I wasn’t concentrating 100%, by the end I realised I had no idea WTF was going on. Who is Carrie even working for?

Anyone like to give a brief synopsis to date?

Aye she’s just a freelance spy now. She’s probably writing a blog or something and hoping that she can use clickthru ads or Amazon affiliate links to make a bit of money. Maybe become a youtube partner. The last job she had for German Harvey Weinstein was a step up from her U.S Government job but even then she was only on $40,000 a year and 25 days leave. Health plan obviously but that’s still peanuts for the level of stress she’s going through.

Anyway, they obviously wrote the last series expecting Hillary Clinton to win and it misfired horribly into little more than fan fiction.  Now they’re trying to shoe horn a social commentary subtext which just won’t fit because they were so wide of the mark. Guff. But my wife enjoys it. And I enjoy making jokes about how little money Carrie earns for all her trouble.

Homeland has always been somewhat antastical, even the 1st series

Its become more of an alternate future, now in which the bannon/alex jones character didnt do enough to inlfuence the vote ( though in reality Russia did the job! )

I thought they just wanted to go out in some complete mad way, I expect a shark to appear and a jet ski soon

That and the innovative way to dispense the poison

I got half way through series 2 and said enough was enough. I don’t need to watch US fiction to get my fix of psychotic female thankyouverymuch! 😀

kimbers

Homeland has always been somewhat antastical, even the 1st series

Its become more of an alternate future, now in which the bannon/alex jones character didnt do enough to inlfuence the vote ( though in reality Russia did the job! )

No, they had already cast the role of President Keane six months before the show aired. They only announced Jake Weber as Brett O’Keefe on the 6th of December. Alex Gansa admitted in an interview that season 6 was written “in something like real time”. He also admits the O’Keefe character was originally supposed to be quite different (presumably more Steve Bannon/Andrew Breitbart) before appearing earlier in the series and given a more central role,  and despite trying to put a positive spin on to admit that at all speaks volumes.

They predicted an embattled female president at odds with the intelligence community and that became surprisingly irrelevant so they tacked on a horribly contrived “Alex Jones” sub plot to cover up how badly they missed the mark.

Absolute cobblers of the highest order! But then it always was.

To be fair to them trying to out-do what is actually happening in American politics at the moment is quite a challenge. Lets be honest, if Trump rounded up a load of journalists and intelligence agency bods tomorrow and slung them all in prison,  would anyone be remotely surprised?

The last season we watched to the end was the one where life of pie got shot. It had gone badly down hill by then but nothing compared to the hogwash of the next season which we packed in after a few episodes. Have not been back since which is a shame as we really enjoyed the first couple.

I don’t see how you can complain that they missed the mark on believability, jimjam,  they blew up the pentagon i  series 1 didnt they? & Looking at the chaos of Trump’s presidency, to date, who could’ve predicted that !?!

I assumed by your earlier comment “Its become more of an alternate future, now in which the bannon/alex jones character didnt do enough to inlfuence the vote” that you were of the opinion that they had done so deliberately, and not as an obvious attempt to anticipate events which misfired. In late 2015/early 2016 the prospect of a Trump presidency was almost laughable, Hilary seemed like a shoe-in.

I’m not complaining about the lack of believe-ability, rather i’m pointing out the fact they obviously attempted to pre-empt what the U.S political landscape would look like when the series would air, and failed.

Is this a new series/season?

Well just watched the first one, yep still bonkers !

A paranoid president at war with the secret service….. Some bits still following the real potus!

Well just watched the last one.

Not sure about the preachy ending & was looking forward to ‘Carrie escapes from the Gulag’ next season, but I suppose they can play on the first series storyline

I thought this series was excellent.

I thought this series was excellent.

+1 More prescient than some of the doubters at the start of this thread could have realised 🙂

I agree – I thought this series was good – certainly better than some of the previous ones.

I thought Carrie was going to end up getting shot whilst trying to escape (particularly after her heartfelt goodbye to her daughter) but it feels like they tagged the prison scenes / bridge exchange on to the end to allow for another series….. meh.

With very few exceptions, anything that gets to 7th season tends to have jumped the shark some time ago and they’re just milking it for syndication rights. 24 was probably the worst offender that I’ve watched.

Enjoyed it mostly. Suspension of disbelief necessary though – just took it as fiction loosely based on reality.

What makes me chuckle about this sort of stuff is the assumed American IT superiority of the ‘secret room full of computer whatnot’.

This trope pops up from time to time elsewhere in films and TV and just looks like lazy scripting to me.

The idea that the Russian network infrastructure can be hacked as easily as a taking candy off a baby strikes me as risible.

Any expertise that can hack our NHS network, let alone play around with the American election like it it did, is likely to have very good firewalls in place at least…

When running from Russians looking for a woman with dark hair; do you:

a) Take off your wig, walk out and hail a taxi to the airport.

b) Remain in disguise until caught risking the lives of everyone in your team.

I think Carrie needs either stronger medication or better scripts.

Anyway, they obviously wrote the last series expecting Hillary Clinton to win and it misfired horribly into little more than fan fiction.

other than being a woman I’m not sure its fair to say the President in the series is representative of Clinton. She’s a political outsider in the top job. She’s not representative of Trump as a person- as you couldn’t hang a watchable drama around that- but she is represeentative of the situation that would put someone like Trump (as in someone from outside the establishment) in the Whitehouse and how that person would then find themselves isolated from there rest of the machinations of government.

When running from Russians looking for a woman with dark hair; do you:

a) Take off your wig, walk out and hail a taxi to the airport.

b) Remain in disguise until caught risking the lives of everyone in your team.

