Homeland: Uh-oh, Hillary lost! Now what?
Spoiler Alert
The writers of Homeland, Season 6, obviously were so confident that Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president that their new narrative had a female Democratic Party candidate win the election. Elizabeth Marvel is a wonderful actress and a pretty fair doppelganger for Hillary Clinton. But the writers got it all wrong.
In an interview, show creator Alex Gansa revealed that their scripts were by design following real events, but "five or six episodes had been completed when the election happened." Hillary lost, and they were stuck with the wrong real-life president-elect. M.G. Oprea wrote a terrific article at The Federalist about the ridiculous turnaround that has characterized this season. All those involved with the production have apparently come to feel sufficiently guilty about their realistic focus on Islamic radicalism and terrorism over the first five seasons, to the point where they have reversed course and become submissively pro-Islam. What was for five seasons a fair representation of the worldwide problem of Islamic terrorism became a televised apologia for all the good work that came before.
Carrie Mathieson is now a pro-Muslim activist living in New York. She becomes close to the president-elect, then not close, then close again, then not. Dar Adal, who from the beginning of the series was sinister and menacing, is gradually but finally revealed to be the mastermind of an odious cabal subverting the president-elect with the help of others in the intelligence community and special ops military. Think Burt Lancaster in Seven Days in May or Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. (Adal even sees to it that Carrie's daughter is taken from her by Child Protective Services.) He and his partners in crime plan to assassinate the new president. Why is never made clear, for nothing remotely disturbing is revealed about her until the last shot of the finale, after she has justifiably had all those who plotted against her arrested. She then begins arresting even those who tried to protect her. Suddenly, the people who have been running the CIA for years, the good guys who were trying to protect the country, set out to murder the president-elect! Did they construct the new direction after Donald Trump won? The latter must be true, because the first female president-elect, a Democrat, is by the finale somehow a female Donald Trump, to be dealt with exactly in the manner the real left have been behaving since their loss to Trump in November. Total derangement. Consider all the leftists who have called for Trump's assassination on Twitter and other social media, the chaotic protests, silly marches, etc.
The writers have inadvertently demonstrated exactly how the left functions, not the right. Now that we know that the Obama administration functioned like a crime syndicate, it is easy to surmise how easily the writers projected these tactics onto their own characters. They even created a character (presumably based on radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones) who operates a massive bot organization to propagandize by social media. He is clearly meant to be a right-winger who, along with Adal, unfairly maligns the reputation of the president-elect's dead soldier son. She is at this point a person for whom the viewer feels sympathy.
As the season progresses, all the malevolent subterfuge is revealed, except now it is committed not by terrorists, but by persons within the government. They get this part rather close to the mark, but from the wrong side; in eight years, no one of the right who opposed Obama went to the lengths the left has in less than a hundred days.
The writers depict those who are supposed to be right-wing extremists acting exactly like our real-life leftists, who, to this day, are unable to accept Trump's victory over Clinton and vow to "resist" all things Trump. The writers never expected or considered the possibility that it would be the left that would in reality behave so very badly.
What the writers did to the best character in the series – Peter Quinn, played by Rupert Friend – should be a firing offense. Maybe the other actors were jealous of his fan base. They destroyed him, bit by bit. And then they killed him. It is very likely he desperately wanted off this show. Who wouldn't, after what they did to his character?
Mandy Patinkin, who has played Saul Berenson from the beginning, Carrie's father-figure and mentor, was interviewed on NPR and, as M.G. Oprea explains, admits to and totally supports the guilt-driven narrative shift. Who knew he was such an abject moonbat? Probably lots of people. And he plays one of the good guys! But as Oprea writes, "[a]ctors tend to think they are the only ones with the knowledge and power to speak the truth about the injustices in our country and the world at large, that they are our last great hope." She goes on: "But they aren't. They are entertainers and, much more rarely, artists." If they are fortunate enough to be busy actors, they are working and raking in the bucks; they have little time to bone up on what is actually happening around the world. They watch CNN or MSNBC, read Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and think they are political mavens. Informed actors with common sense like James Woods are very rare.
It is difficult to believe that the original creators of the series, Gideon Raff, Howard Gordon, and Alex Gansa, are still involved, but they are. For the first five seasons, they were never cowed by the absolute power of political correctness that has ruined so many other series and films. The sixth season capitulates entirely to the mindless P.C. that characterizes Hollywood, the mainstream media, and the discourse on any college campus. Perhaps CAIR had something to do with the switch.
The season was still worth watching, if only to see how even the most talented writers and producers do not remain independent thinkers and eventually succumb to the agenda of the radical left. These writers remained autonomous for five seasons; the program was among the best ever produced. It educated the public about how serious the threat is and how hard those in the intelligence services work to stay steps ahead of the terrorists and prevent attacks. Now it is just another piece of leftist propaganda.