"Homeland" fans are now fearful for Peter Quinn's life after watching the season 5 episode "The Litvinov Ruse." After being abducted by jihadists, Quinn was selected to become the guinea pig for their planned sarin gas attack. The closing scene showed Quinn painfully fighting its effects, though he has already started to weaken and drool.
Thankfully though, one of the jihadists injected him with atropine first without the others knowing, in hopes that Quinn will survive the experiment.
International Spy Museum's historian and curator Dr. Vince Houghton is now sharing with The Wall Street Journal his thoughts on the episode, and if it is realistic that Quinn will survive the sarin gas infusion.
"Sarin is a nasty, nasty chemical weapon. If you could make it in an abandoned building somewhere with a rudimentary chemistry set, like the 'Homeland' jihadists are doing, then everybody would do it," he shared. "The idea that some guy is creating sarin gas in an abandoned building in Berlin or outside Berlin somewhere - it's kind of crazy. It's ridiculous. Even if you do create sarin, the challenge at that point is weaponizing it, coming up with a way to kill people with it, to find a way to disperse it. Dispersal is the key."
Houghton said that there are a lot of technical challenges faced by the "Homeland" jihadists because they cannot simply pour the sarin gas straight on their victims.
"You have to find a way to turn sarin from a liquid into at least droplets that can kill on contact, that you can breathe in. And most explosive devices that would disperse this stuff would either destroy most of the sarin or won't disperse it very well. So it's very, very difficult to do," he explained.
The intelligence expert suspects that in the next episode, there is a good chance that "the jihadists are going to be bumbling ISIS guys that will end up gassing themselves instead of anybody else."
At the same time, Quinn's survival looks very optimistic. Because of the concern of a single jihadist, he was secretly given a shot of atropine, and Houghton said this is enough for him not to die.
"You can use atropine as a prophylactic before you actually get exposed to sarin - it works just as well. It's not something you have to inject yourself with after the fact," he explained. "Atropine is actually very effective against sarin gas, because what it does is it counteracts the effects of the gas on your nervous system. Most of the time you end up asphyxiating because your lungs stop working. Atropine blocks that reaction from taking place. So you can't take atropine days before you get exposed to sarin, but right beforehand is perfectly fine. As long as it's in the system at the same time as the sarin, then you should be okay."
