Homeland: The Complete Fifth Season Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Homeland: The Complete Fifth Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Carried away.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 13, 2017

It’s kind of interesting to trace the morphing of threats as Homeland has segued from its first season to its fifth season. It’s arguable that the entire series has been built on paranoiac sensibilities, with shadowy hazards haunting Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) both in real life and in the labyrinthine alleyways of her own addled mind, but the first season made that paranoia more of a personal element as Carrie sought to determine whether or not one time Al Qaeda captive Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) was a traitor or not. In a curious set of plot developments that some perceived as the series stumbling during its sophomore and third years, that ambiguity was played for a sort of “having your cake and eating it, too” way by the series’ writers, who wanted Brody to be at least a potential bad actor but also a romantic entanglement for Carrie. Freed of the Brody plot line, at least in terms of a major focal element, the fourth season of Homeland started to branch out more overtly into what might be termed generalist reflections of various menaces facing the world in these perilous times, attempting to transform the fear of individuals into a perhaps even more troubling anxiety regarding whole populations. That said, Homeland has continued to exploit Carrie’s seemingly inherent ability to get wrapped up with people with ulterior motives, and so while broad arcs in the series have dealt with nations or terrorist groups, there has always been a personal element where Carrie has been forced to confront the kind of fears most of us prefer to keep at the subliminal level. The fifth season of Homeland is both intriguing but also perplexing, for it begins with Carrie no longer ostensibly part of any intelligence organization, and also in a time frame curiously disjointed from the more or less contiguous formulation of previous seasons. This season may therefore strike some as overly contrived, especially as it attempts to get Carrie back to where she belongs—dealing with threats both real and imagined.

For those wanting to catch up on the convoluted story of Homeland thus far, our reviews of the series’ previous seasons can be accessed by clicking on the following links:

Homeland: The Complete First Season Blu-ray review

Homeland: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray review

Homeland: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray review

Homeland: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray review

Perhaps appropriately given Carrie’s bipolar disorder, the series has a somewhat schizophrenic aspect as it begins its fifth year, with Carrie supposedly happily ensconced in Berlin working as a security chief for Otto Düring (Sebastian Koch), a German gazillionaire who runs a philanthropic organization, but who seems to have his thumb in any number of pies, at least as evidenced by a subplot involving a website somehow tied to his dealings. In a kind of subliminal connection to the “Brody years”, Carrie is attempting to raise her daughter Frannie, with one of Düring’s attorneys, Jonas Hollander (Alexander Fehling), serving as a surrogate father and Carrie’s new main squeeze. While this apparent domestic bliss is detailed, the series is already busy setting up a number of elements that will ultimately pay off in more traditional spy thriller ways, though the tether to Carrie is a bit tenuous, at least in the early going.

There are a number of competing espionage elements at play in this fifth season, including a major arc which is obviously based (at least in concept if not in actual specifics) on Edward Snowden (Snowden is actually overtly referenced). It’s here that Homeland is able to rejigger the ambiguity it tended to deal with a bit too cavalierly in its Brody arc, nicely detailing the dialectic between those who feel the “need to know” outweighs all other motivations and those who feel circumspection is a better alternative when dealing with terrorists and nefarious governments. Two German hackers who are actually attempting to infiltrate an Al Qaeda-esque website to post a fake recruiting video (one which has homosexual overtones) manage to defeat a firewall in the CIA's Berlin offices (due to some overly convenient plot contrivances which ring pretty hollow), allowing them to download a ton of classified information on a secret deal between Germany's intelligence agency and the CIA.

The series kind of lurches to get the “old gang” back together again, with Carrie accosting Saul (Mandy Patinkin) in a hallway of the Berlin CIA offices when she’s there trying to arrange safe passage for her boss to Lebanon and he’s there to find how the heck thousands of classified CIA documents fell into hackers’ hands. It’s this kind of plot machination that repeatedly tends to undercut this season’s attempts to generate believable situations, something the series has at previous junctures also at least occasionally had issues with. This year, though, the very setup of Carrie seemingly divorced from the CIA while still having to interact with it gives the season a kind of incredulous air that it only fitfully recovers from.

