Homeland… WTF?

I don’t know if there are any Homeland watchers out there, or anyone thinking of getting caught up but this post is going to be sort of spoilerish, without giving too much, if you want to look away. It’s one the great things about TV now that no show is lost to us, but the downside is it’s hard to talk about shows because no one knows where anyone is in the series.

But for me this post is more about the writers writing themselves into a corner or maybe not. I will say a BIG thing happened at the end of Homeland’s season finale three.

I was crazy freaked out by it, but if I looked at the culmination of seasons 1 and 2 there really was no other outcome. This was exactly it. This was exactly as it was supposed to happen. Because the writers took us there.

It just made me think about how much control writers have in general. Writers of books, TV, movies. So many decisions that add up over the course of the work that sometimes can pull us into a direction we can’t write ourselves out of.

I mean it’s one of the greatest lines from Romancing The Stone isn’t it?

“Write us out of this one, Joan Wilder.”

“Joan Wilder? You are Joan Wilder the novelist?”

As I’m going through edits now on my wip (Thanks Molly!) it really weighs on me how each decision, each direction I take, each piece of dialogue must play a part of how the story resolves itself. In a perfect book there is not one single line of extraneous information. All parts most work toward a common goal. The finale.

I felt that way about Homeland. Whether they did it intentionally or not, those writers put those characters into a position where the only outcome was the one we saw on Sunday night.

So either well done, or WOW you guys wrote yourselves into a corner even Joan Wilder couldn’t write you out of.