Pakistan bureau chief, she’s been kicking arse and taking names, doing everything short of shirt-fronting her boozy, bitter and insubordinate second-in-command John Redmond while becoming besties with Martha Boyd, the whip-smart American ambassador and piecing together the trail of the killers of her predecessor.

Carrie’s (presumably unmedicated) bipolar tendencies have shifted firmly in the direction of ‘laser focus’ rather than self-destructive (for now), and it’s a smart move by Homeland. It means the action of ‘Iron in the Fire’ has Carrie at its centre, the way it should be, and it gives the show room to breathe. She’s on the streets of Islamabad, chasing up leads, slipping tails and generally being kickarse.

We’re maybe — finally — seeing the fleshing out of her character, and the pervading feeling is that we’re looking at the toll Carrie’s job is taking on her humanity (this is, after all, the woman who revelled in being called the Drone Queen by her co-workers).

That’s what the biggest moment of this episode, the uncomfortable, super awkward bed-making seduction of Aayan, the Pakistani youth, played up to (poor kid; expelled from medical school, a virgin, and I’m not sure if this is how he imagined his first time). The key to Carrie’s character was in her pragmatism in seducing Aayan; she decided what needed to be done, and did it. No matter that it was kinda creepy.

Because, as the episode slowly revealed and after some great Max and Fara stake-out scenes, in true Homeland fashion Aayan’s terrorist uncle Haissam Haqqani is still alive and not actually blown up. Also muddying the waters is the involvement of the Pakistani intelligence agency.

This is the kind of intrigue that Homeland thrives on; shading in the grey areas where pragmatism and morality collide in a spectacularly tense supernova of cut-and-thrust espionage.

When you think about it, this episode should’ve been called ‘Stalking Horse’, a much more descriptive and fitting idea for the machinations of Carrie Mathison. Because that’s what Carrie has proven most adept at; using anything and everything to get her way, regardless of the affect ‘her way’ has on her stalking horse (as Carrie explains in the episode, a ‘stalking horse’ is a prop used to hide from view while hunting a target).

And that’s great; we marvel at the way how someone like Walter White or Tony Soprano manipulates people, and that’s just what Carrie is doing with Quinn, Fara, Max, Saul (who’s providing an exquisite bearded diversion in the background while antagonising Pakistani intelligence), and, of course, Aayan. They’re are all just pieces for Carrie to move into place in order to take full advantage of them.

Even the moral questions they bring up for her are now increasingly irrelevant; having twisted Quinn’s arm to join her in Islamabad, Carrie continually scoffs at Quinn battling his guilty conscience and arguing about morals (his point about not wanting to “live in a bunker and kill people by remote control” being a particular highlight), but she still makes sure to use his considerable black-ops skills to sneak into (bad guy) Farhad Ghazi’s house.

As such, Quinn and Aayan are being set up as signposts marking just how much of herself and her sense of humanity Carrie is willing to sacrifice in the search for her version of the greater good (no mention of the Brody baby this episode). You just know that Quinn will find out about Carrie sleeping with Aayan — even if they steered the Quinn/Carrie relationship away from the romantic rocks — and surprise himself by becoming insanely jealous, leading to some sort of epic, kid-killing unravelling. As for ‘poor’ Aayan, the stalking horse, it could be that he’s being used by Carrie after he tried so hard to stay out of the spotlight and is just delivering medicine for sick kids … but it’s not out of the realm of plausibility that he’s more than he seems.

We still don’t yet know what big terrorist plot lurks in the background, and that means this season is off to a good start. There’s intrigue aplenty, the streets of Islamabad are a great setting, and the addition of the ambassador’s husband, Professor Dennis Boyd (Mad Men’s Mark Moses, aka Duck Phillips), who’s being blackmailed by the mysterious Tasneem Qureshi (Is she a terrorist? ISI? Who cares! She’s amazing!), is another compelling wrinkle.

Either way, it’s masterful work from Claire Danes who, given half a chance, is helping shape a potentially great female character. If only Mathias ‘Girly’ Cormann had half as much chutzpah as Carrie Mathison.

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Homeland airs on Monday nights at 9.30pm, fast-tracked to Channel TEN.

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Jaymz Clements is a New York-based writer, super-yacht enthusiast, hi-tech jewel thief and Bengal tiger trainer. He tweets @jaymzclements.