“Homeland” fans wondering how and why Nicholas Brody ended up with a gnarly gunshot wound — and in Caracas, Venezuela, no less — won’t get many answers in future episodes.
Sunday’s third episode of the new season opened with a barely conscious Brody (Damian Lewis) — making his first appearance since slipping over the Canadian border in last season’s finale — being pulled, barely conscious, from a Jeep near a Venezuelan beach. His head is shaved and he’s bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound to his stomach.
But as Sunday’s episode progressed, viewers never did learn exactly what happened to Brody, or how he ended up in Venezuela, save for a few lateral (and fleeting) references.
“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,” series creator Alex Gansa told The Post. “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,” Gansa said. “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,” Gansa said. “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.”
“Homeland” viewers jonesing for more of the Brody-to-Caracas back story can log on to audible.com for a free, 30-minute download starring Lewis in which Brody — in the form of a letter to Carrie —relates how he ended up near death in Venezuela (among other plot events).
“The audible book is specifically designed to tell that interstitial story,” Gansa said. “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.”
Most of Sunday’s episode with Brody unfolds in an abandoned, half-finished skyscraper in Caracas. Inhabited by squatters, and missing its outside walls, it’s referred to as the “Tower of David” — and is based on a real building in Caracas, the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, also called the “Tower of David” after David Brillembourg, who financed the project but died in 1993, a year before the Venezuelan banking crisis left the 45-story building unfinished. The first squatters took up residence in 2007.
An abandoned high-rise in Puerto Rico subbed for the real “Tower of David” in Sunday’s episode, with CGI effects added to make it resemble its real-life counterpart.
“When we first conceived of the idea of Brody going underground . . . we were searching for a geography to put him in,” Gansa said. “We thought of the jungle, desert or a Middle Eastern country . . . and we felt [the ‘Tower of David’] was an interesting, unexpected place to have Brody wind up. It was too dangerous to shoot in Caracas,” Gansa said. “We wanted [the high-rise] to feel like a circle of hell — which wouldn’t have worked if Brody was in a jungle or the Middle East.”