Homeland Season 8 Premiere: What if your Memory lied to you?

What if your memories turned up counterfeit? If facts you’d been clutching to your chest, your heart, washed up on shore as fiction? Carrie Mathison fell headfirst into this nightmare on Homeland’s Season 8 Premiere. A personal journey into why eyewitness testimony can be unreliable… Even your own.

This article contains spoilers for Showtime’s Homeland Season 8 Episode 1 (“Deception Indicated”).

Does a polygraph test know more truth about you than you consciously do? That’s the merciless image that will haunt Carrie Mathison’s every waking moment after discovering her Afghan contact Roshan terminated on tonight’s Homeland. Not by accident or as a casualty of war but her very voice. Her lips may have spelled an untimely murder, the irreplaceable loss of someone’s father, someone’s husband. Roshan’s wife Sheena made it clear in no uncertain terms that her husband, who’d been utilized as a secret intelligence asset for Carrie had made no mistakes. He was not working with anyone else, no other American agent was involved. Rather, his identity was presumably given away by Carrie herself, a memory she cannot recollect or account for.

Carrie pleaded with Sheena and Roshan’s son Sarwar that it wasn’t her with genuine sorrow in her eyes. To no avail, every word, every syllable meant nothing. Each sentence of denial seemingly more empty than the last. When Carrie made it back to safer ground, the certainty it wasn’t her evaporated. A new realization dawned… That her memory has the neatly penned outlines but not the blushing colors. An entire perception of who she was as a person vaporized. If there’s doubt… There is no doubt.

Claire Danes as Carrie in HOMELAND, “Deception Indicated”. Photo Credit: Sifeddine Elamine/SHOWTIME

How can one convince others of their innocence as a foreign asset, when you cannot even convince yourself? Carrie may have just witnessed her biggest betrayal of all… Her own mind turned against her. Lying with a polished, grinning smile back at Carrie. The seeds were sown to full mental collapse when she asked Mike Dunne [Cliff Chamberlin] about the possibility of Russians giving away their intelligence to the leading faction on the ground in Afghanistan.

(L-R): Cliff Chamberlin as Mike Dunne and Claire Danes as Carrie in HOMELAND, “Deception Indicated”. Photo Credit: Sifeddine Elamine/SHOWTIME

However, it was seeing Yevgeny exiting a government meeting and winking at her that completed the domino effect. No longer can Carrie Mathison put commitment to her recollections of what happened while captured. What is a person without faith in their words as the reliable, unquestionable truth? Compromised…

Need streaming info for tonight’s Homeland Season 8 Premiere and future episodes? No worries, The Natural Aristocrat has you covered! Check out Homeland Season 8 Premiere live stream: Watch Showtime online for detailed information and options.

Be sure to check out The Natural Aristocrat’s recent interview with Dar Adal himself, F. Murray Abraham, on his new series Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet.