I do not reveal the "ending" of the show in this review, i just spoil the content of 2 episodes ;-)
This show i believe is a mini series, since i have seen all 9 episodes and it appears to "end" on the 9th episode. It saddens me because this show had the potential to be extremely good.
The strangest thing about Sleeper Cell is if you only see one episode you will have a completely warped perspective on what political message the show is trying to send.
let me give an example, the first episode made the al queda sleeper cell to appear extremely non descript, 2 fluent naturally English speaking Arabic men, 3 Caucasian men, and 1 African American Muslim. The goal of the show at first seemed to be "lets scare the Sh*t" out of the American public by making them even more paranoid about terrorists than they already are. The terrorist cell acted like the Joe pesci, deniro, and Ray liotta in Goodfellas. In the first episode they confront a fellow member by burying him up to his head in sand and stoning him to death for bragging to his friends about their planned attack. To me it was even more charactered than a Mafia movie.
So my thoughts were after the first episode were "Wow this is definitely some sort of anti Muslim, scare American, propaganda show"
but i was extremely surprised that in a following episode the political message seemed to completely 180.
A young Muslim boy from Afghanistan comes to America hoping to be recruited to the sleeper cell. Through out the episode we learn that he was wrongly accused of being a terrorist by the American, when he was actually a farmer in Afghanistan. His rival neighbor had sold him and his family out to the American army for a large cash reward. You then follow his story to the Abu Garib prison where he was tortured over and over again until he admitted he was an Al queda member. Upon his release, by this time he had harbored so much hatred against America that now he actually wanted to commit terrorism The episode almost tried to make you sympathize with this character for "the Americans turning him into a terrorist".
very strange show indeed, although sometimes very campy and hard to take seriously, this show still makes me paranoid, question the war on terror, and realize that a terrorist attack either real or hoaxed can happen at any time.
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