Because the series evidently wanted to hit the ground running this year, despite the change in employment and the gap between this season’s timeline and last year’s, there are a number of elements which take a bit of getting used to over the course of the first several episodes. One of these is nearly debilitating, with one of Düring’s other employees, a journalist named Laura Sutton (Sarah Sokolovic), seemingly genetically predisposed to hate Carrie for reasons which aren’t totally clear, despite lip service being paid to Carrie’s inability to properly vet the secret CIA documents which of course ultimately fall into Laura’s hands. The whole sidebar of Düring’s supposedly philanthropic efforts having this muckraking journalistic aspect is in itself a little confusing, seemingly constructed merely to give the Snowden-esque plot elements a direct connection to Carrie.

While it’s probably equally (and maybe even more) contrived as some other aspects unfolding this year, the season long escapade involving really undercover operative Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) has some of the most exciting moments in the twelve episodes. When the arrangement with German security falls apart in the wake of the hack, Saul more or less cuts Quinn free, saying their continued relationship will pretty much amount to Mission: Impossible-esque dossiers left in a random mailbox which Quinn can access and choose to complete or not. That in turn leads to a number of intense vignettes where Quinn becomes a vigilante enforcer of sorts. Later developments putting Quinn himself in danger (repeatedly, in fact) tend to feel labored, with the season ending climax suggesting a major change for the character.

A friend of mine who’s a major Homeland fan and who thought the series came dangerously close to “jumping the shark” relatively early in its run due to the whole Brody romance angle shared that he found this season positively crackling with suspense and energy. I found this season’s momentum to be more of a start and stop affair, with moments of high anxiety (albeit awfully affected feeling at times, like the first episode’s abduction of Carrie, or later developments involving Carrie's emotional turmoil) interspersed with narrative stretches that seemed padded and in many cases not especially germane to some of the actually interesting subjects this season attempts to explore. The series has reportedly received a greenlight through to an eighth season, which is more than enough time for Homeland to probably both hit some specific targets while missing others completely.

Homeland: The Complete Fifth Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Homeland: The Complete Fifth Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Perhaps due to some of the really nice looking Berlin locations that are featured in this season, as well as a tendency to offer more scenes in decent (and even bright at times) lighting, detail levels are somewhat more prevalent and exact looking in this season than in a couple of previous, more murky looking, seasons. There are still occasional deficits in shadow definition when lighting conditions don't allow, including some that have also been graded toward the blue side of things, something that further depletes fine detail levels, if only marginally at times. There are occasional uses of what looks like stock footage for some establishing shots, and those brief moments don't have the same clarity as the bulk of the presentation. While ubiquitous close-ups help the overall presentation of fine detail, there's also regular use of "jiggly cam", something that can give the perception of softness at times.

Homeland: The Complete Fifth Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Homeland: The Complete Fifth Season offers regular immersion courtesy of some of the busy urban environments in Berlin, but also due to other crowded sequences, like those in a refugee camp Carrie visits. Quinn's exploits feature some fun sound effects, including some good use of LFE when explosions enter the fray. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly with no problems whatsoever.

Homeland: The Complete Fifth Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Evolution of Carrie Mathison (1080p; 10:56) is an interesting overview of the character's development and background.


• Homeland in Berlin: Beyond the Wall (1080p; 9:30) looks at this season's focal locale.

Homeland: The Complete Fifth Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There are a number of really interesting elements in this season of Homeland, including a bunch of "ripped from the headlines" content like refugee crises and hacking (and subsequent release of classified documents), but the series has a too strained time trying to get Carrie involved in everything. The interplay between Quinn and Carrie (whether covert or overt), something that comes to a head as the season closes, provides some of this year's most exciting moments, but there's a tendency to put major characters in harm's way a few too many times. The series continues to be generally riveting, but I personally think things might be more cohesive (and coherent) if the writers simply let Carrie be the good, old fashioned manic depressive CIA operative she used to be. Technical merits are strong, and Homeland: The Complete Fifth Season comes Recommended.