![Claire Danes [image courtesy iDominick wikimedia commons]](https://staticr1.blastingcdn.com/media/photogallery/2018/2/13/660x290/b_502x220x82/claire-danes-image-courtesy-idominick-wikimedia-commons_1832009.jpg "Claire Danes [image courtesy iDominick wikimedia commons]")
Anyone who thinks that the Trump presidency is the end of the world would do themselves good by tuning into Season 7 of “Homeland,” a series that depicted the long war on terror as a morally ambiguous struggle between aggrieved Muslims and a very flawed the United States. Former superspy Carrie Mathison, who had confronted various Islamist terrorists, Islamophobics in the horridly woke Season 6, and her own mental illness is now faced with her most formidable enemy yet. President Elizabeth Keane is providing the series a window into what a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been like.
It is not pretty.
When we last left our intrepid heroes
Season 6 ended with a bang, with an attempted assassination attempt on Keane apparently led by a general named Jamie McClendon. Keane had rounded up hundreds of people in the intelligence community, including Carrie’s mentor Saul Berenson, and locked them up in federal prison as if they were foreign terrorist unlawful combatants. When right-wing broadcaster Brett O’Keefe calls the assassination attempt a hoax, Keane puts out an order to arrest him as well. But O’Keefe went into the wind, broadcasting from a remote laptop with the help of an assistant where ever and whenever he can.
The reign of terror
Season 7 starts a few months later. Saul and company are still cooling their heels in prison.
O’Keefe is still on the run, proving to be the voice of the Resistance. Keane is raging because a military court martial gave McClendon life instead of the death penalty. She demands that the verdict be “fixed.” The demand is carried out as the general, after being humiliated by a strip and full body cavity search, fall to the floor choking and writhing in agony.
Keane has gotten the sentence she desired.
In the meantime, David Wellington, Keane’s fixer, meets with Saul in prison and offers him the post of National Security Advisor in exchange for his freedom. The theory is that Saul would thus be seen as supporting the new administration. The former CIA spymaster tells Wellington to pound sand.
What Carrie is doing
Carrie, in the meantime, is using all the spycraft she developed over the years to try to bring down the president whom she used to admire. Carrie, like President Keane, had grown weary at the moral compromises that the show depicted as happening in the war on terror and wanted to stop fighting. However, like the real-life Hillary Clinton, Keane has proven to be a paranoid, delusional megalomaniac who is willing to violate civil liberties to strike back at enemies real and imagined.
By the end of the episode, Carrie has managed to smuggle a bug into Wellington’s apartment. She is somewhat less successful in persuading an old friend from her counter terrorist days, who is now tasked with interrogating Keane’s prisoners, to testify before a committee of a friendly senator who is trying to stop the Reign Of Terror. And so the latest season of “Homeland” starts with a bizarre twist with a look into a nightmare universe that makes the real one with the Orange Haired Overlord look kind of good by comparison.
