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I feel like I should like Quinn. I want to like Quinn. He's the one person being decent to Carrie, after all. But it doesn't ring true, because his about-face on Carrie last season was completely out of the blue and not based on any aspect of their relationship that we saw on screen. One episode he just suddenly said, "She's the best! She's alright with me!" When in fact he probably had more reason to think otherwise based on the events of last season.

If also doesn't help his case that in his big scene in the premier, he stupidly and wantonly fires blindly in a house he knows has a kid in it and, what do you know, kills a kid.

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I like this season better than the last half of season 2.

But yes, it's rough to care about many of these characters? What reason should we root for Carrie? At the end of the day, she IS a manic depressive prone to noncompliance with medication and manic swings with paranoia, who lied about that to the CIA for years, and ultimately fell in love with someone she KNOWS is a terrorist, and she is STILL defending him.

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I don't see how caring about her comes down to likability, though.  Being wrong in some ways, and making bad choices, and having huge flaws...that's kind of what makes a lot of the best lead characters work in shows nowadays.

 

I mean, how many ways were Vick Macky or Walter White or Tony Soprano wrong, impetuous, selfish or flawed?  I think we care about her because we've seen her have flashese of absolute brilliance and because she's taken huge risks with her own life and mind in order to do her job better, so she believes.  If she has turned into a worse person because of this or lost control or reason or revealed flaws through it...I don't see how that is less dramatically valid than any other anti-hero.

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Carrie and Brody falling in love wrecked the show, IMO. OK, she could be infatuated with him while having her suspicions in season one. She's unstable. It fits in with her character. Likewise, him manipulating her for his own ends also made sense.

 

But the idea in season 2 that they were some great love affair doesn't hold water. She's too messed up for even Brody who, despite everything, does seem to have a longing for a normal, peaceful life. I don't think Carrie would be so willing to throw her career and beliefs aside to defend a known terrorist, either.   

 

Also, Damien Lewis and Claire Danes have no romantic chemistry whatsoever. 

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I'm okay with season 3 so far.  I'm glad they're slowing it down.  They shouldn't try to do 24-style stuff. 

 

Saul getting hot and bothered about a scarf was weird.  Unless that was a way to motivate her or something.

 

I guess the way they're going to try to get us to care about Dana is to get her mom to be awful.  While this is the best Dana stuff so far (though I didn't get the prayer rug thing at the end), it's still doing more to get me to hate her mom than to like her.  And I'm in no rush to find out what Brody's been up to. 

 

I agree with piranesi that the point isn't that Carrie is supposed to be likeable or that we have to root for her; it's that she's supposed to be interesting.  And the idea that she's great at her job as long as she's insane?  I find it interesting.

 

That said, I'm kind of rooting for her to find some sort of balance.  But I wouldn't be surprised if the series ends with her homeless on the street, babbling to herself.

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I've dug this season quite a bit. It's interesting in the sense that it's really fucking depressing, like they looked back on the season 1 finale and made that their template for this season. I also liked how the CIA job has made Saul into a complete dickhead, although that could be Dar Adal rubbing off on Saul. Quinn is the face of the series though, so that means he will surely die at some point.

 

Oh, and to kinda echo what EVA said, I thought that this was the producer's way of giving the finger to all the people who wanted Brody dead, to show how plodding things would be without him. He still needs to die, or really, the show should have really just become even more 24-esque, although without all the retarded crap. Brody could have been the overarching possible main villain/tragic hero while Quinn and company stops whatever threat, and instead it's finding lame ways to get Brody's depressed dick into Carrie's morose vag to produce the most emo offspring ever.

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I've dug this season quite a bit. It's interesting in the sense that it's really fucking depressing, like they looked back on the season 1 finale and made that their template for this season. I also liked how the CIA job has made Saul into a complete dickhead, although that could be Dar Adal rubbing off on Saul. Quinn is the face of the series though, so that means he will surely die at some point.

 

 

 

I think Saul getting corrupted also had to do with the fact that, while he was chasing a particular guy, that very guy was arranging to blow up everyone Saul worked with.  In the same way that Carrie went off the rails after 9-11, you got to think that Saul was pretty gutted by that.

 

That weird scene with him and his wife, where after begging her to come home, he couldn't even touch her...he just laid there in bed like a zombie. He's tuned out of everything he believed in or cared about.  That shard of conscience that made him different from the other top guys can't survive a second attack like that.

 

Like, Saul, is a little walking metaphor for how easy it is to lose yourself and forget what you believed in in the face of an attack like that...he's a metaphor now for why terrorism has proven so effective at undermining democracy.  He's having a little, personal patriot-act in his head.  The only question is whether he wakes up from it and comes through it more intact than, like, we did.

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I don't feel like Carrie is necessarily unlikeable right now, but I do think that one of the many mistakes they've made so far this season was to start with Carrie in Meltdown Mode. It's an off-putting state for her to be in. I think it's better to build up to that over the course of the season, rather than drop the audience right into the middle of one of her episodes. It would also help if there was another character we liked who could anchor the show while she's in meltdown, but as I mentioned...Saul isn't Saul anymore and is being a major asshole to her, and Brody is nowhere to be found.

There's just Quinn. And like I said, I want to like him, but the dude literally just became one of the "good" guys in the season finale, after being a vaguely sinister cat's paw for Estes until then, for reasons that didn't entirely make sense, and make less sense after the bombing. If anything, Quinn should be walking the Path of Rage right now, on a relentless search to track down Brody and finish the job he should have done at the cabin.

Really, I feel like they just chose to start this season at the wrong point in time. Yes, it stands to reason that Congress would want to scapegoat the CIA for everything, but is that really a story anyone is interested in? Does anyone care about the CIA? We care about Carrie and Saul, but the agency itself? They're major assholes who violate our rights on a daily basis and kill innoncent children, etc. Not to mention, they've been grossly negligent and borderline incompetent throughout the Brody affair. Fuck them. Nobody cares. Move on.

I mean, this season was so fucking simple to write. On one side, you put Dar Adal and Quinn on a mission to kill Brody, and on the other, you put Carrie on a mission to prove who really did it and save his life, with Saul caught somewhere in the middle. Duh. How hard is that to fuck up?

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There's just Quinn. And like I said, I want to like him, but the dude literally just became one of the "good" guys in the season finale, after being a vaguely sinister cat's paw for Estes until then, for reasons that didn't entirely make sense, and make less sense after the bombing. If anything, Quinn should be walking the Path of Rage right now, on a relentless search to track down Brody and finish the job he should have done at the cabin. 

 

Thank you.  That's probably the one thing (out of many) that is annoying the hell out of me most about this season.  Technically since everyone believes Brody did it, Quinn could have prevented everything by killing Brody.  Instead it's hardly ever mentioned, and we have him brooding over killing a child and brooding over how unfairly Carrie is being treated.  Hey, how about brooding over the fact that most of your co-workers are dead because you thought "Brody was a good guy?"  The fact that their number one gun ISN'T on a seek and destroy mission but roaming around the mental hospital because he has nothing better to do is just inane.

 

Honestly, I'm just watching this show now to see how ridiculous it gets.  When Dana went through the cabinets in the garage, I half expected Brody to be hiding in one of them.

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The one thing I really don't like is how they're completely doing away with the notion that Saul may be a really evil piece of shit. They've established an actual paper trail to the group that funded and planned the CIA attack, and that in and of itself should reveal evidence to clear Brody's name. So now we have this big bad in Iran, and possible showdown with Iran over the CIA attack, Congress/Senate wants Saul to go after Brody instead of these other players that Saul and Dar Adal put into the ground, and the whole thing feels like it's leading to someone in Congress or Senate being responsible for the attack. The only reason to kill Brody is so that their own names stay in the clear and the can carry out their war with Iran. And hey, that's fine if you want to take some of those elements and incorporate them into a scenario similar to the one EVA describe, but the whole way they're going about this makes me feel like I'm going to be awfully disappointed.

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Man, I better not hear any bullshit about how this week's episode was boring or something.  Because that was an outstanding hour of television. 

 

An entire hour about what it means to be dehumanized by being "in the system" (whether its the criminal justice system, the VA system, the mental health system, or some off-the-grid system like the slum system).  Powerless, forced to conform to the point of surrendering rationality, and ultimately with no means to fight, flee, or reason your way out.

 

"There is no next place" refers to so many different ways that we house, incarcerate, and disappear people we don't want around.  I think it's magnificent that they could take an hour off from "moving the story" to just contemplate how these two characters end up in the system like that and use it to force us to deal with the idea.

 

Brilliant.

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It was an improvement over the first two episodes, and there were definitely interesting thematic parallels at play between Brody and Carrie's stories. The Tower of David set was both incredibly realized and also a very fitting backdrop to a story about systemic imprisonment. And, geez, the creepy pedophile doctor was a fantastic character, just the sort of incredibly specific, wonderfully weird character you NEVER see on this show.

That said, it was still kinda boring. Again, its like they've completely forgotten how to create a suspense sequence. Brody's escape to the mosque had all the drama of a trip to the mailbox.

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Oh man, how did I forget the hilarity of El Niño, on top of everything else, making it a point to tell Brody, "Stay away from my daughter!"

Maybe next episode pedo-doctor will warn Brody, "HER FATHER IS THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY!"

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YES YOU MOTHERFUCKERS, HER FATHER IS THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY. Oh my god, that may be favorite thing from the DVDVR lexicon.

And I was really digging that episode until they switched back to Carrie, and boy did she drag the show down. Then when it went back to Boadie, things slowed to such a boring crawl. How many fucking times did that creep doctor come visit Brody? Jesus...It was overdone to such a point that you knew the episode would end with Brody shooting up.

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Oh man, how did I forget the hilarity of El Niño, on top of everything else, making it a point to tell Brody, "Stay away from my daughter!" Maybe next episode pedo-doctor will warn Brody, "HER FATHER IS THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY!"

I loved that part as well. He's locking him in a room he isn't getting out of and he says stay away from my daughter. This is like a rejected way to bring back Jack Bauer.
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