@Tops_Blooby:disqus Look, almost half your comments are some variation of "Dana is boring". Maybe dial it back a little, or make your point cogently once instead of whining about it at every opportunity.

@avclub-0530bd878343f01904d5d9634a4f819b:disqus I'm no expert. The particular style Fara wore seems exclusively Muslim to me but I could be quite wrong. However, covering the hair in a similar way is something you see in other religious or cultural traditions like ultra-Orthodox Judaism, or even the Amish.

@avclub-b9a25e422ba96f7572089a00b838c3f8:disqus Don't confuse Dana's ability to articulate what she's feeling with full on clarity. The scene with her father's prayer rug was moving, but she's having a moment with one of her father's most tangled up (and secret) issues with his captivity.

And if those scenes work for other people? If it ruins the show for you, stop watching. It's not inherently flawed, these characters have been part of the story from the beginning, and some people are invested in them.

Yes. Fara is not the kind of person who gets you with a big speech. She gets you with scrupulous attention to accounting detail, because she found the place on the spreadsheet where you fucked up.

Headscarves are technically cultural, and probably predates Islam, but there isn't a clear line of demarcation between religious and secular in a lot of non-Western cultures.

@avclub-7aee1b75b527e215f31e20a5c4e7a768:disqus He did it cruelly, but not necessarily unsuccessfully. She sure seemed motivated after that.

How do you know they're not working for the CIA? That's classified.   :-)

I don't even know that it's that many people who object to these characters and scenes, it's just that the ones who do are so loudly and insistently vocal about it.

I think he's bad news because he's mentally ill and emotionally parasitic, not because he's a deep cover operative.

It's a pretty normal response for the least powerful  person in the family to also try to be the peacemaker.

Links to Iran would say Shia.

I didn't read it as Saul losing control, but Saul being manipulative. He found a way to make the new employee feel that she has to prove everything to everyone.

I could have done without Fara's long dramatic speech to the evil bank dude. I agree with it, but it was out of place in that context, and didn't fit her character either.

People with a condition like Carrie's don't "get better". There's a lot of horrifying repetition of loss of control in their lives. It's always a tight rope walk for drama to be both realistic and engaging about something like this, but so far, it still works for me.

She did a great job in that last scene with Saul, and really nailed dry mouth. I'm always impressed when someone can portray such an inherently physical symptom like that.

Gitmo exists because not only was it illegal to "interrogate" people like that on American soil, but the Bush administration wanted the public to know about it; they were proud of it. So they needed a place under US control but not technically in the US, that they could brag about. Most other torture done by the CIA…

She actually does have a mental illness, and Daines is doing incredible work portraying her symptoms. She also suffering from the terrible dilemma of people on meds. She feels dulled and stunted by them, and them temptation to go off them to a more "natural" state is constant and owverwhelming.

Dana's not that clear, she just thinks she is. She thinks she's the unhealthy one leaning on a strong romantic partner. I think she's going to discover it's the other way around.

He was very famous around the world. Another part of it besides the reasons you mentioned was he insisted on staging some of his biggest title fights in developing countries, not in the US.