'Homeland' 'Gerontion' review and 5 reasons why series is better

I like reasons on this blog, I like lists of reasons, and — despite the general carping that seems to have soured the once-loved now-loathed "Homeland" in various corners of the TV-watching cognoscenti world — I still very much like "Homeland."

In fact, I like it better this season than all of the inferior second season, and here, to combine all my "likes," are five reasons why Sunday's "Gerontion" -- written by Chip Johannessen and directed by Carl Franklin — indicates that "Homeland" knows where it's going and why I'd like to go there with it.

I'm beginning to think that these intelligent dramas are actually just proxies for the emotional wranglings that their middle-aged writers are going through — relevance in a brutal industry run by young whelps who could give a crap about them. Time is passing, their lives are passing.

Yeah, it's all a trip down Narcissist Lane but you are supposed to write what you know, right? Point here is, Saul is interesting. More so this season than ever before.

This may be an overstatement in the scheme of the show certainly but not in the mindset of Quinn, who in that one vital scene has to confess to two brutal murders he did not do. Right guy, wrong crime, he later tells Carrie.

He's probably right about that. Quinn, as this season's stand in for Brody and who can foretell his fate, has been a terrific character.

Of course, that scene also revealed a long-standing "Homeland" weakness. A failure to attend to the smallest details that in their own way can become the biggest details: What? Lockhart had no cellphone? Is he the only guy on Capitol Hill without one of those?

So in one important sense, they share a gene. Javadi is evil; Saul is good. That would seem to be the only compass we have to go by, but Sunday scrambled that ever so slightly. Especially that scene where Saul tells him — in effect — we are the same.

He doesn't mean it — only a gambit to con him — but he does mean it. That's why the con worked. He understands Javadi as no one else does. It's called "self-awareness."

"Breaking Bad" deployed Yeats! Fine! "Homeland" will one-up-ya with Eliot!

Whatever! Christian imagery in "Homeland?" Maybe not — but the idea of old men looking back, past the wreckage of their lives, to find meaning and understanding. Does Saul discover a sort of wisdom in his advanced years — or is he only playing with the same set of cards he's always played with? Namely: Planting agents, pitting one colleague against the other, indulging in subterfuge that could have unintended consequences and often does?

What is the answer? I don't know and maybe "Homeland" doesn't yet know. That's what is making this season so much better, and after Sunday, I find that for the first time, I actually think I want to know.