I haven't watched Homeland. Do they routinely victimize innocents a la Cap Weinberger's maid's son or the security guard outside his house or this week's waiter? Or are the people affected (esp. sympathetic onscreen individuals with lines) mostly conveniently part of the game?

I'd quibble with the "only"— being professionally evil all the time strikes me as worse than dropping into it in extremis. (And if their locations were reversed, while Stan might be more ruthless, neither their personalities nor Soviet history suggests that Philip and Elizabeth would be less so.)

Killing an enemy agent in your country isn't the same thing as killing a bystander who happens to have seen something he shouldn't. And extreme, vengeful action in the wake of a friend's kidnapping and murder isn't the same thing as business as usual.

I do wonder if that would get characters as much audience sympathy if they worked for, say, the Spanish Inquisition.

Yeah, in my case it was my grandparents, and I think it was eyestrain.

Or to put it another way: Lois, riding mower, your foot: pick any two.

Well, except that it would run into the same problem as executing a panty raid on Ferenginar.

Negotiating exchanges with Feds is like playing chess with a grade-schooler. You have to keep their attention on the game and remind them of the moves to make, but you don't have to worry that they're pursuing any sort of deep strategy, or that they're even really thinking about the outcome past the next move. With…

"Glory to you…" (*bug eyes*) "and your Full House…"

So, a plan that relies on Sisko being weak-minded? Good luck with that.

Starfleet: But we don't have money.
Nog: *sigh* Let me demonstrate an ancient Ferengi ritual known as Bar'Ter…

The Cherokee tried that, and it didn't work out. (Granted, that was 19th century again rather than 18th.)

I'd generalize that to "embrace what you're doing". That can be silly, as with the 60s Batman or Batman: the Brave and the Bold. Or it can be dramatic with flashes of humor, like Batman: the Animated Series or Justice League Unlimited or the Avengers movie.

And for a while his character was even mentoring the new Apollo.

Taking it another level: the Kim Possible episode "The Fearless Ferret" had her sidekick Ron Stoppable become the successor and protege to a retired hero, who'd starred in a campy 60s series.

"The Super-Batman of Planet X": Batman goes to the planet Zur-En-Arrh and starts developing Superman-like powers, and proceeds to team up with that world's Batman (Kevin Conroy) and get into a love triangle with reporter Vilsi Valar (Dana Delany) and fight mad scientist Rohtul (Clancy Brown).

Wow— that really captures the style. (Aside from the subject matter, of course. :-) )

Yeah, but America's only even existed since the world was made round after the fall of Numenor a few thousand years back. Elves still get to sail on the flat-earth route that gets you to the earthly paradise.

Starfleet policy on transcendant aliens has always been to say "nice doggie" while trying to figure out which energy locus needs to be phasered from orbit to get rid of them. (If Kirk had swung by Bajor he'd have turned the orbs into scrap metal and given them a speech about how freedom is hard but well worth it.) …

I'm just impressed they were able to do it at all, given the multiple levels of rights confusion, dispute, and outright infringement involved. I honestly never expected to see it emerge.