Homeland (TV series)



""The nation sees a hero. She sees a threat.""

A Psychological Thriller, loosely based off the Israeli series Hatufim (Literally "Abductees", English title Prisoners of War) sharing an executive producer, produced by Showtime and set during the War on Terror. It premiered in October 2011. Its second season will air in September 2012.

A raid on a terrorist safehouse in the Middle East leads to the rescue of USMC Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damien Lewis), who has been missing in action for eight years. Brody receives a hero's welcome from his wife Jessica (Morena Baccarin), CIA Deputy Director David Estes (David Harewood), the Vice President and the entire country -- but not from Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a former CIA Operations Officer. Based on intelligence from her last (and completely unauthorised) mission, Carrie believes that Brody is a sleeper agent waiting to be activated. With the help of her mentor, CIA Middle East section chief Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), Carrie sets out to prove that Brody, seen by the world as an American hero, is really a traitor.

This series provides examples of the following tropes:

 * Adaptation Distillation: The original series had three kidnapped soldiers: one whose wife was faithful to him, and he has two children he doesn’t know; one whose wife left him for his brother several years after he was kidnapped; and a third one who was returned dead. The American adaptation has just one.
 * Added Alliterative Appeal: During her manic flights, Carrie spouts - quite realistic, with a hint of psychosis - word salad (schizophasia). Like many instances of schizophasia, the words she uses are connected on a semantic level; they have similar meaning. Carrie's ravings have a morphological connection too; she's very fond of alliterations.
 * Armor-Piercing Question and Villainous BSOD: Used in a tense scene between Brody and Dana in "Marine One".
 * Artistic Title: The credits come with some memorable imagery. Although not stated outright, the credits imply an origin story for Carrie Mathison, in terms of her interest in global politics stemming from watching news broadcasts when she was younger.
 * The Atoner: Carrie wants to atone for missing seeing 9/11 coming.
 * Auto Erotica:
 * The Bad Guy Wins:
 * Being Tortured Makes You Evil:.
 * The Big Board: Saul draws the undesirable task of trying to file Carrie's colour coded Room Full of Crazy into some kind of order, and this is the result. There's a more straightforward example in the CIA office.
 * Big Brother Is Watching: Combined with Sinister Surveillance-Carrie does this to the Brody family based on gut instinct and initially without a warrant.
 * Book Ends: A very subtle one in "The Vest". While on a family trip, Dana makes an offhand comment that Brody's scars are starting to fade. At the end of the episode, Carrie, while preparing for Brody's arrival, tries to cover up her scars.
 * Bratty Teenage Daughter: Dana showed signs of this at the beginning of Season 1, but toward the end she became the emotionally closest family member Brody has.
 * California Doubling: Charlotte, North Carolina, doubles as DC and Northern Virginia. That is why so many cars lack front-mounted plates; NC does not require it.
 * Calling the Old Man Out: Dana goes off on her mother because Jessica is hiding the fact that she had been sleeping with her father's best friend while he was MIA.
 * The Cassandra: Nobody wants to believe Mathison that Brody is an Al Qaeda agent..
 * Catapult Nightmare: Brody at the start of Ep.2.
 * The Chessmaster: Nazir.
 * Children Are Innocent: Abu Nazir's son is quite adorable
 * Cold Sniper: Walker.
 * Dark Secret:.
 * Dating Catwoman:
 * Dawson Casting: Morena Baccarin, 31 at the time of filming, has a 16-year-old daughter. She's apparently supposed to be around the same age as Brody, who is played by the 40 year-old Damian Lewis.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Virgil.
 * Deep-Cover Agent: Carrie fears Brody has been allowed to go home to become one.
 * The Determinator: Carrie, bordering on The Unfettered.
 * Enhanced Interrogation Techniques: The CIA uses sleep deprivation (via sporadic bursts of Grindcore and bright lights) to supplement their interrogation
 * Eureka Moment:
