Homeland: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Homeland: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Carrie on.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 11, 2015

In what may be a completely unintentional case of subliminal imagery, the cover art for Homeland’s fourth season Blu-ray release features Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) wrapped up in a crimson head scarf that makes her look for all the world like Little Red Riding Hood, perhaps off not Into the Woods, but threatened by any number of Big Bad Wolves in any case. By a "not exactly a coincidence" (as evidenced by the fact that all previous seasons of this show have been released around this same anniversary), the United States (and indeed the world) is commemorating the attacks of September 11, 2001 as this review is being written, and so some of the salient issues which have informed Homeland from the start are front and center in today’s news cycle, reminding those who have perhaps grown a bit complacent that there are very real threats in the world and that vigilance and perhaps even more importantly responding have to be an absolute must (as evidenced recently by the heroic efforts of passengers—both American and French—who prevented what could have been a major tragedy aboard the train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris a few weeks ago). What’s so interesting about Homeland’s “evolution” over its four years is how the “is he or isn’t he?” dilemma of the series’ first couple of years, an ambivalence which sought to exploit everyone’s understandable paranoia about who was “with us” or “against us” in the wake of 9/11, became an albatross which threatened to sink the show. The whole (long) arc featuring Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a former Al Qaeda prisoner of war who may or may not have been “turned” to the terrorist dark side, was responsible for a lot of Homeland’s initial visceral intensity, but ultimately gave way to some outright contrived silliness, including a perhaps misguided attempt to create a love story between Brody and Carrie. The third season of Homeland saw the show’s creative team struggling to right a ship which had perhaps gone at least somewhat off course. With the Brody storyline now more or less exhausted (there are still remnants lingering in the fourth season, for better or worse), Homeland has jettisoned the specific paranoia of the series’ first couple of years for something a bit more general, and the surprising thing is, the gambit works, at least for the most part. Divorced now from the personal stories of Carrie and Brody, Homeland plays out on a somewhat broader canvas, with Carrie’s work in Afghanistan and Pakistan providing fodder for the show’s continuing examination of life in a very dangerous world.

For those wanting a “refresher course” on Homeland’s sometimes convoluted story thus far, our reviews of previous seasons can be found 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

Law & Order and its many offshoots may have popularized the whole “ripped from today’s headlines” approach toward storytelling, but just the first few episodes of this fourth season of Homeland seem like they were crafted around a number of relatively recent news events. Carrie, seeming to have jettisoned everything about her stateside life (including her baby), is working in Kabul, where she’s being fed surprisingly reliable intel on potential terrorist targets by local CIA operative Sandy Bachman (Corey Stoll). As the fourth season opens, Bachman has a hot lead on a terrorist who’s long been on the United States’ kill list but who has been maddeningly hard to track down. They have him supposedly sighted at a rural enclave, but because of the location and other factors, it’s hard to get a bead on if he’s actually there and if there may be civilians around as well. Carrie’s decision to go ahead with a bombing attack ends up having repercussions which will spill out over the course of the ensuing episodes and in fact the entire season.

The first story point which newshounds may recall in similar real life accounts is that while the terrorist is putatively taken out in this raid, an unusually high number of “collateral damage” civilians are killed as well, since the gathering was evidently a wedding. The second story point which soon ensues involves the shocking death of a supporting character which seems deliberately staged to evoke memories of the equally horrifying deaths of Americans in Benghazi, especially in a sequence where the body is returned to the United States and Carrie stands in a large hangar with a flag draped across a back wall that is extremely similar to the scene shown when the bodies of Ambassador Stevens and the other victims of Benghazi were returned home.

The entirety of this fourth season tends to expand the incipient paranoia of the series to a point where no one can, or at least should, be trusted. The series started with the central quandary of Brody, a character who served as a scapegoat of sorts for generic fears about the “other”, especially fears of a Fifth Columnist sort who wanted to disrupt from within. Here in this fourth season, the series traffics in a more generalist angst that seemingly everyone is engaged in scheming of one sort or another, something that plays into Carrie’s already addled psychological state. (There are a couple of scenes with Danes assuming different convoluted and confused facial expressions that curmudgeons will find hard not to laugh at, recalling Anne Hathaway’s hilariously manic take on the material in a Saturday Night Live sketch.) The show delights in a voyeur’s perspective at times, as it often seems that everyone is spying on everyone else. That feeling of voyeurism extends to the series' continued use of closed circuit feeds of various characters that Carrie and her cohorts view. But even an early plot point involving the bombing raid involves a social media video upload (another allusion to contemporary events), as if to suggest that even cellphones are engaging in espionage tactics.

The conspiratorial air that informs much of this season is on tap from virtually the first moment, starting with Sandy Bachman and then radiating out to many (maybe even most) of the other characters that trundle through the series. Ultimately this includes Carrie’s longtime mentor (and occasional nemesis) Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), who sets up shop with Carrie in Pakistan as members of the “old gang” get together again. F. Murray Abraham (Emmy nominated) returns as the machinating and duplicitous Dar Adal, and a late “reveal” is probably not as surprising as was probably hoped, but still makes the salient point that Carrie has very few people whom she can trust. Interestingly, this season ends with less of an outright cliffhanger than a more subtle fissure that plants more seeds of doubt in an already tenuous environment. The series is evidently moving even further away from its original premise in its upcoming season, with some reports suggesting Carrie and the CIA may part ways. Luckily (?), paranoia isn’t an Agency specific phenomenon.

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

Homeland: The Complete Fourth Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. While the series continues to look largely excellent due to its use of a variety of digital cameras, there's a very slight downtick in this season's video presentation, something that is perhaps attributable to a glut of dimly lit and/or other murky sequences where detail can be middling at times. In more brightly lit environments, detail and fine detail continue to pop quite commendably (see screenshot 1). Once again color grading is utilized fairly aggressively, with both the ever popular blue tones (for a lot of the office and/or espionage moments) and yellow hues (for more of the outdoor elements) used ubiquitously, though rarely if ever to the detriment of detail. A couple of very dark sequences flirt with noise, but never tip over into anything very problematic.

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

While there are moments of fantastic immersion with some requisite LFE in at least a few important sequences in the fourth season, the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track tends to offer more of the subtle and relatively restrained ambience that was a feature of the third season's Blu- ray release. There are still excellent uses of the surround channels detailing elements like the bustle of the CIA staging headquarters, and when Carrie or others venture out of doors into crowded town squares, there's often a lot of surround activity, albeit nothing overly "explosive". Dialogue is presented cleanly and clearly and is always well prioritized on this problem free track.

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

• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 10:52)


• Character Profiles (1080p; 16:56) cover Peter Quinn, Aasar Khan and Fara Sherazi.


• From Script to Screen (1080p; 23:17) is a set of interesting featurettes detailing various aspects of the writing and plot development.

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

There are probably a few too many sidebars in this fourth season, including Carrie's continuing family dysfunctions and a more compelling subplot involving the supposed lone survivor of the bombing raid that opens the season, but Homeland has rather smartly reinvented itself in the wake of the Brody storyline. Technical merits continue to be generally first rate, and Homeland: The Complete Fourth Season comes Highly recommended.