Claire Danes’ Homeland mission: Keep frighteningly calm and Carrie on

IT has already taken on terrorism, religion, politics and sex. So what’s the last taboo Claire Danes plans to shatter when Homeland returns to TV tomorrow?

Episode 402

STILL unpredictable. Still volatile. Still brilliant. Still bi-polar. But Brody-less.

That’s Claire Danes’ CIA Agent Carrie Mathison as season four of Homeland opens.

This season, Carrie struggles to come to terms with what she saw in season three’s brutally unforgettable finale - The public execution of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), who was her lover and the father of her child.

Carrie had been first frozen out by the CIA, committed to an asylum, recruited as a double agent and then re-inducted into the CIA to help orchestrate an assassination, which ultimately resulted in the public hanging of Brody.

Season four opens in Islamabad and Kabul, with Carrie working at a dangerous CIA station in South Asia. Without her child.

“That’s one of the last taboos in our society, a woman who is not interested; doesn’t have maternal feelings towards her child,” Danes said.

“I think that’ll be very confronting for a lot of people.”

Back ... but without the baby. Claire Danes returns as Carrie in Homeland.

Executive producer Alex Gansa has promised series four will reset Homeland to what the show knows best: action, intrigue and deep conspiracy.

For Carrie, that means publicly working with steely focus, and, privately, denial — a denial that sees her distance herself from her baby and her grief.

“It’s been a lot of seasons of trauma,” Danes said.

“Carrie’s passed a certain threshold and her response is not so histrionic. In fact she’s kind of flat lined.

“She’s sort of alarmingly high functioning. There’s a lot of pain lurking beneath the surface.”

While flickers of vulnerability and humanity surface, Danes confesses Carrie’s “not a lot of fun right now”.

Sneak peek ... A glimpse of what’s to come in season four.

Added to her profound loss is her guilt — to the point she can’t face her own child.

“She led him (Brody) to his death. And she has this kid, who she’s just kind of deposited with her sister and is not really able to face,” Danes said.

“Ultimately her work this season is to … arrive at a place where she can accept her new reality as a mother and embrace her child.

“The reality is, even us mothers who love our children have complicated feelings about it.”

Danes knows it will, again, make Carrie hard to like.

“She’s not in a very flattering light. It’s just a new way to find her to be quite difficult,” she said.

“She’s in these high risk territories where you’re not allowed to bring dependants.

“She’s forced to re-engage with the kid and she fails miserably, she just panics and finds a way to leave again.”

Slightly happier times ... The original Homeland gang.

HOMELAND

MONDAY, 9.30PM, TEN

Originally published as Claire Danes’ Homeland mission: Keep frighteningly calm and Carrie on