1x07 - "The Weekend" Episode Discussion

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Discuss The Weekend here.

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AVC: It sounds like the Tom Walker reveal was in the works from the start. How did you come up with that idea?

AG: Credit where credit’s due: The third prisoner of war in Hatufim, the Israeli series, was presumed dead and then found to be alive at the end of the first year. So we did very much borrow that from Gideon Raff’s storytelling, although in a very different way. Certainly in the Israeli series, the prisoner of war who was left behind who was then found to be alive is not a terrorist.

AVC: Tom Walker is very important to the season, but we don’t get a lot of his backstory. How much had you guys figured out on your own about his story?

AG: Not to spill too many secrets, but this is, in my opinion, the second big flaw of the season—that we had two American Marines who were turned. We really struggled with a way to avoid this, because it was difficult enough to provide rationale and motivation for Brody, and now we had another character, Tom Walker. It was either going to be repetitive, or we were going to run into the same problem we ran into with Issa, which is to make it literal as to how and why he was turned. Even though I know and I’ve read enough blogs of people that were interested to find out why and how, we felt we just weren’t going to come up with anything convincing and real that matched Brody’s motivation. So he turned into more of a psychopath at some level. He clearly turned quicker than Brody. He clearly gave up information. He clearly went to the dark side a lot quicker than Brody did. But above and beyond that, he was more a device than a character. I think it’s to Chris Chalk’s credit, the actor who plays Walker. He brought a lot of color to the role that wasn’t on the page. He did an amazing job, I thought. But it was a conscious decision at that point to keep him more of a mystery.

AVC: We get confirmation in the last couple of episodes that Carrie is really in love with Brody, but what do you feel his feelings toward her are?

AG: I definitely think there’s a certain reciprocated, requited affection or love or whatever. I think the reason for that is that Brody has a secret nobody else knows, except for this woman. He knows that she knows. There’s an aspect of liberation, in other words. He gets to sit opposite somebody, to make love to somebody who knows his deepest, darkest secret, and that is powerful for a man who’s carrying the weight of that. There’s a catharsis in being with that person, even though he has to deny it to her. The very fact that she recognizes him in a way nobody else does and suspects him in a way nobody else does allows for a real connection to develop.

AVC: At the end of this episode, you imply that Carrie falsely accused Brody. Was there a thought about stringing out that reversal a little longer?

AG: There was. In the nature of compressing the story, especially as we were into the next episode, “Achilles Heel,” it seemed to us that, again, the more interesting question was not whether Brody had been turned in captivity, but whether he would go through with what he agreed to go through with Nazir. We felt that it was enough to play one episode where you believed that indeed he was innocent.

Actually, if you look at the “Achilles Heel” episode, what really sells that, to me, anyway, was Morena Baccarin’s performance. She sold, to me, the idea that her husband was actually not a bad guy. In her reaccepting him back into her life and then having that moment at the party, and [with] the family sitting around, and the reconnection between husband and wife there… For me, that was enough, and really allowed us, at the end of that episode, to pull the rug out from under the audience. Again, it’s in the nature of compressing the story and advancing the plot in a way that we got to the more interesting question. The more interesting question to us was, “Is he going to go through with this?” The less interesting question was just the binary one of “Is he or isn’t he guilty?”

AVC: You plant the Issa idea in this episode when Brody wakes up screaming Issa’s name. How do you drop clues like that without giving away the game?

AG: Well, the interesting thing about that is that, again, it’s a sleight of hand. In that conversation between Brody and Carrie on the screened-in porch in “The Weekend,” Brody answers every question Carrie poses completely truthfully. The one thing he lies about is the Issa thing. But the audience doesn’t know that at that point. As far as the audience knows, Issa was a guard. (That’s when Brody says he was a guard that treated him well.) So it’s planted there to be revealed for what it really is in episode nine, with Issa and Nazir. It’s just a little bit of the weave; it’s a little bit of the story that we planted there to set up later that came back at the very last scene of the show for the season.

AVC: Was that something you had always been planning, that it would reverberate that far along?

AG: No. I wish. I wish we were that smart. When we started doing research into EST therapy and realized that short-term-memory loss was a component of that therapy, and was a side-effect of that therapy, then it became clear to us that she should have a revelation at that moment and then be put under, and then have the electroshock stuff done and forget it. That’s how that came about, but that was after the fact. The Issa thing was really to set up the Issa episode.

AVC: This episode gets a lot of acclaim for the last reveal and also the scenes between Brody and Carrie. There’s also a wonderful B-story about Saul and Aileen driving back across country, with their relationships essentially having ended for different reasons. How did you go about that story?

AG: That story went through a lot of talk. Obviously, the big idea there was that Saul was going to take this woman on a cross-country interrogation. That is a direct answer to, again getting back to 24, which is the Jack Bauer course of interrogation techniques and, you know, torturing people. Here was our opportunity to show how Saul does it, which is to establish a personal connection and to really get to know somebody and establish trust. That leads to information.

That was very much the sort of political intention of that story, which is—look, it’s another way to interrogate people. If you talk to most military interrogators, they will say that if you have the time, this is the way to do it. Your information and your intelligence is going to be much more credible. People will say anything for whatever reasons in the middle of being tortured, so this was our attempt to show how that actually might be constructed. We wanted to reveal as much about Saul as we could, too. It’s not a one-way street. Saul is going to be very revealing of his own personal story as a way of drawing Aileen into a relationship with him. We talked about a lot of things, and we settled on this idea that Saul takes her back to his hometown and shows her where he grew up, and the forces that influenced his life and shaped who he is as a person.

AVC: You bring up Saul’s Judaism in the background a lot. How do you work religious themes like that and Brody’s Islamic beliefs into the show?

AG: It all grew out of trying to make Saul an outsider at the CIA, and traditionally, the CIA has been a more sort of WASP-y institution. Saul was less put-together; he never worked [high-profile cases], or very rarely; he had a beard. He had been passed over for a job; Estes got the job instead of him. He was able to embrace an outsider role. We used his faith as a way to differentiate, not only in the institution in the CIA, but also in the way he conducted his personal life. Where he grew up and how he was treated as a boy certainly influenced that, and his posture in the world.

Alex Gansa talk about The Weekend - Read more here: www.avclub.com/articles/alex-gansa-walks-us-through-homelands-first-season,68273/