Brody was finally reintroduced into Homeland last Sunday after being absent from the first two hours of the new season. Viewers found him nearly fatally shot in the abdomen but he was saved by international colleagues of Carrie Matheson in Caracas, Venezuela. How did he get that gunshot wound? What happened between the time he left Carrie in the woods at the end of season 2 and his stay at the Tower of David? Executive producer Alex Gansa says the show won’t tell that story in flashbacks but there is a way for fans to be filled in.
Enter Homeland: Phantom Pain, a 30 minute audio book narrated by Brody’s portrayer Damian Lewis that reveals Brody’s untold story of crossing the border.
Emmy Award-winner Damian Lewis, who stars as Former Congressman and U.S. Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody in the hit series Homeland, narrates this original Homeland story of Brody’s journey into exile. Picking up at the end of Season 2 after he has parted from Carrie at the border, Brody relates, in the form of a letter to Carrie, his desperate escape by sea and land as the world’s most-hunted fugitive. Guided off the grid by a former CIA analyst and a battle-scarred French mercenary, he stays in the shadows…both physically and emotionally. But wherever he goes and whoever he meets, he cannot stop thinking about Carrie.
“The audible book is specifically designed to tell that interstitial story,” Gansa told the New York Post. “There’s also a bit of interstitial information on the Season Two DVD, in which you see Brody at the border in the scene where he’s wounded.”
But why not include this backstory in the show itself? “Our feeling was that it’s a fairly straight narrative line between Brody being dropped off [at the Canadian border] and how he got to Venezuela,” Gansa explained. “He’s been on Carrie’s underground railroad…and ran into some difficulty at a border crossing. Maybe people feel differently, but our goal was to reveal Brody in an interesting way, rather than showing him being shot. He’s carried into the [camera] frame and there he is with his head lolling about and blood spilling from his gut. That was the most impactful and narrative way [to show Brody] after not seeing him in the first couple of episodes. One of the men [guarding Brody] does allude to ‘those Colombians’ and the fact that Brody didn’t have a pleasant border crossing. I don’t know if it had to be explicated beyond that.”
Though it may not be key to Homeland‘s season 3 arc, fans are gobbling up this bonus material rating the audiobook 4.3/5 stars on Audible.com. Click here to download the book for free and shine a light on Brody’s backstory.
Homeland airs Sundays at 9PM on Showtime.
[Via NYP]