Homeland Season 6: "The Man in the Basement"

Posted: January 22nd, 2017

By Michael Sulick

Michael Sulick is the former director of CIA’s National Clandestine Service and is currently a consultant on counterintelligence and global risk assessment. Sulick also served as Chief of Counterintelligence and Chief of the Central Eurasia Division where he was responsible for intelligence collection operations and foreign liaison relationships in Russia, Eastern Europe and the former republics of the Soviet Union. He is the author of Spying in America: Espionage From the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War and American Spies: Espionage Against the United States from the Cold War to the Present.

In this second episode, “Homeland” heroine Carrie Mathison is revealed, not surprisingly, to be a central figure in the two parallel plots launched in the season’s premiere: the case against arrested jihadist Seiku Bah and the conspiracy of CIA operative Dar Adal to manipulate the incoming President.

The one major character still uninvolved in either plot line is Quinn, whose condition deteriorates rapidly in this episode. After Quinn refuses to stay at the VA facility, Carrie takes him to live in the basement of her brownstone. Despite her kindness, Quinn refuses to take his meds and locks himself in his room. Carrie enlists a former colleague, CIA tech Max, to babysit Quinn when she has to go out. Quinn ducks out of the house and goes to a local convenience store where he promptly has a grand mal seizure. By the end of the episode, Quinn has calmed down and plaintively asks what happened to him. Carrie shows him the gruesome YouTube film of his near-death experience from the poisoning by terrorists the previous season. Quinn is too popular and too action-oriented a character to remain a basket case for long — the stage is clearly set for him to recover and get embroiled in this season’s parallel plots.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+