AG: We were looking ahead to the next episode, which was going to be one of two things. “The Weekend” was either going to be an idyll up in a cabin, or it was going to be a situation in which Carrie was forced to take Brody prisoner and interrogate him. We knew that that’s what episode seven was going to be, so it became our task in six to set that story up one way or the other. That was our conundrum, and the way it played out was, we had them sleep together, and we had Brody pull up and Carrie get in the car with him. It was a bridge episode leading to “The Weekend,” and Henry was able, in a very deft way, to make that episode compelling. And those bridge episodes are always the most difficult ones to do. We also finally made the Brody/Mike/Jessica story come out into the open, and also set the stage for Tom Walker to step back into the world. It was a building-block episode.
Again, having them sleep together so soon took people by surprise. I think people expected that to happen, but that it would happen so quickly unsettled people. I think about this time, in episode four or five, you could feel anxiety building in the audience. People started to get worried and get invested in Brody, and start to think, “Oh my God, I’m beginning to sympathize with somebody who might actually be a bad guy.” And that was the greatest thing that could happen in this part of the season, and that was the thing we were going for. And if we succeeded, I think we did a really cool thing.
AVC: Were there any doubts about making him side with Abu Nazir?AG: That was pretty much in stone, that he had been turned in captivity, but it wasn’t in stone that he’d go through with what he’d agreed to do. That was the open question, still. But I think everyone would have felt it was a big jerk-off if he hadn’t been.
AVC: How much of that was you needing Carrie to be right on some level?AG: For exactly that reason. You’re right. I think for her to have instigated and done so many rash and impulsive and reckless things, to not be proven right at that point would have compromised her character beyond repair.
AVC: This episode also has the “on the run with Aileen and Faisel” adventure. These are two characters we’ve just met, and we’re being asked to be engaged in their relationship. How do you approach that problem as TV writers?AG: Honestly, we really struggled with this. And we struggled with it in “Semper I,” too. We just never really nailed that relationship in a satisfying way, to us in the room. In my opinion, it felt like the most 24-like story that we told all season long. It just didn’t have the depth and complexity—and we tried. It wasn’t for lack of effort. We just couldn’t find the scene that brought those two characters, in this episode and the episode previous, into some kind of three-dimensionality. And it wasn’t until “The Weekend,” when we got Aileen in the car with Saul, that one of those two characters came alive.
AVC: It turns out Abu Nazir is behind Faisel’s death. How did you keep him from becoming a Lex Luthor-like supervillain, where he always knows what’s going on? AG: Well, it’s really quite remarkable how little screen time he has, all season long. You have to go look at the little bits where he’s actually in the show. I think one of the most profound parts was in the pilot, after Brody beats Walker to death, or thinks he’s beaten Walker to death. Nazir takes Brody into his arms and comforts him. And in the scene in “The Weekend” where Brody’s talking to Carrie and says, “A man was kind to me, and I loved him.” Look, Nazir is a human being, and it was our intention from the very beginning to make everybody’s motivation in the show understandable. Not right, not something that we endorse, but an understandable idea. Why is he like this? Why is he propagating this violence against Americans? We wanted to make that clear and understandable, and not two-dimensional. And I think Navid [Negahban], who played Nazir, was able to bring an intelligence and a sort of scholarly quality to that character that really wasn’t a cliché.
AVC: Do you have future plans for that character?AG: Absolutely.
AVC: How did you go about developing the four main characters’ lie-detector scenes, where we learn new things about them, and not one of them is the same. How did you build essentially the same scene in four different ways?AG: I have to throw it into Henry’s court, Henry who wrote the episode. I believe he had written a Rubicon episode that was a lie detector. I never saw that episode.
Intelligence officers are boxed all the time, and it can be randomly done, and there is a wonderful bartender/therapist quality to [the process]. The guy, James Urbaniak, who played the lie-detector guy, was just so wonderful and understated and quirky. And the fact that all our main characters are allowed to reveal themselves to this guy in a way they can’t to other people was just a great runner through the show. It lightened and leavened the heaviness of the rest of it. We talked about a lie-detector runner, and Henry did it all. We didn’t pitch much on it in the room. We wanted all these people to be in there, to have their moments, and I just think it played well. I thought that especially Saul and Carrie, Mandy and Claire, were especially coy and sly with him in a way that was wonderful to watch.
AVC: This is the episode where Brody finds out about his wife’s infidelity. It’s something that he sort of gradually figures out over the course of a few episodes. How do you play those moments where a character gradually learns something and the audience is shown them learning that?AG: Well, in this case, the audience knew right from the get-go that Mike and Jessica were involved in a relationship. It wasn’t just a relationship; it was a serious thing. They planned to move in together. They were actually in love, and the kids were on the verge of being told all this before Brody ends up being rescued.
My own feeling was that Brody knew from the very beginning. He sensed it, and because he knew he had so many secrets himself that he didn’t want to share, he wasn’t going to make it incumbent on Mike and Jessica to share their secrets as well. Speak no evil, hear no evil. Brody was at a point where there was so much he was holding in that he didn’t want that information. He wasn’t ready to face it until this particular episode.
AVC: Why would you say he snaps in this episode and has the fight with Mike?AG: It’s the truth-teller. It’s the character of Lauder. It’s the wounded warrior who comes back and tells Brody the truth. And needles him, and gets under his skin, and tells him about how he’s changed and what he’s doing, and points out the current hypocrisy in his posture toward the Marine Corps and toward the world. And then comes out and announces to everybody that indeed this relationship is going on, at which point he can no longer ignore. Frankly, it just comes out. It gets spurted out in the open, and Brody can’t control himself any longer. All that stuff he’s been holding in comes out. And that allows him, interestingly enough, to hook up with Carrie. The idea was that once he had learned, and faced the fact that Jessica and Mike were still probably in love with each other, it opened up the possibility that he could open up to this other woman, to Carrie Mathison, with whom he has a connection.
AVC: When exactly did you make the decision that it wasn’t going to be the kidnapping situation in the next episode?AG: We were struggling with a couple of issues. One of the iterations of this was that Brody found some evidence of the surveillance in the house, and then Max and Virgil were forced to put the clamps down on him and drag him off to some safehouse somewhere, and Carrie would come out to confront him. The problem with that was everything was out in the open at that point. The moment Carrie would interrogate him in any capacity would, by its very nature, have to bring Estes into the equation, and we didn’t want to bring Estes into the equation.
So the idea of this romantic idyll out in the words preserved all that. It could be kept a secret, and the merits and virtues of that were so far superior to the other idea, that the moment we started talking about “The Weekend” we realized it would be better to do it in a less hostile and confrontational way. We could achieve the same ends as a more traditional interrogation thing. We always knew that at the end, Carrie would be convinced that Brody was guilty. But then the Walker piece of information would come in. She would learn that Walker was still alive, and go, “Holy shit. I’ve been interrogating the wrong man. I’ve been suspecting the wrong guy.” We always knew that twist was going to come, but if you add that romantic part, the fact that Brody actually made a connection with Carrie, the fact that Carrie found herself emotionally attached to this man, and that was all spoiled and ruined by the fact that she falsely suspected him, it was just richer.
Alex Gansa talk about The Good Soldier - Read more here:
www.avclub.com/articles/alex-gansa-walks-us-through-homelands-first-season,68222/
