Watching Homeland Seasons 1-2-3 After Twelve Years – Part I

I am home after surgery, supposed to rest, and “take it easy,” whatever that means. My main job is to kill time. I open Netflix.

And there it is.

Homeland.

For the first time, Homeland is on Netflix US, staring at me from the top row. I watched the entire show only once. I never rewatched it. Not a single episode. And now here I am, twelve years after that horrifying Season 3 finale, lying on the couch with time to burn… and Netflix presents me Homeland like a get-well card.

So, I click play.

A little bit of context for new readers: at a recent dinner party, we played a game. Everyone had to name three things that changed their life. My top three:

1. The Live Aid concert in 1985 (I was 13, suddenly aware that the whole world could come together and watch the same thing).
2. The assassination of a journalist in Turkey in 1992 (I was 20, and I learned what a state can do to its own citizens who insist on finding and reporting the truth).
3. And… Homeland.

Yes, seriously. Homeland.

Because I was just a regular academic, minding my own business, watching TV in the evenings, until a certain “pesky Brit” disguised as an American POW showed up and turned everything upside down. That show made me a Damian Lewis fan for life and made me to start a blog in his name. Go, figure!

I did, eventually, keep watching Homeland past Season 3 (A certain ginger may or may not have told me to). Time helped. The blog helped. Other roles helped: Wolf Hall, Billions, A Spy Among Friends, and more. I came to accept that, as Brody told Carrie, “It’s over.”

I kept saying, “I still miss Brody,” and I meant it. It has now been almost twelve years since his execution on TV, and I am still firmly in denial. In my mind, we never saw a dead body. Javadi can say whatever he wants about forests of pine trees. I am not buying it.

So, when I say rewatching Homeland twelve years later is a big deal, I really mean it. And I’m ready to share with you what it feels like – I have so much to say so I will do this over two weeks… please bear with me!

When we first watched Homeland, the show had just swept the awards, everyone was talking about it, and we got our hands on the DVDs like it was treasure. We binged the first two seasons mindlessly — three or four episodes in a night, sleep deprived in the end! We mostly cared about what would happen next, not about how it was built. We weren’t watching — we were consuming. This time, I watch differently. I pause. I rewind. I observe. I pay attention not only to the twists and turns — but to the stillness, the hesitation, the pain. And watching at that pace makes one thing very clear: the first two seasons aren’t just great television — they’re a masterpiece. Season 3? Well, let’s call it an experience.

Back when I first watched it, I didn’t think much about how different Homeland was from 24, even though they were products of the same creative team. 24 came from the fear right after 9/11 — a world where Muslim terrorists were always the enemy and the question was simple: “How do we stop them, at any cost?” Homeland came after the years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the world started asking if those wars should have happened at all. Soldiers came home not as triumphant heroes but broken and traumatized, and Brody represents that shift perfectly. He isn’t the shining hero people expect him to be. He’s hurt, confused, angry — and absolutely not interested in being used as a poster boy for a war he doesn’t believe in anymore. His line, “their f***ing war,” lands even harder now. It’s blunt, and very honest.

Homeland isn’t afraid to talk about hard and uncomfortable topics. It shows that governments can do terrible things, like dropping bombs that hurt innocent people, and then deny that it ever happened. The series also highlights how some people unfairly treat Muslims, assuming they’re dangerous solely because of their religion. While investigating Congressman Brody, Saul bluntly instructs his team to “focus on the dark-skinned people Brody talks to,” showing how bias can quietly get into decision-making under the name of national security. Saul calls it “actual profiling” when Max tells him it’s “straightforward racial profiling.” I know the statistics, Saul, but Max is still right. Alongside that prejudice, Homeland also exposes a broader ignorance about the Middle East. One memorable moment comes when a student at an elite prep school casually asks, “Persians? Arabs? What’s the difference?”—a question that reduces two ancient and distinct cultures into one simply because they share a region and a God. And the unsettling part is imagining those kids growing up, getting jobs, and running things. And honestly… they probably do.

The show doesn’t hold back when it comes to torture, either. Even though the government denies it happens, the series shows people going through sensory overload, freezing temperatures, and intense psychological pressure. I mean, Quinn puts a hole in Brody’s hand during his interrogation for God’s sake! By exposing such things, Homeland pushes viewers to think hard and shows what can happen when fear controls decisions. The show is about living with what the war does to everyone. This makes Brody not the villain, not the hero, but the cost of war.

And very quickly, everyone starts treating Brody like a symbol instead of a real person. First, the military turns him into a hero — a perfect example of strength and loyalty — asking him to give speeches and represent their idea of survival. Then the politicians show up. Big names in the Democratic Party welcome him at the event Elizabeth Gaines hosts, eager to shape him into a public figure and use his story for their own goals. Military leaders and politicians want to use him as proof that the war effort is working — that the on -going war effort is still worth it.

