Sidney Sheldon’s The Tides of Memory by Tilly Bagshawe is a classic Sheldon-style thriller (available April 9, 2013).

Powerful women, dastardly villains, intrigue, glamour, revenge, violence—those are the hallmarks of a Sidney Sheldon novel. As a teenager, I raided my nana’s library to indulge in his juicy, racy sagas, like Windmills of the Gods and If Tomorrow Comes. A TV-producing mastermind (he created and wrote nearly all episodes of The Patty Duke Show and I Dream of Jeannie) and one of the best-selling authors of the 1980s, Sheldon, who passed away in 2007, continues his legacy with new novels by Tilly Bagshawe (a best seller in her own right). For those who read and enjoyed the author’s work in his heyday, there’s a decidedly nostalgic appeal to be found in the brand’s newest release, The Tides of Memory.

[Six years gone and still going strong...]

Wow.  Just…wow. There’s been a lot of grumbling among critics and fans that Homeland has jumped the shark this season, contorted its plot beyond reason or logic, but it’s hard to imagine even the worst critics not being satisfied by such a clever and fairly elegant resolution to its storyline thus far.

Remember that duality we talked about last week? Well the people who watch this show wanting high octane thrills all the time, a la 24, were likely really disappointed by the first 40 minutes, because they’re devoted to exploring that quiet emotional side, the relationship between our leads. Brody and Carrie are back at their cabin in the woods, their idyll out of time, and it’s honeymoonish for sure. It’s also pretty honest.  They bare themselves emotionally, acknowledging their baggage (“your past and my illness”), and tentatively wondering if they can make this work…all the while unaware that Peter Quinn is watching them. He watches and waits, even as they start making love—a pretty neat bit of symmetry with the show’s first few episodes where Carrie surveilled Brody. Quinn takes a time out, and the next morning, when Carrie runs out to get croissants, he follows Brody into the woods, where he goes to pray, and lifts his gun, finger on the trigger….

[AND?]

The penultimate episode of the season splits its time between the show’s two modes of operation: high-octane action thriller and raw emotional relationship drama. I like both sides of Homeland (despite having to suspend disbelief a lot more when it comes to the action scenes), but pairing them in the same 60 minutes tends to highlight just how strong this show is at the latter, and render the former as somewhat cheap thrills.

We pick up where the last episode left off, as Carrie skulks around the dark empty warehouse where she was imprisoned by Abu Nazir. She sees a figure and follows him, only to stumble out a door and into the harsh glare of the SWAT team’s floodlights and Peter Quinn’s soothing embrace. The rough edges of early season Quinn are all but gone as he handles Carrie with kid gloves now. He does ask how she managed to escape but accepts her vague dismissals of the inquiries. When the SWAT team emerges without having found Nazir, she insists he must have had help escaping, and attention turns to the MIA Danny Galvez, who also happens to be a Muslim. They track him, but it’s a red herring, Galvez left the scene merely to get to the hospital for some busted stitches.

[Red herrings, moles, it’s a jungle out there!]

If a tree falls in a forest, but doesn’t take any other trees down with it, does it really fall? Up until now, Brody’s status as a terrorist was somewhat iffy. An attempted terrorist? Sure, but when it counted, he didn’t pull the trigger. A murderer? Yes, but Tom and the tailor that he killed were both terrorists.  Arguments perhaps could have been made that Brody hadn’t yet truly done anything to endanger the U.S. or its interests.

But with the events of this week’s episode, Brody has now definitively fallen. He has killed the vice-president of the United States in fairly cold blood. He has achieved his mission to revenge Issa’s death.  What does this mean for the show? And for Brody’s future?

[And did he see it as terrorism? Or vengeance?]

The hands-down best thing about this show is that you never know what new zig it will take just when you expected it to zag. We left off at the towering moment last week of Brody nabbed and coming face to face with Nazir on American soil. But the show doesn’t pick up exactly where it left off, and the A-plotline this week involved neither Brody nor Carrie primarily. It’s a testament to the deep bench of talent on the show that scenes with third-tier players like Virgil and Max offer just as much excitement and entertainment as the ones carried by our heavy hitters.

We start ostensibly the morning after the previous episode’s events, with our CIA team weighing their options. Brody’s gone, they haven’t heard from him, and they’re unsure what move to make next, finally deciding they need to round up Roya Hammad. Meanwhile, Brody and Nazir are parting in an empty outdoor lot and it’s sweet sorrow indeed, seemingly. They embrace, Nazir compliments Brody’s strength and emphasizes his trust in him, they agree to pray for each other. Nazir drives off and Brody jogs to the nearest main street, and calls Carrie, telling her nothing but entreating her to get his family to a safe house right now and that he’ll call her back in an hour. She agrees, then calls off the Roya grab.