 * In the first episode, while Carrie was in a bar and about to go home with a guy, she has one while she watches the musicians.
 * Carrie's final act in the first season is to have one.
 * Face Heel Turn: Carrie is convinced Brody has undergone one.
 * Fake American: Damien Lewis, a Brit, as Sergeant Brody. David Harewood, another Brit, as Estes.
 * Flash Back: Used heavily to explore what happened to Brody during his time in captivity. The prime plot device of "Crossfire," where the motivation behind Abu Nazir's plot is revealed.
 * Flashback Cut: Sometimes. The scene can then be expanded on with the further flashback later in the episode.
 * Flashback Echo: Sometimes to show/contrast with what is happening in Brody's present and the link to his torture.
 * Foreign Remake: Trans Atlantic Equivalent for an Israeli series, Hatufim, about recently released prisoners of Hamas.
 * From a Certain Point of View:
 * Depicted in "Crossfire".
 * Played with in "The Vest".
 * Gray and Grey Morality:
 * This whole show is full of this. On one side is the CIA and the American government, who are repeatedly shown bending and breaking their own rules. This is often shown to put lives at risk. On the other side is a war hero who suffered years of torture by Al Qaeda,.
 * Hannibal Has a Point:
 * He Knows Too Much: Walker kills a hunter who witnesses his target practice in the woods.
 * Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Reed. A hooker she might be, her willingness to work with the CIA and use her position to spy on suspected terrorist financier is absolutely commendable.
 * How We Got Here: The whole of Brody's plot.
 * High Class Call Girl: The prince has a harem of them, whom he hires for two-year stints and pays outrageous sums of money.
 * Honey Trap: Claire Danes described Carrie as such in an interview with Conan O'Brien. For most of Season 1, Carrie does not play this trope straight...but could still be one eventually. Lynne Reed, Carrie's callgirl contact, does play the trope straight.
 * Hot Mom: Jessica, combined with a healthy dose of Fan Service.
 * I Let Gwen Stacy Die:  Carrie doesn't handle the death well and considers herself at least partially responsible for it  . She also seems to treat 9/11 this way.
 * Important Haircut: Jessica cuts her hair to match the short cut she had when Brody left for Iraq in an attempt to turn back the clock and rekindle their former romance.
 * Incredibly Lame Pun: "Representative Brody" has a really bad one. When referring to the Vice President's offer, Brody asked Jessica if she had "thought about the politics of it all."
 * Invulnerable Knuckles: Averted..
 * Ironic Echo: In "Crossfire," Jessica remarks to Brody that "it's a violent country" after Brody tells her he was mugged..
 * Jumped At the Call: Presumably with Carrie when she became the CIA's point person on investigating Abu Nazir. She followed her intuition to the point where she was seen by other characters as a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
 * Last-Name Basis: Brody. Even his wife calls him "Brody".
 * Lima Syndrome: Carrie falls in love with Brody over the course of her surveillance, despite the fact that she believes he's a terrorist.
 * Logic Bomb: Carrie throws the FBI agent's solution of TV ads back in his face, when the FBI agent says it worked for catching Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger. Carrie points out that it took almost 20 years.
 * The Long Game: Invoked a few times by Carrie Mathison to explain Brody's actions. She believes that Abu Nazir planted intelligence on hi s own safe house in order to have US forces rescue Brody, whom she believes to be a Turncoat or Manchurian Agent. She says he has turned down opportunities to kill high-profile targets in order to get an opportunity for a really big score.
 * Love Dodecahedron: Carrie/Brody/Jessica/Mike.
 * No Medication for Me: Carrie, after.
 * Meta Guy: Virgil. He watches the surveillance footage as if it were a TV show.
 * The Mole: It's yet to be revealed.
 * Not Quite Dead: Brody, of course,
 * Obstructive Bureaucrat: David Estes.
 * Oh Crap: Two occurrences in Episode 7 alone.
 * Carrie, after offering Brody a cup of his favorite tea-and so giving away her surveillance of him, since he never mentioned it to her.
 * Saul, upon learning that.
 * Only Sane Man: Carrie thinks she is this,, but the twist of it is that she's not psychologically a sane person either.
