A Great Series Comes To A Close: Homeland's Final Season

When I was giving a list of my greatest shows of the decade, I pointedly ignored Homeland. That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought it was an incredible series at times – mainly in the first two seasons, but often it was quite exceptional when it managed to finally cut loose the remainder of the Brody storyline. (I may write about the series in more detail later on) But trying to express what made Homeland brilliant often seemed askew in a world situation that seems to mirror fiction far more than reality.

When we left Carrie at the end of Season 7, she had just been freed after more than seven months in captivity of the Russian government, in particular Yevgeny (Costa Ronin, playing a completely different kind of Russian than he did in The Americans)  the conspirator who nearly undermined the Keane Presidency throughout the last season. Carrie is still recovering from more than six months without her medication, and is now considered by her own government a compromised operative. It doesn’t help matters that she can’t remember much of her own time as a prisoner.

Everyone believes she is a danger, but her mentor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin, still a pillar of strength) can’t help it. Still serving as the National Security Advisor, he is in the middle of peace negotiations in Kabul, most of it with the same people who led the attack on the Afghani embassy at the climax of Season 4. He needs Carrie, who was section chief there to try and find a way to make peace work. And in a level of his own desire to negotiate, he finds himself dealing with Hassam Haqqani,  the Islamic terrorist who, because of his abduction of Saul and attack on the embassy, has become the head of the Taliban. He must also deal with the manipulations of Tasneem the Afghanistan government head who was the puppet master behind so much of the double dealing that lead to death and destruction in Season 4. And even though Carrie seems to be better suited for what is going on here, it doesn’t help matters that Yevgeny has appear in Kabul, determined to pull her own strings.

In many ways, the final season of Homeland has so many of the elements that made the series great. We are back in Afghanistan, site of so much real world chaos and some of the most searing drama in the series – the kind which causes Carrie to leave the CIA in the first place. We are dealing with Russian manipulation of truth, which was very effective both last season and in so much of Season 5. And in the most daring move, we are dealing with the story that started the whole series – the possibility that ‘an American prisoner of war has been turned’. The fact not only that the one in question in Carrie, and that she can’t even say definitively what happened to her, adds yet another layer to work that has already garnered Claire Danes two Emmys. The possibility for a great conclusion to the series is all there. What worries me is the fact that the story line of trying to bring about peace in the Middle East was at the center of the final season of the other legendary Howard Gordon series 24. And that became a balls-up very quickly.

The things that give me a little more confidence is that Gordon and his staff seemed to have learned their lessons, not just from 24 but through the past decade that they have writing for Homeland. They no longer think that Islam equals evil, or that the geopolitical situation can be resolved with a well-placed bullet.  Carrie, Saul and all the other characters live in the world of ambiguity, something that barely existed in the world of Jack Bauer. And Homeland is much more character driven than anything else. The big question in the final season is not whether peace will be achieved? It’s whether Carrie will betray Saul. And that would break my heart far more than anything else that happens.

My score: 4 stars.