[And this week’s avalanche of tension begins]

The tension levels ratcheted back up to 11 in this week’s episode. And if Damian Lewis doesn’t get another Emmy at next Fall’s awards, there is no justice in the world.

Brody is finally truly cracking under the pressure of living multiple lives and lying to nearly every single person he knows (with the important exception of Carrie, of course). While a bereft Dana seeks refuge at Mike’s house (which is in an incredibly dodgy looking neighborhood—the military seriously needs to pay better wages), Jessica is screaming at Brody that he’s let their daughter wander off, asking him to explain why he didn’t let her come clean at the police station about the hit-and-run. He vaguely says the CIA is the obstacle and when she pushes further, he breaks down.

[Oh what a tangled web we weave...]

Maybe it’s because I watched the Saturday Night Live skit, but this week’s Homeland felt off to me. It felt like a filler episode, which is surprising since it was written by one of the show’s heaviest hitters, Meredith Stiehm. But I’m not sure much of anything that transpired last night moved things forward.

We start the episode with a very uncharacteristically nervous-looking Roya confronting Brody on a run to let him know something “big” will be going down soon. He freaks on her and demands some answers, wanting to know what the heck happened in Gettysburg, which answers the question fairly definitively that he didn’t know about it or tip her off in any way. She basically just tells him to sit tight, and to keep Walden very happy.

Carrie visits Quinn in the hospital, where we learn the important news that poor sweet Danny is alive! Though…probably not for long. And we see Rupert Friend’s ass. (Literally, this is all that happened in this scene.)

[Well, it begins on a happy note, anyway...]

It’d be understandable after the last two episodes if Homeland had decided to take a little breather this week, and for the first forty minutes it seemed like that was the case. We open on a big surveillance operation underway, as Carrie, Quinn, and Danny watch from their safehouse as Roya meets with a man they can’t identify. Virgil and Max are dispatched to follow her and get close enough to record the conversation, but since the clever reporter met the man near a noisy fountain, the team can’t hear anything. (How many of you playing along at home started wondering briefly if Max was the mole?) Carrie suggests pulling Brody in to identify the guy, although Quinn cautions he isn’t to be trusted.

[What do you think? Is Brody to be trusted?]

“Is there a plan to attack America?”
“Yes”

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The whole series has been leading up to this, the outing of Nicholas Brody as a terrorist. And finally this week, we see that no one but Carrie Mathison, flawed and fabulous, could achieve it. Every action, every interaction, beautiful and messy and hurtful and scary, has led to this.

Professionalism, we’re often told, means checking your emotions at the door. Especially for women. As Tom Hanks once infamously exhorted the All American Girls Baseball League, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Yet Carrie cries, she screams, she lays her bleeding heart out on a table for the world to see (or at least hear). And it’s that very thing that finally gets through to and manages to break Nicholas Brody’s silence. Her weakness—the emotions, the recklessness, the candor, all of those things you shouldn’t let interfere with your work—is her strength.

[And what strength it is...]

What an amazing roller coaster this show is! Homeland up-ends your expectations with every new scene, making you cheer in triumph just moments before you’re covering your eyes and cringing at the next development. The last fifteen minutes of this one is a no-joke, hover-at-the-edge-of-your-seat yelling at the TV screen final act. It’s a game changer that most shows would save for a season or even series finale, but here we are at only episode FOUR of a new season and the creative team is playing their cards. With any other show, I’d be worrying that they better have an awfully deep deck, but it seems insulting to even imagine that they don’t. In seventeen episodes, they’ve never yet come up short on upping the dramatic stakes.

[Get out the popcorn, this is cinematic stuff]

We all know how TV drama plots generally work: one step forward, two steps back. Both Carrie and Brody’s stories this week had a circular nature that seemed to be following that model—and then boom, we get a knock on the door in the episode’s final minutes that changes everything. The plot twist from the final moments of last week’s episode—Saul finding Brody’s video confession—pays off in a big way, one that has clear repercussions for everyone. Most shows would have sat on this, drawn it out for half a season or more, toying with our expectations of whether the intel would ever be revealed to our key players, or if Saul might be the mole while various contrivances kept him from going to Estes or Carrie with the damaging proof.

Thankfully, Homeland’s commitment to keeping up the show’s tension and momentum and taking risks prevented that from happening. But in a clever opening sequence, we think that might be the case. At the Beirut airport, Saul is detained and “officials”—likely paid off by the Hezbollah—rifle through his classified, diplomatically protected briefcase and find a memory card in the lining. Mandy Patinkin plays it off beautifully, visibly anxious and concerned…and then we cut to him on the airplane, where he stealthily removes the real card from a hidden compartment in the case. The scene also neatly seems to eliminate any possibility that Saul is a mole.

