What, it’s been two years already since Nicholas Brody was hung from a crane in Tehran, right? Yet, he has never fully left the world of Homeland;Â he’s a ghost lingering just behind Carrie’s eyes as she makes the motions to have a normal life with someone new, and he’s ever present in the face and twirly red locks of his child Frannie. The infinitesimal hint Carrie had of happiness with a man she loved so completely has informed her every movement since then. She wants to have it again, to feel it again, and, this time, for someone who is not a terrorist bent on self-destruction. Hey, a girl can dream. And that’s all just Brody appearing in spirit. Even in body, he makes a posthumous appearance as Carrie’s hallucination in Season 4 Redux, a gratuitously excruciating and painful scene to watch. (You think I exaggerate, but, truth be told, like Carrie, I was pretty much a fetal ball crying on the floor too after that scene: “I want to believe…” gah!)
Now in Season 5, Brody makes an appearance yet again as the picture on the wall within Carrie’s eyesight all five years she was stationed in Baghdad. Let’s go back…and then forward…shall we? Forward and onward in this world created by a show that mirrors so much of the real world it’s downright eerie.