Homeland Season 2, Episode 10

Season 2, Episode 10

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“Broken Hearts,” the season’s 10th episode of “Homeland,” may resemble “24” more than any other episode of the show. How bad a thing is that? The Keifer Sutherland real-time series presented such a slick, heightened idea of counterterrorism that it could have been called Plausibility Takes a Holiday. At its best, “24” could also be an irresistibly compelling series as the writers sent Jack Bauer into one desperate predicament after another.

“Homeland” has always presented itself as being more grounded in the real world than “24,” and viewers complain that the former looks too much like the latter when Showtime’s spies take actions that strain credibility. You can’t build up the realistic interactions of the Brody family or the CIA bureaucracy and then pile on crazy twists. “Homeland” usually avoids this kind of thing - I doubt Dana Brody will have to fend off a hungry mountain lion on the show - but it’s always a little jarring when the series seems to gift into a different level of genre. A lot of that happens this week, the incidents of which could have fit into an hour of real time (at least, “24”-style real time), but thankfully were not.

So Mandy and Murray walk into a diner. Actually, Saul (Mandy Patinkin) walks into a diner and finds Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham). Saul knows Adal is a regular there and Adal shrugs, “I guess old habits die hard.” (Maybe the sixth film in that Bruce Willis action series will be called Old Habits Die Hard. As a covert ops muckety-muck, Adal confirms that Quinn belongs to his team and calls him a soldier. Saul points out that soldiers kill people, and Adal replies, “They also fix airplane and engines and cook bad food. It’s a figure of speech.” He also says that Quinn is on the team at Estes’ request.