![]() Stooped by the weight of the world, Saul Berenson doesn’t play to win. It was a necessary and methodical counterweight to the dirty-bomb-style spy games preferred by Abu Nazir and, in a way, the emotionally explosive Carrie Mathison. He was part clergy and part Charon, ferrying her from the mess she’d made of her life - missing the moment when her youthful politics became blinkered radicalism, mistaking her youthful crush on Raquim Faisel for a violent, romantic metaphor - to the harsh life sentence that awaited her. While Carrie and Brody lolled about the lake house, pawing at each other’s damage like cats with half-dead mice, Saul, ever patient, was Aileen’s confessor and her therapist. Like his colleague Carrie and his occasional target Brody, Saul’s professional existence is defined by secrets - but he himself is almost monkishly straightforward. And so they drove on, watching the odometer click in silence, two pawns in a global game sharing a ride but going in very different directions. In direct contrast to Carrie and Brody’s teetering Jenga tower of lies, these two presented a simple binary: Saul needed the truth, Aileen wasn’t talking. But my favorite part of “The Weekend” was its b-story: Saul’s long, intimate road trip with Aileen Morgan, the bloodthirsty blue blood. The hour provided the rare opportunity to watch both actors and characters losing themselves in the best roles of their lives. And rightly so! It was hypnotizing to watch the two leads dip in and out of honesty - and each other - like bags of Brody’s precious Yorkshire Gold into mugs of hot water. In the case of “The Weekend,” it was the backwoods tango between Carrie and Brody that got all the ink. It’s like taking a step into the deep end of a pool: Suddenly there is no bottom suddenly anything is possible. For the audience, the feeling can be delirious and disorienting. Regardless, it’s as if, in an instant, the writers find depth in the material they hadn’t even realized was there. I’ve heard it described variously as a show finding its voice or, more anthropomorphically, the show revealing how it should be written. ![]() It happens that way sometimes, in TV, when the panicked crush of production finally catches up to the promise of the pilot. Titled “The Weekend,” it marked the moment the freshman series went from good to great. Exactly one year ago Homeland aired its seventh episode. ![]()
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