That’s what always has been her North Star, and why it’s almost as terrifying to find out her own colleagues think she’s lost it. That choice was always the mission, the agency, the fear of not being hit again. As we learn during her latest interview, she failed her polygraph on multiple questions, including perhaps most heinously whether she gave actionable intelligence to the Russians. Worse still, they’re lost to one of her worst fears of “going mad.” That terror is now being held against her by the agency she’s desperate to get back to. That’s how much time she lost, 180 days, due to the denial of her medication by Russian interrogators. Not bad for someone who forgot half a year of her life. Excluding nightmares of her slow mental decline and torture in a Russian gulag, she runs every day, reads, and appears on the mend. When the episode begins, Carrie seems to have a stable, even healthy, daily routine. But she has been hit constantly, including by a skeptical agency that is unsure they should take her back. She has given everything for the country, the CIA, and the fear of not being hit again. Over the course of the series, Carrie has been scapegoated and ostracized by her own government (twice), watched two lovers die in agony, and most recently gave up complete custody over her daughter so she could become martyred as a Russian prisoner. And on the show, it is hard to imagine greater sacrifice than that offered by Carrie. Hence his unenviable position of brokersing a peace deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban.īy returning to the root of the War on Terror, Homeland is intentionally causing us to take stock of American foreign policy in this century and the sacrifices that’ve been made for it. That includes the new President Warner (Beau Bridges, credited but not appearing in this episode), who has made getting out of Afghanistan a top priority even though, as Saul helpfully tells journalists and audiences alike in one of the episode’s first scenes, it would mean the Kabul government could collapse in as little as six weeks. And much like our world, American apathy for the war is only piqued in Homeland when some leaders try to hasten its end. The country that remains the site of America’s longest (and still continuing) war, Afghanistan remains a precarious situation with a government aided by American support facing daily struggle and menace from the Taliban-the militant organization and war lords still attacking the country they once ruled before the U.S. It’s fitting then that for the final year of Homeland, Carrie and Saul, Gansa and Gordon, return to where arguably the original sin of modern foreign policy: Homeland returns to Afghanistan. In many ways, the foreign policy mistakes of those fearful days have determined the world we have now, and shows like Homeland that were borne of this era. Now though many of the nightmare scenarios Carrie and Saul Berenson railed against in their fiction became our not-so-quite entertaining fact. It doesn’t seem that long ago when viewers like myself pondered the actual plausibility of someone as compromised by foreign interests as Nick Brody inserting himself into the upper echelons of the executive branch-or that a foreign intelligence operation of social media bots could so disgruntle an entire nation.
The world has changed and changed again since the last Homeland season finale, and the sometimes seemingly heavy handed realpolitik the series was once universally lauded for has by and large come to pass as reality. It’s been a grim few years for her, and it’s not been a whole lot rosier for us either. The vigilant premium cable bulwark against terrorism, Russian espionage, and generally bad news has been on sabbatical for nearly two years since the season 7 cliffhanger revealed her mental state had been shattered by Russian interrogators. It’s been a long time since we last saw Carrie Mathison.