‘Homeland’ Recap: In the Finale, Carrie’s Suburban Fantasy Is Dashed

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Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison in "Homeland."Credit David Bloomer/Showtime

Season 4, Episode 12, “Long Time Coming”

Given all that Carrie and Quinn have been through together this season — Sandy Bachman’s killing, Aayan’s seduction and sacrifice, Saul’s kidnapping and humiliation, Fara’s murder, the breaching of the American Embassy — didn’t they deserve a break?

More cozy nights out in the suburbs, a preternaturally quiet baby, Irish whiskey in paper cups… Lockhart with lasagna?

I had never believed that Carrie and Quinn could come together — like sharks, I thought, they would die if they slowed down long enough to connect — but seeing them in this episode, and witnessing the look of sheer terror that passed between them just before they kissed, I knew that they could, as Quinn put it, “get out together.” No matter how calm the outside circumstances, they could manage to self-generate just enough adrenaline and fear to keep love alive.

So, yes, they could get desk jobs at Langley. Or go for the big bucks in security consulting. Send Frannie to Sidwell.

But it wasn’t to be.

I’m taking a light tone, no doubt self-protectively, but I wonder if you, like me, felt your heart break just a little bit when Quinn called Carrie on her “crazy road trip” in Missouri, all boyfriendlike and hopeful, only to be told she was “kind of in the middle of something.” His frozen “right” was absolutely devastating.

And then the final blow for me: Carrie’s mother

hadn’t left Carrie’s father because life with a spouse with bipolar disorder was just too hard.

“I wasn’t very good at being married,” she says.

As Quinn prepares to go dark in Syria, Carrie says: “I’ve always thought that being bipolar meant that you couldn’t be with people. Not for the long haul, because they’ll up and leave you soon enough.”

“No,” her mother says. Talk about too little too late.

I’ve often been surprised by the venom that some viewers seem to harbor for Carrie. I’ve always had a real fondness for her, with her uncompromising patriotism and that capacity for “crazy love” inherited (or learned) from her father. She’s been someone who, like Quinn, is more or less incapable of dwelling in shades of gray. Which is, of course, why she’s been such a problem for Dar Adal and Saul. (Yes, Dar Adal and Saul: Rewatch Season 3, and tell me if you can still stand by the popular belief that the former C.I.A. chief is really the show’s “moral center.”)

That said, it’s brilliant how good and evil intertwine in Saul and Dar Adal’s final dance this season, set against a backdrop of ambient inauthenticity so complete that even the black ops specialist feels betrayed. (His beloved former breakfast spot is now, he spits, “a Pain Quotidien.”) What Saul calls “sedition” — Dar Adal’s removal of Haissam Haqqani’s name from the United States kill list in exchange for a promise not to harbor terrorists in Afghanistan, and a guarantee that the recorded images of Saul’s humiliation will never see the light of day — is at the same time a colossal act of friendship. Dar Adal betrays the C.I.A.’s dead to bring Saul’s career back to life and, he implies, to revive the agency over all. “Lead us,” he implores, with emotion that sounds real.

Not surprisingly, Dar Adal has the final word this season, as he makes a show of stumbling over a line from John le Carré — “What’s that line?” — just to make sure we hear it.

“We are the no-men of this no-man’s-land,” he tells Saul, just like George Smiley, near the end of the novel “Smiley’s People,” as the British master spy contemplates the sight of his longtime Soviet nemesis, Karla, defecting.

“I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his,” Smiley muses. “We have crossed each other’s frontiers; we are the no-men of this no-man’s-land.”

Le Carré, the “Homeland” co-creator Howard Gordon told me recently in a brief phone interview, has always been the prime literary inspiration, “at least aspirationally,” for the show.

“He’s accused, as we are, of moral relativism,” Mr. Gordon said. “What he does — what we hoped to do — is present the complexity of it all. Present the complexity and avoid the polemic.”

Complexity is a smart place to dwell in a post-Saddam, post-Bin Laden, post-Jack Bauer era. But it’s also a pretty unsettling place in which to finish an emotionally high-impact season that seemed, unbelievably enough and just for a moment, to be possibly winding toward an old-fashioned happy ending.

Carrie ends the season much as she began it: claustrophobically framed by car windows, the jazz soundtrack of her traumatized youth jangling in her ears. She’s going home, having promised to stay, not fleeing into booze and drugs and sex and adventure. Reunited with the women in her life, abandoned by every single one of the men. For now, at least.

Let’s hope that, when the next season begins, enough time will have lapsed off-screen that Frannie will be old enough to attend the International School of Islamabad. Quinn will be back, his facial hair either gone or grown into an honest beard. Carrie will have a new working mother plotline. And we’ll get the chance to say a formal “good riddance” to Dennis Boyd.