The Carrie Mathison
Series's obvious hub is a bipolar gunpowder with lousy impulse control. She may not have started the trend with scruffy heroines (think Lisbeth Salander), but at least made it peak. She also appeared in the box the same autumn (2011) as our own Saga at the Border Police (in the Bron, thus), and was followed by other nervous women with straight pathos and diagnosis.
She is an intricate anti-hero. An idealist and pragmatist in the same person. Literally goes over corpses to reach their goal which is almost always altruistic. Carrie sacrifices the relationship with his sister, colleagues, friends. Yes, even his own child for the big cause.
Even the old mentor and constant ally Saul Berenson gets to know about her hard-line idealism in the final season of the final season: A father murder, which is taken from Greek mythology.
Politics
Homeland has delivered a lot of wonderful excitement (best seasons: 1, 2, 6, 7) but sometimes its world view has scored a little false. On a superficial level, the series favors some sort of social criticism, but it is nevertheless founded in the view that the United States is the bastion of freedom on earth. This is best exemplified by a scene in the first season's fifth episode where Nicholas Brody asks if the captured Al Qaeda man will be tortured during the CIA interrogation (implied: as Brody himself became when he was in Al Qaeda's violence). Carrie replies in obvious tone: "No, we are not doing this."
And it was a reply that was written only a few years after the American torture scandal in Abu Ghraib ...
The proximity to reality
Homeland thrives mainly in the mill that constitutes our fear of terrorism, gives us an educational chimera of security, that Carrie and "the good guys" in the long run whip terrorist stock.
But the series also attracts that it gives a tickling illusion that we get an insight into the corridors of power. Carrie's mission has brought us close to real events such as the nuclear agreement with Iran, the growing polarization in the US and the progress of terrorism. In that perspective, the last season is unusually alert. There, the dramaturgical framework is a peace agreement between the United States, the Afghan regime and the Taliban. Just a few days after the first episode was shown, President Trump declared that an essentially similar agreement was underway.
Trump has also previously been in Homeland's mental vicinity. The sixth season was recorded in late summer of 2016, just months before Donald Trump went unpunished. The screenwriters apparently believed (just like all of us) that Hillary Clinton would be elected, and therefore entered a female president of the six - who then premiered at about the same time Trump swore into the White House. But even if you missed that little detail, you got two exciting seasons (even the seven) that mostly took place at home, where the divide between Washington and those who could in fact be classified as Trump voters became dangerously large.
An era is over
But during the time that has gone by , Homeland has gained so many competitors for our attention that it is possible to shed some tears. In addition, we are getting patches on the possible wounds already on Friday when the fifth season of Homeland's French and sharper cousin, False Identity, premieres here at SVT.