Soon after, the media joins in. Talk shows want Brody not for who he is, but for the story he represents that the crowds will cheer for. And then there is Abu Nazir — the one person who planned for Brody to become exactly this: useful, visible, powerful. Brody first refuses to be the poster boy for what, in his own words, is “their fucking war.” But when Abu Nazir tells him to run for office, the way he uses Mike to convince Jess he should do it — shows just how deeply he has learned to perform.

As all these forces surround him, Brody can’t live his own life anymore — he performs. Everyone has a version of him they need, and he slips into and out of each role depending who he is with or who he is talking to, because there’s no space left to simply be Nicholas Brody. As Damian sums it up TCA Summer Tour 2012:

“Essentially, he’s everybody’s bitch. He’s pretty f—ed.”

And that’s one of the things that hits me most on this rewatch.

And as I watch, I feel that Brody’s story begins to dominate the show. And maybe that’s why the writers ultimately felt compelled to kill him off — to give the story back to Carrie, where it truly belongs. When you think about it, neither Quinn nor Yevgeny, nor any of the new characters introduced over the next five seasons, ever shaped the show the way Brody did. In the end, it feels like the creators were intentionally making sure Homeland remained Carrie’s story.

Talking about Carrie, on this rewatch I think I understand her better. But before I talk about her, I want to offer a few general observations about the CIA personnel in the show: The show gives us hints that life inside the CIA leaves little room for healthy relationships, and the personal lives of the characters make that painfully clear. Estes’ marriage has already fallen apart, Carrie manages to destroy every relationship she touches, and Saul — whose wife Mira can no longer accept his work-first existence and leaves — sits alone eating peanut butter out of a jar with a ruler he dug out of a drawer. It’s sad, a little darkly funny, and very telling. And Quinn’s apartment? Almost bare — one bed, one chair, nothing personal. It’s just a place to sleep before the next mission. Watching them, you start to wonder whether CIA officers should think twice before getting married, or whether the only workable option is choosing someone in the same line of work — someone who understands the stress and the secrecy come with the job. And, hey, what is it with the two Winnie-the-Pooh dolls in Saul’s office? 🙂 I totally MISSED it when I first watched the show!

Years ago, my fellow bloggers JaniaJania and NotLinda wrote a whole series digging into Carrie and Brody’s relationship — including the big question: Was it love? I’m finally sharing my take here for the first time.

So yes — I do believe Carrie loved Brody. Deeply. But I don’t think what she did for him never quite matched the love they shared. Personally, I wanted her to hold onto Brody with both hands. If it had been me, I would’ve crossed that border with him in the Season 2 finale and faced whatever came next together. But Carrie is Carrie. She’s a CIA officer before anything else — that’s where she feels steady, even when everything else in her life is chaos. She convinced herself she could help Brody more from inside the CIA. But could she really? Because in the end, Brody ended up being an addict in Caracas!

I’m looking directly at you, Homeland writers’ room. You’re the reason Carrie did what she did… and what she didn’t, after all.

So, yes, I don’t see eye to eye with Carrie. I still want to shake her sometimes. But I get her more. Especially about her relationship with her job — or maybe it’s better to say her obsession with it. Carrie doesn’t simply care about the work — she bends rules for it, she pushes people, she sacrifices her own stability for it. She crosses lines and often forgets that there are lines. One scene that hits harder now is when she, desperate for answers, tries to seduce Saul, and Saul snaps:

“What the fuck are you doing, Carrie?”

The truth is: she doesn’t fully know, either. She just believes her work is the only place she is worth something — and that is what she holds onto with both hands. It is heartbreaking in its own way.

Then while this rewatch has changed how I see Carrie, a part of me will always be that woman yelling at the TV: “WTF, Carrie?”

Back then, I was swept up in Carrie and Brody like everyone else who got caught in that lightning strike of chemistry. I didn’t question or analyze every moment like I did with Billions or Wolf Hall — I just felt it.

That rain scene in Semper I.

The polygraph moment in The Good Soldier.

And then The Weekend.

“I just want to live here for a second.”

THAT line felt so romantic when I first saw it. Now, it feels like someone desperate for peace  — someone who hasn’t had a single safe second in years – is saying it. But the chemistry between the two leads is off the charts. And that chemistry isn’t something writers planned. It wasn’t written into script — it was discovered.

Carrie’s surveillance of Brody — watching him in vulnerable, private moments — created an emotional closeness before they ever truly met, and writer Alex Cary explained that they needed Carrie to empathize with him even as she suspected him. Still, the real spark didn’t happen until Episode 4, Semper I, when Carrie, after removing surveillance over Brody, secretly follows Brody to a veterans’ support meeting and “accidentally” bumps into him. Their flirtation outside the church in the rain surprised everyone, including the writers, because the chemistry between Claire Danes and Damian Lewis was immediate and intense. Show runner Alex Gansa recalls seeing the footage and realizing, “This is the show.” From that moment on, the show runners rewrote storylines, and viewers like me forgot the genre we were watching, and believed in the impossible relationship of these, as Damian once described it, “two broken-winged birds circling one another.”

