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After watching the end of Season 7 of Homeland, I meditated for a while on what is so endearing/riveting about her. I concluded that I love this character… Perhaps she’s frightening to some or reprehensible to others. I did read that the women of the CIA declaimed Homeland for creating so exaggerated a protagonist as the first serious totem to female operatives. I suppose, being DC insiders, they don’t understand the nature of drama and the characteristics it requires to construct a compelling character, and likewise don’t understand how the chaos of the modern world has cultivated a hunger in audiences for characters that reflect, however magnified, the daily tensions and struggles many of us confront.

“She’s a lot, this Carrie-freakin’ Mathison character.”

Like her or not, for me she is the ultimate modern woman, writ large. She’s manic and impulsive as hell, sometimes a truly shitty mother, and a driven hero despite herself. This may sound blasphemous, but like another of our national heroes – Jesus – she suffers for our sins… and watching her traumas and challenges gives us perspective on our own, lesser ones.

When she storms through the kitchen completely ignoring her child, we get it. She’s just trying to save the world. When she fucks the enemy – it’s all for the state, or almost. When she is completely dismissed as a lunatic, we totally get the feeling. When she tracks down her blackmailer and, because she is deeply in debt having been fired from the CIA and the White House, has no other bargaining chip but her own body, how can we not drink in her bravery, or is it her cocksureness? When she finally locates the guy and winds up heaving him into the ground and smashing him with her gun, how can we not cheer? When she pleads with her superiors and her handlers and her own family to give her one more chance, how can we not root for her? When she loses lover after lover, when her face contorts into wild mask of tragic despair, how can we not suffer as well? When she is willing to take on one last dangerous exploit to capture a star witness in the Russian murder of a US General, winds up in a Russian prison without her meds and emerges seven months later completely demented, how can we not be devastated?

Carrie is us. She is afflicted by a dissonant self, a driven self, a faulty self and rarely in control of it. But she is clever as hell, and all who love her believe she will survive through Season 8 and possibly shed an even brighter light on the seething swamp of our nation’s capital.

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