[Why do we call them moles when they are anything but blind?]

There isn’t a show on television that does intensity like Homeland. If last week’s pilot felt slightly laid back, the show doubles down tonight with a nail-biter of a secret op and then a mind-blowing twist in the final scene.

But first, we begin with Carrie meeting her contact. She’s been on the run since she evaded her tail and tracked Fatima down on her own at a prayer meeting, rather than at the expected rendezvous spot. The risky maneuver pays off with a sweet piece of intel: Abu Nazir is in Beirut to meet with Fatima’s husband (one of his top lieutenants) tomorrow. When Carrie heads back to the CIA safehouse, despite a compassionate hug and kiss from Saul, she doesn’t quite get a congratulations. Instead, she gets concern from Saul, then needling from Estes about how Fatima’s story may not be credible. Carrie’s word is not enough, and without Saul having been there to assess the intel, they can’t decide if they should act on it since it could put American lives at risk.

[Of course, not acting could be just as dangerous . . .]

Episode 2 of ABC’s Last Resort picks up exactly where the pilot left off, maintaining the high stakes intensity in an hour that’s just as jam-packed as the premiere. It’s amazing how well they sustain the momentum and tension, even if some of the dialogue itself is a bit on the nose. They lean heavily on the episode’s theme as all of our key players find themselves either asserting or questioning who they are and what they stand for.

Having just basically declared war on the entire world, Captain Marcus Chaplin (Andre Braugher) is taking a moment to watch a video letter from his son, Jeffrey, stationed in Afghanistan, when hell breaks loose once more. Marcus’s 200-mile safety perimeter is being breached on all sides, first by twenty U.S. warships who want to tangle with the Colorado, then by an air-dropped Special Forces team. Reluctant to engage in battle with his fellow Americans, Lt. Commander Sam Kendal (Scott Speedman) wonders if they can’t ask questions first, shoot later. (Pro tip, Sammy, that doesn’t usually work out so well.)

Marcus reiterates the need for strength and craziness he eschewed last week, adding a touching story about how in some old battle, brothers were pitted against brothers. (People really like their nostalgic war stories/examples on this show . . . almost as much as they do their rousing speeches.) Then he says, “Sometimes the enemy is just the man keeping you from coming home.” His wise words—and prescient too, no doubt, sooner or later that man is gonna be Marcus, isn’t it?—work their magic. Sam comes around, deciding to take a team on foot into the hills of Sainte Marina to meet and quell the special forces team.

You know who’d be real handy to have on that mission? Why, a Navy SEAL of course. Unfortunately, our head SEAL, James King (Daniel Lissing), is still drowning his sorrows at the island tiki bar, now hungover to boot, which does nothing to improve his sparkling personality. Sam and Lt. Grace Shepard (Daisy Betts), who volunteers for the mission, despite her own fears about her strength to lead the team after more harassment by COB (Chief of Boat) Prosser (Robert Patrick) and his cronies, are less than impressed with King’s self-centered refusal to help, even when the buff soldier lays out his rationale while stripping down to shower.

[Thanks for tiki-ing the situation seriously . . .]

Season 2 of Homeland returned with a premiere episode that thrust us back into the action as seamlessly as if no time had passed—even though it had. It’s six months since we left Carrie on a hospital bed having electroshock therapy, to ease the effects of her bipolar condition, and Brody on his way up the political ladder, trading on his new position as a congressman with the vice president’s ear to appease Abu Nazir, promising the terrorist that he’ll be more effective working “inside the system.”

Carrie is a new woman—calm and safe in a daily routine where she putters in the garden, cooks dinner for her family, and teaches English as a second language. We get hints of the old Carrie, she’s snappish when people nag or small talk her, she furtively checks her laptop for news on the brewing crisis in Iran, but we can see she’s trying to heal. And then Saul calls unexpectedly with news: they need her. To rub a little salt in the wound, her old boss Estes is the one who comes to tell her that a former informant has intel about a terrorist attack on America and will talk to no one but Carrie. She’s terrified by the idea of going back, and outraged that Estes would ask her after he unceremoniously stripped her of her job. But the pull of duty, and no doubt the lure of being active again, is too much. Of course, she says yes.

[Back into the swing . . . and the swings?]

If you tuned into the Emmys last Sunday night, you saw a little program called Homeland emerge as the night’s big winner, snagging six awards including the hat trick of best actor, actress, and drama. The socio-political drama about terrorism is Showtime’s first serious contender to HBO’s long-held throne, and those awards are well deserved. With great acting, tight writing and pacing, and almost unbearable intensity, Homeland is easily the best crafted show on television.

