Fifteen years after 9/11, it’s probably time for a report card on how we’ve done with our response – and Showtime’s Homeland is raising the possibility we’ve taken some serious missteps.
Homeland launches its slightly delayed sixth season Sunday (9 p.m. ET), with Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes, top) relocated to New York.
Showrunner Alex Gansa says she might even stay there a while since Homeland has been renewed through Season 8.
“I’d love to be in New York for seasons 7 and 8,” says Gansa. “So many shows shoot in New York now, but we’re doing a less glamorous version of the city. We aren’t in Central Park. We’re shooting more in Brooklyn and the boroughs.
“New York can’t help becoming a character. It’s incredible.”
That said, Gansa allows that the focal character remains Carrie, and once again in Season 6, her situation reflects troubling concerns from the real world.
In this case, says Gansa, she finds herself coming back to the question of whether America’s ongoing response to the threat represented by the 9/11 attacks has been appropriate, effective and/or morally justified.
Fans will remember the extended sequence in which Carrie had to decide whether to call in a drone strike that could kill a key terrorist if it meant also risking the life of a child who had set up a table selling bread on an adjacent street.
“Such an industry has been built up around counterterrorism,” says Gansa. “We’ve spent over $100 billion on it. The question is whether it’s stopping the bad guys. What’s the cost/benefit ratio?
“Carrie’s goal from the start of the series has been that ‘We can’t let it happen again.’ But I think she has slowly come to the conclusion that the whole country went stupid crazy about 9/11 – how we chose to project our persona and the people we hurt while not making ourselves any safer.”
When we met Carrie, then a high-ranking analyst with the CIA, she was part of that government machine. Her intelligence connections triggered the Nicholas Brody story that grew to dominate the show’s first three seasons.
But starting in Season 4 and continuing into this upcoming season, says Gansa, “Carrie going forward finds herself in growing opposition to her former employer.”
That’s neatly reflected in her career path. After she had left the CIA, she worked as an independent intelligence contractor. This season she’s working as an advocate for Muslims in the U.S., which naturally draws her back into the whole security spider web.
For purposes of the Homeland story, Carrie’s growing doubts have already nurtured an intense subplot on her changing relationship with her former CIA boss Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin, top, with Danes).
“Saul recruited her, trained her, taught her everything,” says Gansa. “He created her in this world. He gave her purpose.
“He’s still signed on to the program. But around the end of Season 4, you saw she was having some doubts, and she began to question their relationship.
“Now we see her coming out from the shadow of Saul. She’s experienced what it’s like to be on the front lines, and she feels that sometimes the people in charge didn’t understand. Sometimes you just can’t go there.
“We’ve seen her becoming her own person. The question now is where she can end up. She’s tried to make a go of it as a regular person, and we’ve seen that struggle.
“Some of the things we’ve asked Claire to do as Carrie are just crazy.”
Some of them are also traceable to the fact that periodically she stops taking the medication that controls her bipolar disorder. She argues in those interludes that she thinks more clearly if she’s off her meds.
Maybe. It just comes with some serious manic side effects.
“She’s back on her meds now,” says Gansa. “But it’s always going to be part of the storyline. Any person who suffers from this illness knows they battle it all their lives.”
As for exactly where the new season will go, the potential big plot reveal got spoiled a long time ago. Carrie’s troubled fellow agent Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend), who was almost killed at the end of Season 5, does indeed survive to return, though Friend and others have cautioned that he may be a different person.
Otherwise, Gansa keeps the Season 6 storylines guarded and says he doesn’t know where the seasons after that will be going.
“Season 1, looking back, was really easy,” he says. “What was much harder was seasons 2 and 3, and 4, and 5. It takes a lot of work to map out each season, which is why we start about two weeks after the last one ended.
“We have no off-season because we live in constant fear we won’t have any more ideas. You can’t run a TV show and also have a life. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.”
What would be more chilling, of course, would be if our counterterrorism policies also didn’t work.