As Homeland Season 8, the last season of the show in which I “discovered” Damian Lewis, is fast approaching, we continue our tribute to Nicholas Brody, a character we have loved and still miss dearly!
I was inspired to write this particular post thanks to Tbkwrm’s inspiring lovely fan fiction in which she imagined Jess and Brody’s wedding day! And she got me thinking… She got me thinking hard about the “other” love story in Homeland that we never really witnessed except for little bits and pieces… So here you go: Nick and Jess Brody…
…A beautiful couple united by love and separated by war… High school sweethearts… They start dating at 16 and get married probably in their early 20s… They have a simple, yet happy life: A house. A car. Probably a mortgage. Two beautiful kids. Football and BBQ on the weekend. Your picture-perfect American family… Well… until life happens…
Here is the happy couple on their wedding day! I found this photo online sometime in 2015.
Jess and Brody on their wedding day? Sweet, isn’t it?! My hunch is this is either a part of a flashback scene that did not make it to the final cut… Or it is just a photo taken for a photo frame at Brody house! I LOVE it either way!
So, yeah, back to the story: Brody goes to Iraq and Jess gets word that he is MIA. She holds out hope for years that Brody will come back but finally decides to bury him and allows herself to love again… and loves no other than Brody’s best friend Mike who has always been there for her and been a surrogate father to her children. The two are at a point in their relationship that they will move in together…
And the phone rings: “Jessica, it’s me. Brody.”
Finding out that a loved one that you think has been dead for years should be as big a shock, if a happy one, as finding out a loved one is dead. And, Jessica may well think this is the biggest shocker in her life but she doesn’t even have a clue about what else is in store for her…
Brody & Jess love story is, in fact, over when we meet them. However, neither Jess nor Brody nor we, the viewers, know about it yet… Brody rightly admits it to Jess in their most intimate moment much later:
“I was fucked the moment I left for Iraq. We all were.”
The couple’s first night together is heartbreaking. Jessica is doing her best to welcome home the man she has loved for the longest time with her sexy “negligee” and a bottle of wine… But the romantic moment quickly turns into a horror movie as Jess notices Brody’s scars and freaks out… followed by Brody turning into an animal and almost raping her…
It turns out this scene was filmed early in the shoot and Morena Baccarin explains why this timing makes sense: “When we shot that first intimate scene, it was very early on in the filming schedule. I think we had known each other for about three weeks. But it worked because we were like strangers.”
Then come the dark nights with Brody having awful nightmares and even attacking Jess one night in his sleep… And, when he realizes what he’s done, he withdraws himself farther and farther away from her, grabs his pillow and sleeps on the bedroom floor… And, in the the saddest and the most disturbing scene of the show — yes, it is the most disturbing for me even in comparison to torture and violence scenes — Brody tells Jess to take off her night shirt, masturbates and goes back to his pillow on the bedroom floor when he’s done… This is too much to take for any human being…
And not just for Jessica, but for Brody, too… He’s also struggling… He’s now back to his wife and children whose love helped him keep going for eight years in captivity, and now he does not know these people that he calls family. He and Jess, two people that have been together since they were 16, are complete strangers. Brody does not know how to deal with that. Moreover, he realizes the relationship between Jess and Mike was beyond friendship and this is also quite hard for him to take even though deep inside he knows Jess thought he was dead for a long time and Mike was always there for his family.
Brody is desperately looking for the love he once had for Jess… For example, when he takes Dana for a walk to a chain link fence and shows her a padlock with his and Jess’ initials on it from the times they were dating; it’s not just to show his daughter the love he and Jess shared a long time ago, but also to see the proof to that love with his own eyes… Brody wants to believe in his love for Jess, with whom he is not even able to sleep now…
I believe one deep down reason for Brody and Jess not being able to connect physically is the fact that they just cannot connect psychologically. Brody and Jess cannot talk. They are never ready to talk. And it is not just that Brody does not share with Jess about his horrible experience as a POW, but Jess also does not share with him about her life in his absence. And this unspoken eight years of their lives tear them more and more apart every single day…
Morena Baccarin says many fans told her they were rooting for Jess and Brody to be together.(source: Homeland Revealed by Matthew Hurwitz. 2014. Chronicle Books. Page 34). Well… I am not going to lie to you. I am one of those fans that rooted for Jess and Brody… And, in fact, for a long time… until I saw… no, not The Weekend… Not even The Weekend in which Brody finds this recognition and intimacy with a woman who has gone through experiences similar to his made me think it was over for Brodys… Probably because The Weekend was more of a cat and mouse for me than two people bonding — don’t get me wrong there was some real connection between Brody and Carrie in that cabin, but not at a level to convince me that Jess was out of the picture. So I rooted for Jess and Brody until much later… And they had those little moments in their relationship that the hopeless romantic in me could not help saying “Oh maybe they will make it” without believing it 😀
Jess knowing about The Weekend, accepting the fling her husband had with Carrie and being able to move on from that tells me she is strong and tries her best to do things right with Brody. And once Brody becomes a congressman, Jess seems to very much enjoy the company of her husband — it’s a cliche, but they really look like a new Jack & Jackie — as well as the glamorous D.C. life.
