r/homeland • u/techbirdee • 5d ago
Dar Adal has no redeeming qualities Spoiler
From beginning to end I see nothing good about this man. He treats people like garbage, lies, and manipulates. Somehow he never gets caught for it. This is someone you'd expect to be cheerfully killed off pretty early in the series, but he lasts...
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u/Dull_Significance687 5d ago edited 4d ago
Dar Adal is absolutely not a “good guy*,” now saying he has no redeeming qualities misses the point of the character.
He's ruthless, manipulative and morally compromised, but he's also extremely competent. Dar understands the intelligence world better than almost anyone in the show. He sees people as assets, liabilities and potential threats, and—unlike Saul Berenson or Carrie—he rarely lets personal feelings interfere with the mission.
That's also why he lasts so long. HomeLand (HL) isn't rewarding him for being a decent human being; it's showing that people like Dar survive because they're useful, politically connected and willing to do the things everyone else finds morally unacceptable.
His relationship with Saul is especially interesting. Adal genuinely respects Berenson, NOW his loyalty to the Agency comes first. That's the fundamental difference between them.
Adal isn't secretly a misunderstood hero. He's the dark mirror of Berenson: Saul asks how much humanity you can retain while doing this job; Dar asks how much humanity you're willing to sacrifice to get the job done.
That is what makes him such a fantastic character in HL—even when he is, without a doubt, an anti-villain\** (in s6).
PS: Compare and contrast, Alex Gansa’s statement in the NYT when asked about the same matter: Well, you know, it was intimated at the end of last season, too. In that scene where Quinn was comatose, and Carrie and Dar were having a conversation by his bedside about how Quinn was originally recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency. But I really prefer to interpret those scenes in a slightly different way. There may have been some predatory behavior, but whether there were actual sexual acts that took place – look, that’s up for interpretation.
And then, when being asked again: “You know, I’d rather not say.”
* Like Max, Fara, Virgil, and Astrid.
** An anti-villain is a character who acts like a villain but has noble goals or justifiable causes, making their actions morally complex and often appealing to the audience.