<i>Homeland</i>'s Crisis of Conscience
In Sunday night’s episode of Homeland, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) confronted a young American Muslim, Sekou (J. Mallory McCree), about a video he’d put online, violating the terms of the agreement she’d used to get him out of jail. Sekou had been set up by an FBI informant who encouraged his increasingly radical behavior, and Carrie was helping him, she explained, because “this whole country went stupid crazy after 9/11 and nobody knows that better than I do.”
In its past five seasons, has positioned Carrie against myriad. But in season six, for the first time, the Showtime series seems to be explicitly setting up the U.S. intelligence community itself as the bad guy, with the former CIA operative now a crusader for justice. It’s a marked shift in direction for a show built on dramatic terrorist plots against the U.S., and it perhaps reveals some of ’s fatigue in trying to keep up with whiplash-inducing current events. While season five—which portrayed a shocking terrorist attack on a major European city and Russian agents working within the CIA—was almost uncomfortably prescient, season six appears to be undergoing something of a crisis of conscience.
