Though episode 12 falls way off the pace, Homeland Season 5 is still worth watching

Homeland Season 5 was fantastic, tense, gripping engaging - choose your adjectives - for 11 episodes, but unfortunately there was also an episode 12, which in my view was a failure: the crisis that drove the plot (a plan to fill a Berlin train station with poison gas) is resolved in the first 15 minutes, and then we have another 45 minutes in which the writer-director wraps up the various friendships, romances, and betrayals among the key characters, leaving a few strands untied as we get ready for Season 6. A great spy show becomes Lifetime movie, sadly. But don't let that dissuade you. At least through 11 episodes this series is terrific, thanks in large part to the ever-expressive Clair Danes in the lead and Mandy Patinkin perfectly cast as her mentor, protector, and sometime antagonist in the CIA. The tense plot is timely and disturbing, as across the world this week tensions between the West and the Muslim world rise - and terrorist attacks continue. This may make it hard for some viewers to watch this series; there are some shied-your-eyes scenes, and of course we hope a series like this isn't giving any terrorist cell new ideas (I doubt that it is). Yes there are improbabilities throughout (e.g., what are the chances of Quinn's rescuer bringing him into the same building where a radical cell plots a terrorist attack?), but the series moves so quickly and the focus is so intense - every screen moment matters for the plot - that these slip right by us. We're caught up in the action.