As we all know, last night was the finale of Homeland’s much-discussed second season. In his recap praising the episode, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote: “None of which should be construed as endorsement of how we got here. I prefer Homeland’s first season to this one because, compared to 24, the Bourne trilogy, and other military-espionage tales, it was intimate and grounded. There were hard-to-swallow plot twists, but they weren’t as flamboyant as a lot of the action in season two, parts of which depended on Saturday morning serial-style ‘because we said so’ plotting.” This morning, Grantland published a podcast interview between TV critic Andy Greenwald and Alex Gansa, one of Homeland’s showrunners, that addressed some of those plot twists. Here are choice quotes from the interview, which you can listen to in full here:
On the overall goal of the season:
“We were fulfilling the promise of the season, which I’ve been saying from the very beginning is the story of this doomed love affair between Carrie and Brody. And that’s what we were really positing in the finale: Is a happy ending really possible for these two characters? And I think the answer was clearly no.”
On being true to the characters, even during ridiculous plot moments:
“I don’t think we were ever untrue to our characters this season. As preposterous or outrageous our plot devices were, they were always in service of real moment between our characters. We were willing and able to put our characters in those situations by, what some people might say, outlandish plot moves.”