 * Precision F-Strike:
 * Delivered by Carrie in, of all places, the opening credits! Even by premium-cable standards, this may be a first.
 * Brody to Carrie, when he realizes she's been spying on him the whole time.
 * Pyrrhic Victory:.
 * Real Life Writes the Plot: Possibly used at the end of "Clean Skin". A young couple, a Middle Eastern man and a white woman, are seen buying a house near an airport. In a previous scene, a diamond necklace that a Saudi prince gave to his mistress, was sold to a jeweler for $400,000. One of the prince's handlers retrieved the necklace from the mistress  . It's heavily implied that the couple was able to buy the house with funds from the necklace sale. The scene of the young couple could be a subtle Lampshading of the case of Faisal Shahzad, the man who attempted to set off a car bomb at Times Square in 2010. Shahzad bought a large house in Connecticut several years prior to the attempt.
 * And in the next episode, we learn the man is named Raqim Faisel. A later episode plays with this trope when the CIA starts investigating
 * A popular Democratic Congressman with a name that's a synonym for a part of the male anatomy gets in trouble for sending pictures of himself to female aides. (In fact, they give him two such names—"Dick Johnson" is probably the only more apropos name than the real thing: "Anthony Weiner.")
 * Red Herring:
 * Reveal Shot: At the end of Ep.1, the camera reverses to give a new perspective on the death of Thomas Walker.
 * Ripped from the Headlines: Dick Johnson, the Democratic congressman who sent racy images of himself to female aides, is an obvious reference to Anthony Weiner, who is also a Democratic congressman who sent racy pictures of himself to women. "Dick" "johnson" and "weiner" are also all words that can describe a penis.
 * Room Full of Crazy: Carrie's place after she's been off her meds. Painstakingly transformed into The Big Board once Saul stays up all night organising it.
 * Scary Black Man:
 * Shell-Shocked Veteran: Brody
 * Sitting on the Roof: Brody and Dana in the finale.
 * Society Marches On and Technology Marches On: Brody is unfamiliar with Vitamin Water while grocery shopping. He refers to a "video called YouTube".
 * Soundtrack Dissonance: A lively jazz number plays over the Tear Jerker chaotic ending of "The Vest".
 * Spiritual Successor: To 24. They share a lot of writers and production crew, and Homeland could be reliably summed up as what you'd get if the characters from 24 went home at night, got eight hours of sleep, showered, shaved, came into work the next morning and actually had to deal with the regulations and beaurocracy of intelligence work.
 * Although it's arguably less over-the-top.
 * Stockholm Syndrome: The reason Carrie believes Brody is a Turncoat or Manchurian Agent.
 * String Theory: In the first season's 11th episode (The Vest), Saul can only make sense of Carries various notes, documents and pieces of information after he applies them orderly to all wall that connects all of the bits in a spatial fashion. There are no strings, though, so this might belong to a (existing?) higher-ranking trope of "external thinking", expressed through spatial arrangements of information.
 * Ten-Minute Retirement: Carrie, at the end of "Blind Spot"/start of "The Good Soldier."
 * "The Reason You Suck" Speech: YMMV on this one. In the sixth episode of Season 1, Lauder, a member of Brody's unit, gives one to Brody that questions why Brody came back alive. Tom Walker, another member of the unit who was tortured along with Brody, did not return with Brody.  Lauder unravels his argument by outright saying that any member of the unit wanted to sleep with Jessica, Brody's wife, while he was away.
 * Torture Cellar: Most of Brody's torture seems to have taken place in small, dark rooms, most likely underground.
 * Working with the Ex:
 * You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
 * You Have to Believe Me: Carrie can't really fault people for not believing her when she does things like scream at the top of her lungs "None of you understand! The world is ending!"
 * You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
 * You Have to Believe Me: Carrie can't really fault people for not believing her when she does things like scream at the top of her lungs "None of you understand! The world is ending!"