Photo via Showtime.
In Homeland’s third season finale, the show did the best thing it’s done all season: Be sensible. “The Star” was probably the most grounded, realistic episode of Homeland’s rocky, but overall solid third season. Carrie Characters didn’t make brash decisions, contrivances didn’t hinder an otherwise grounded plot, and the dénouement neatly wrapped all of the character’s individual story lines together with a neat little bow on top. In fact, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say this would be a fitting finale for the series. But Homeland has indeed been picked up for another season, which means the writers will find some way to get all the characters back together to fight a common enemy, but more on that later.
To recap: The final episodes of the season saw Saul hatching out quite the harebrained scheme that involved sending Brody to Tehran to seek asylum for the Langley bombing (which he didn’t commit) and get close enough to assassinate General Akbari, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. After that’s done, Saul, Carrie and the CIA would somehow extract him from Iran before he’s caught and, presumably, killed. Yeah, right. But for the first time all season, things didn’t go exactly as Saul planned it. (This season was so full of cockamamie schemes going exactly as planned that suspension of disbelief was abandoned months ago.) Missing his opportunity to kill Akbari, Brody embraces his asylum and Iran paints him as a hero. The CIA thinks he’s turned and packs it up. But Carrie—pregnant with Brody’s kid—still thinks he’s planning to carry out the mission and, of course, she was right. Brody savagely kills Akbari, then quietly slips out with enough time to give himself a good head start before the Revolutionary Guard catches on and goes after him. A few quick phone calls and the chase to get him out is back on.
Photo via Showtime.
The first half of “The Star” focuses solely on Brody and Carrie’s escape from Iran, which was doomed from the beginning. Homeland has made a firm habit out of killing off central characters in its season finales, and “The Star” is no exception. Brody dies. He has to. After two seasons of the writers making him narrowly escape death time after time, his nine lives are finally up. I’m convinced that, locked away somewhere far, far away is an early draft of the script that has Brody surviving and escaping Iran, but the writers knew they couldn’t have pulled out a Great Escape anymore. In order for the show to survive, they had to kill off its second-biggest character. The viewers wouldn’t trust them anymore had they not.
Although Brody’s death was an inevitable conclusion, props to the writing team (this episode was written by Alex Gansa and Meredith Stiehm) and the director, Lesli Linka Glatter, for an almost flawlessly executed 20 minutes of television that provided for some of the best moments of the series. The fast-paced editing and playful writing almost made it seem like he was going to make a clean getaway. At the safe house awaiting the extraction team, Carrie finally drops the baby news on Brody, effectively giving him a reason to want to live again. But the Revolutionary Guard swoops in after Senator Lockhart and Dar Adal go behind Saul’s back to sell Brody and Carrie’s location out to Javadi. As peeved as they both are, it makes total sense. Without Brody dying, everything Saul and Carrie worked for this season would be undone. It takes them a while, but they soon realize that.
Beyond that, the moments leading up to Brody’s public execution are some of Claire Danes’ best acting of the series (the moment when she finally realizes all is lost and when she calls out to Brody in his final moments of life are heart-wrenching, award-winning performances). If anything, killing off Brody was a firm reminder that, while the show can so easily go off the rails, it’s consistently one of the best-acted dramas on TV.
Cut to: Four months later. Saul is now working in the private sector, currently off on vacation in some picturesque foreign paradise, living it up with Mira. The morning newspaper confirms that Saul’s master plan was a raving success: Javadi—now leading Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — has just made a groundbreaking deal with the U.N. that’s a huge step toward peace in the Middle East. Saul’s legacy has been cemented, even if it cost him his job. Carrie, now eight months pregnant, has decided to keep the baby to honor Brody’s memory, but is having second thoughts about motherhood. Especially now that Lockhart just offered her a dream job as the station chief in Istanbul—the CIA’s most coveted station (and also making her the youngest station chief in CIA history). Carrie’s conflict is warranted and her father offers to adopt the child after she expounds her anxieties and how terrified she is of motherhood.
Photo via Showtime.
There’s a grand reunion between Saul, Carrie, and Dar Adal as Lockhart leads the CIA’s annual memorial service, where he dedicates stars to the agency’s fallen heroes. Not among them? Brody. Carrie tries to persuade Lockhart to give him a star but he refuses, claiming that he wasn’t technically an agent and some of his actions were considered treason. Still, Carrie etches him a star with a marker at the end of the episode—a nice moment that deeply humanizes Carrie.
The question that now lingers is, where can Homeland go next? With a few tweaks to some characters’ storylines, “The Star” would have made for a fitting series finale. Though most of the narratives wrap up nicely, the writers leave it a bit open, suggesting a few things that’ll probably be the focus of next season: Though now in the private sector, Saul cryptically confesses to Dar that he’d come back to the CIA if they asked him to. Obviously, Carrie’s baby and her (probably) inevitable move to Istanbul will be a central focus of next season. I suspect that the writers will invent a new common enemy to reunite all of the characters together again, but we’ll see. Now that Brody is out of the picture, they can finally cut ties with the needless subplots of his family.
While rocky in the beginning, I quite enjoyed this season of Homeland. There were times where the show almost lost me—The Brody family’s storyline was always clumsily executed, and this season it just got to be a downright annoyance. And the long-winded play cooked up by Saul and Carrie at the beginning of the season was too unbelievable to play along with, but I gave the writers the benefit of the doubt. And they redeemed themselves, mostly. If anything, season three gets credit for abandoning the frantic, trigger-happy, 24-esque vibe of season two, which turned me against Homeland more so than anything in this season. At the very least, season three was certainly the most emotional season of Homeland, and the last few episodes humanized the show’s lead characters in a way that they haven’t been before. Homeland has always been a show about characters, and the great emotional strain they go through because of their stressful situations. I’m cautiously optimistic to see how they’ll reunite these characters in season four. But as long as they bring as much emotional depth to them as they did this season, I’ll play along with whatever droll plot they cook up to bring them together.