I think Carrie needs either stronger medication or better scripts.

Or do you stay in disguise so that they continue to chase you and don’t realise they’re chasing the wrong person?

I thought this series was excellent.

+1, really enjoyed it.

^ This…… if she’d been caught either as Carrie (and the Russian’s would I assume know her as a known spy / ally of Saul’s and so get her directly or by machine facial recognition anyway) or as Simone but then unmasked before the rest had got onto the plane then the potato headed army guard bloke would have detained them all.

But I did wonder if leaving the scarf and coat on that long made it a bit too easy to track her, in the Bourne identity / Bond they always change clothes first chance they get.

I didn’t think this series was bad at all, but if you haven’t seen it and want nail biting / toe curling suspense of the kind they were trying to get to with the will they won’t they get on the plane scenario – watch Argo.

maccruiskeen

Anyway, they obviously wrote the last series expecting Hillary Clinton to win and it misfired horribly into little more than fan fiction.

other than being a woman I’m not sure its fair to say the President in the series is representative of Clinton.

When the writers and creators of the show admit it was largely “written on the fly” and that key actors and characters were changed and shuffled about, how do you interpret that?

how do you interpret that?

that the character of Keane – in either the last season or the current one – doesn’t seem representative of Clinton. She seems to be a bit of an amalgamation of both the candidates really.

muggomagic, theotherjonv
They were looking for a dark haired woman.

They couldn’t actually see her from before she dropped the scarf to the moment when they actually found her, but they kept searching.

Are you seriously suggesting that if she had taken off the wig and walked off that they would have immediately stopped searching or recognised her as the target?

Short version .. Making it impossible for them to find the dark haired woman, would be better than being found behaving suspiciously with black wig on.

Homeland co-creator Alex Gansa speaking about casting the role of President Keane

 “Every season, when we’re developing stories, we’re terrified of being counterfactual by the time we air,” said Gansa. “This year, we’re hedging our bets a little bit. She’s a little bit Hillary, a little bit Donald Trump and a little bit Bernie Sanders.”

It speaks volumes that they cast a middle aged woman and not a wavy haired orange faced old man or a bald Jewish one for that matter. They obviously anticipated a Clinton win and were setting up storylines which might result from that.

Speaking in early 2017 Alex Gansa’s reaction to hearing Trump had won the election –

“My first reaction was, ‘Oh my god, we are now counterfactual to the point of being irrelevant.'” To say that we took it calmly would be a complete lie. It took a while to dig ourselves out of that feeling. 

Are you seriously suggesting that if she had taken off the wig and walked off that they would have immediately stopped searching or recognised her as the target?

She didn’t know who was watching her / what surveillance was on her so if she had dumped the wig, she might have been seen to do that. Then with facial recognition / Russian intelligence capabilities they would quickly have spotted Carrie for who she was, at which they would have sussed the switch and stopped the bus to at least give them time to sort it out (didn’t even have to ID her at this point, they just see the switch which is reason enough).

Dumping the scarf is hiding protocol 1.01, so doesn’t matter if you’re seen doing that or not.

She had to be in character and not obviously Carrie for as long as it took. Still doesn’t explain why she didn’t get rid of the obvious red scarf sooner, although even with that it only stops the clock for a short period so does it matter if that’s now or at some point in the future, you only get to delay once anyway.

I was pleased to see Butthead/Senator Paley get shutdown

theotherjonv

You are a script writers dream, and your suspension of disbelief may be a danger to the International Space Station.

I’m a little envious :o)

I only really kept watching this for Rupert Friend – my hopes weren’t high when he was “uncast”.

But I have enjoyed this latest series – it is fiction, after all.

was definitely a better series than the last one

of course its silly, whether the president is a man or a woman,

that said if they had a 70 year old KKK courting, narcisist who gets his security briefings from Fox & Friends whilst eating KFC, no one would believe that carziness

I enjoyed this series but some of the Carrie subplots were a bit tedious. Quinn was the best character though and getting rid of him didn’t help.

I think the Mrs said that Season 8 is the last series so one more to go!

You are a script writers dream, and your suspension of disbelief may be a danger to the International Space Station.

You are aware it’s a drama, not a documentary 😉

It’s a level above ‘chewing gum for the eyeballs’ in the way it’s tinged with reality and current affairs issues, but if you want factual content, Fox News is over there -> 😉

I generally enjoyed it, but often with drama series it’s one little bit of complete implausibility that spoils it for me.

This time, why would Carrie have been carrying 2 wigs, her usual brunette one, (we’ve seen that before a few times) but also one THAT WAS EACTLY THE SAME AS HER OWN HAIRSTYLE for Simone to wear? That extraction was never part of the plan, and it’s unlikely the KSB hairstylists were in the next office to the safe flat.

Plan B. Gotta have a plan B.

Besides, Saul likes to dress up in his down time and goes by the name of Sally in the seedy bars of Washington. It was his wig.

They did actually say in the show “was that always the plan” and Carrie responded with “more or less”, so I guess they were prepared with the wigs (although it did feel like it was a stretch).

theotherjonv

Saul carrying an emergency wig in case he has to disguise himself as Carrie is slightly more plausible than what happened 🙂

Tho’ I reckon Mandy Patinkin could pull that off even with the beard.

I can see him swishing his blonde locks and shouting “diplomatic immunity!” at a confused russian border guard.

I enjoyed it, but I think the Russians would have shot down the plane, even with diplomatic immunity.

Crazy Carrie was laughable. Ending was terrible but overall enjoyed it for what it was.

I was waiting for the plane to go boom. That would have made things interesting. Not really looking forward to the next season… Will watch it… Just because I have got this far.