What a viscerally infuriating ending introducing a stock character I absolutely loathe — bureaucratic irony guy, here played by government toolbag David Estes. Peter Principled up just far enough to be a pest, bureaucratic irony guy insists on doing things by the book because he has a nominal decision-making role. Like, House has Dr. Cuddy, the diagnosis-blocking House on every single episode, never getting it through her thick, stupid head that House is always right and that, as an awful doctor who has never made a correct diagnosis, ever, she has no business whatsoever questioning him. Estes is the same way, clearly aware — and frustrated — that Carrie is better at her job than he is at his, and there’s a part of me that wants the season finale devoted to Carrie planning the world’s greatest “told you so” for when Brody blows himself up and severs his head.
But Henry Bromell did his job with Homeland, and it’s not too tough for me to get over my initial antipathy towards the Estes archetype and look for the point behind him. So I deconstruct Vice President Smarmy-face there, and with even less screentime and even quicker brushstrokes, he screams entitled, callous villain. The last straw was him spinning the Iraqi school bombing to fit his particular American moral narrative is lazy antagonist shorthand, inexcusable and obvious on Covert Affairs or Burn Notice — but Homeland is engaged with the realities of politics in the intelligence community in ways its romanticized little cousins aren’t. For eight years, we had a real-life vice president who shot his friend in the face, who kept a man-sized safe in his office, who had his house blurred out from Google Earth, who leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent, who was basically a cartoonish Bond villain second-in-command of the free world, so maybe Bromell doesn’t need that much nuance to fill in the character.
What’s incongruous is the first ten episodes, where the CIA is the competent branch of the intelligence community, working despite the trigger-happy nimrods at the FBI. That’s the problem with bureaucratic irony guy, that Carrie put together the entire crazy history of the terrorist that Estes knows is trying to assassinate the president, and his first priority is tearing it down. You don’t want to take a photo of that, or anything? Just gonna assume there’s no value in the clearly organized hundreds of pieces of paper on the wall?
And if this were Covert Affairs, it wouldn’t bother me, because Covert Affairs exists in a joyful fantasy spy-camp world where 9/11 only happened in an screenplay. like those poor anonymous computer-generated people crushed by cars when King Kong ran amok in downtown Manhattan. Homeland opens every week including Saul’s somewhat-oblivious quote, “Everybody missed something that day,” and I believe the question I’m trying to tease out of Homeland‘s alternate reality is whether that’s true. When Homeland is all about Carrie and Saul terrorist-hunting, even when it’s in morally ambiguous territory, the CIA is full of hard-working dedicated professionals who couldn’t piece everything together in time — and that was extraordinarily satisfying (in a cathartic, storytelling sense, I mean) on Rubicon. This week, the CIA was taken over by nameless, faceless buffoons, and the jarring switch is less satisfying.