I believe even the way she does deal with Brody’s new faith by not dealing with it is all about her feeling very happy about where her family stands. Jess is very protective of her family and so her disbelief, her outrage, her angry “this cannot happen!” at finding out about Brody’s being Muslim is all about, first, her being hurt that her husband has not been honest with her and second and maybe more importantly, her being freaked out about their now happy life falling apart… which brings me to Jess’ high point in public’s eye!
The evening Jess needs to fill for Brody and give a speech at a fund-raising for the Iraq war veterans is a turning point for her in so many ways. It is the first time she opens her heart to complete strangers about the traumatic experience she and Brody had upon his return: “If someone had warned me how he’d look at me as if he didn’t know me anymore… how violent his nightmares would be that he would attack me in his sleep… how he wouldn’t know what to say to the kids those first few weeks… how hard intimacy of any kind would be for him… If someone had actually warned me, in plain English, how hard coming home would be for him…” It is also a moment that Jessica feels she is, in fact, enjoying the public spotlight and the prospects of being the SLOTUS 🙂 However, that evening also marks the beginning of the end for the Brodys.
Jess and Brody have their fallout after Brody does not show up for the fund-raiser and says he had a car problem which Jess does not believe…. And she’s right. It’s not just this one lie, but Jess has been lied to by Brody many many times and now she thinks they may have turned a corner and BAM! Another lie! It should hurt badly… Anyhow… Then comes Q & A and the rest is history… I now know Jess and Brody are so OVER. I believe in conversation as the most intimate human relationship. And, Brody and Carrie can talk… This is LOVE. And same goes for Jess and Mike… That is LOVE, too…
So… we never see the beginning of this love story but we definitely see the very end of it. The conversation Jess and Brody have in the car in Season 2 Episode 11 is probably the first and only time since Brody’s return the two are completely honest and open with each other — exactly like when they were 16. They just admit to each other and maybe even to themselves at that point that it is just “beyond” them…
Why not see it again and maybe shed a few tears for this love story that in fact ended the day Brody left for Iraq…
I understand picking up where they left eight years ago was beyond both of them when Brody returned home. Yet FIRST LOVE is something nobody forgets. So I don’t think Jess could ever forget Brody. Her response to Dana saying “Dad was a psycho, he ruined our lives” with “Your father was a lot of things” is very telling.
Sigh.
And a true confession: I watched a couple of scenes just to refresh myself about a couple of things I write about in this post. And… I have realized that I just cannot get over Brody. I just cannot. BIG SIGH.
S2.E01 “The Smile”: Jessica is so horrible!
[referring to the scene with Jess and Brody in the garage where she finds his Quran]
Jessica’s reaction has less to do with Brody being a Muslim (and she is ignorant and uninformed about Islam and Muslims–as are a vast majority of Americans; when she says “this can’t happen” she indirectly references the prejudice that Americans have against Muslims, so she is not the only one with a less progressive way of thinking) and more to do with the fact that he lied to her about it for months. That he lied to her about this major, vital change in his life–in his fundamental being–but did tell Dana and Carrie.
A marriage works both ways. Should Jess have showed more respect towards his Quran and his religious conversion? Absolutely. But Brody also should have respected Jess and their marriage and the trust that’s broken between them by telling her.
I think he was not comfortable telling her knowing what kind of response she would give. I think he knows that his wife is an average American with prejudices against Muslims and Islam in general. I think “This can’t happen” doesn’t have anything to do with Brody not telling her. It has a lot to do about him having converted to Islam.
I don’t know if Carrie was Brody’s true love. Seems like most of Brody’s marital problems stemmed from him being a lying, shady terrorist.