The Weekend remains one of the strongest episodes of the entire series. While Carrie and Brody spend the weekend at the cabin in a tense mix of intimacy and suspicion — a kind of emotional cat-and-mouse — the other storyline in the episode is just as compelling. Saul interrogates Aileen but slowly gains her trust by uncovering parallels between their lives despite being on opposite sides. Aileen grew up in Saudi Arabia, where her wealthy American family discouraged her from spending time with “local brown children,” and Saul shares that his strictly observant Jewish parents raised him in Indiana, where he wasn’t allowed to sing Christmas carols or even play baseball because the game opened with a prayer. Their conversation is soft and very human — a true counterbalance to the intense, unpredictable dynamic between Carrie and Brody. The writing, pacing, and performances in this episode are outstanding.

Then comes Q&A — the episode where everything changes. The interrogation scene is where Homeland becomes truly unforgettable. No surprise the acting and writing both won awards — this is TV at its finest.

Back then I focused mostly on the words they say, because I think real conversation — honest conversation — is the closest two people can get to each other. Not sex, not flirting, but sitting face-to-face and being honest with each other.

Brody finally starts to break — or he finally lets himself break.

“I did not wear a vest.”

His tears, his shaky voice — you can see how hard it is for him to finally say it.

It’s brilliant.
It’s painful.
And it feels real.

That is the Brody I am falling in love all over again.

Rewatching it now, smaller things stand out — Carrie’s steady hands resting on the table, Brody’s uneven breathing, and the silence between them. That silence is not empty. It creates honesty and connection between them which we see in the next scene when Brody reaches out and holds Carrie’s hand in the car on the way back to his home.

Talking about silence, I notice the quiet things more in this rewatch — the little details that I missed before because I was too invested in what was coming next. Like the way Brody hesitates before walking into his own home, as if he’s entering a stranger’s space. The way he hesitates before speaking — as if he’s choosing carefully between truth, lie, and survival. The way Carrie’s face softens when she watches him on camera, even when she’s supposed to be objective. The way Jess gives Brody a forced smile even though her body screams it is not fine. Dana watching her father from a distance — hopeful but also afraid at the same time. None of these moments are loud. And twelve years later, I have the patience to sit with them.

There are also conversations that I missed in my first watch, or I completely forgot about them, that I pay close attention in my rewatch. Brody repeatedly hints that “Uncle Mike” isn’t as well-meaning as everyone prefers to believe. There’s a quiet accusation simmering under their conversation, especially when Mike insists that Brody would have done the same — that he would have stepped in and taken care of Mike’s family if the situation were reversed. Brody’s response, “You know what? I’m not sure I would have,” suddenly feels razor-sharp. It isn’t just discomfort; it’s a quiet confession that Brody knows more than he’s saying. Dana is on the same page with her dad when she tells Mike that things might work out if he stays aways from the family.

“There’s no place for my dad when you’re here, Mike.”

Mentioning Dana, one thing that I feel very strongly about is how deeply the Brody-Dana scenes land.

I see those scenes as quiet, softer moments in a show that is full of tension. And the moments he has with Dana are the closest Brody ever gets to honesty.

And I say “closest” because even within that truth, there are gaps I missed the first time—like when he refuses to hug Dana before leaving the house with the vest. He pulls back, not because he doesn’t love her, but because he doesn’t want her to feel what he’s wearing.

Dana is one of the only people he doesn’t perform for.

With Jess, he’s trying to remember the husband he used to be.

With Carrie, he’s manipulating and falling at the same time.

With the CIA, he’s calculating how to survive.

With the public, he’s a “hero.”

But with Dana?
He’s just her father — broken, confused, and human.

And I think maybe that’s why some viewers found Dana annoying – which I was never able to understand. Dana is direct. She is honest. She doesn’t play along. She doesn’t idolize her father — she questions him. She sees him.

To me, Dana represents Brody’s last real link to the life he lost. Their relationship is messy and imperfect, but it’s real in a way no relationship he has is. Add to this her opinions, her words, her actions – Dana is the conscience of the show.

And that’s why the bunker moment still knocks the air out of me:

“I’m coming home, Dana.”

Four simple words — yet they hold everything: love, regret, hope, and a future he sort of knows will never happen. The first time I watched, that scene shattered me. It still does.

Because in that moment, Brody isn’t a Marine, a prisoner, a suspect, or a symbol.

He’s just a father.

That truth still matters — twelve years later.

Let me finish Part I with a fun detail about Homeland – seeing a very young Timothée Chalamet in one of his early roles as VP Walden’s moody son and Dana’s boyfriend Finn Walden. It’s especially interesting knowing what came later — Damian told his agent Brian Swardstrom to give the 17 year old actor a call, and, well… the rest is history…

Next week: Watching Homeland Seasons 1-2-3 Twelve Years Later: Part II

Author: Damianista

Academic, Traveler, Blogger, Runner, Theatre Lover, Wine Snob, Part-time New Yorker, and Walking Damian Lewis Encyclopedia :D Procrastinated about a fan's diary on Damian Lewis for a while and the rest is history! View all posts by Damianista