Season 2 begins Sunday night, and it’s got a tough act to follow, as season 1 was alternately a painstaking emotional portrait of wounded souls and a breathless thrill ride. If you hear terrorism drama and think “24”, think again. Homeland mostly eschews ticking clock action sequences in favor of nuanced complex character studies. Carrie Mathison (played with incredible deftness by Claire Danes) is a brilliant but bipolar CIA Agent, who was tipped off in Iraq a few years back that an American POW had been turned. However, the CIA is unaware of any Americans in captivity . . . until Sergeant Nick Brody (the superb Damian Lewis) is released after eight years.

[Turning the screws . . .]

It’s rare for network television to take chances, especially on serial dramas—true serials, that is, which don’t revolve around the “case/monster/trial of the week” formula. But Last Resort is, thankfully, the exception to the rule this fall. ABC is betting big on the Shawn Ryan and Karl Gajdusek drama, against all odds. The alphabet network’s become known for its female-friendly lineup, from Desperate Housewives to Grey’s Anatomy, to its newest hit Once Upon a Time. So, a drama about a U.S. navy sub crew that goes rogue and runs some high stakes games against its own government doesn’t just break the mold; it shatters it. 

Ryan, creator of The Shield, Terriers, and Chicago Code, and Gajdusek, a former story editor and writer for Dead Like Me, have created a tense, action-movie scorcher of a pilot. Imagine someone taking the nuclear war conflict, military background, and moral questions of early Battlestar Galactica, melding it with Homeland’s incredible intensity and terrorism hysteria, sprinkling a dash of The West Wing’s political maneuverings on top, and then mixing it all into Lost’s stranded-in-paradise trappings.  

If you’re thinking that’d be one hell of a show, you’d be damn right. And in addition to all of that going on, there are an abundance of strong characters and interesting, complex relationships set up in this first episode. Most of the plot is shaped by the kind of men and women the leads chose to be. Will they act with integrity? Even if it means defying orders and taking ruthless action?

SPOILERS AHOY!

[Don’t torpedo your enjoyment. Watch before you read!]

It’s a strong and swiftly paced first season finale for Longmire as the show finally takes a page—literally—out of the source novels. This episode features the same plot of Craig Johnson’s first Longmire mystery, The Cold Dish, as a quartet of teenage boys who were found not guilty of the gang rape of a developmentally challenged Native American girl suddenly start turning up dead.

Before we get to the real serious stuff however there’s a fun opening scene where we learn that Walt and Lizzie had a little slumber party the previous night. Apparently, though, the dizzy blonde helpfully informs us that it was “just like high school, without the sex.” With excellent timing, Vic and Ferg pull up to deliver Walt’s repaired truck, and there’s plenty of shock and awkwardness leaving Walt blustering that they better think twice about commenting. Luckily for him the phone rings in the nick of time, with Branch calling to tell him there’s a murder that needs solving: one of those boys was shot through the chest with an arrow, an Indian symbol drawn on his forehead.

[This can’t be good . . .]

The worst insult in Absaroka County is the implication that a man is anything less than a Man. It’s a central theme of Longmire and one that particularly resonates in both the personal and procedural storylines this week.

As usual, I found the emotional beats far more interesting than the crime beats, and we get a lot of juicy showdowns as a misdelivered credit card bill tips off Walt finally to the fact that his darling daughter and his dastardly deputy might be knocking those boots. He’s cold when he confronts Branch in his office, laying out his suspicions and suggesting that if Branch is a man he’ll tell him the truth. Branch confesses, noting that it was Cady’s idea to keep the whole thing a secret from Walt for the six months (!) they were together. He dryly points out that she didn’t think Walt would take the news well, and his boss retorts “The news I can take. You? That’s a different story.”

[Time to Branch out?]

This week’s episode is mostly dominated by the crime of the week and it’s hard not to see it as a bit of lost potential as we get close to the end of the season. With only two episodes left (next week A&E will air a rerun—the season finale airs August 12), there still seems to be lot more to learn about the Denver flashbacks, plus there’s the Cady & Branch bombshell yet to drop, as well as that little matter of the election.

But we get only a few “breadcrumbs,” as Henry would say, on those plotlines this week and instead plunge into a fairly predictable cult story. That may sound like an oxymoron, but there’s surprisingly little weirdness to this basic mystery, and it would have been nice to see some sort of twist outside of the usual crazy religious polygamy angle. A local convenience store owner is killed after a scraggly-haired, barefoot girl runs into his store claiming people are after her. The storekeep, Ellis, calls the Sheriff’s office, but a car pulls up and the girl runs off again. Ellis quickly scribbles down part of the license plate before following her and, sadly, meeting his demise.

[Follow the breadcrumbs . . .]