After watching Carrie and Brody spend another weekend at her mother's cabin, Quinn decides that Brody's a pretty okay guy after all, and decides as the guy is praying that he doesn't feel like being Estes's assassin anymore. So he heads back to D.C. and, all spooklike, appears in the shadows of David's bedroom with an ultimatum: Lay off this guy, who has played fair the entire time (as far as Quinn knows) and whose death will destroy Carrie Mathison once again -- or else the new Bad Guy he's hunting will be David Estes. His face in this part, I don't have to tell you: Fabulously scrunched up.
Realizing that when you pay for the best, you get the best and therefore his life is in terrible danger, David lets Saul go, calls off the hit, redacts his report on Saul's misbehavior, and eventually seems set to offer Carrie a job as a Station Chief, the youngest on record. (The Wikipedia entry you get with "CIA Station Chief" is one of the weirder articles I've ever seen on Wikipedia, but the sense I get is that it's regional command to the same degree as a journalist might be on the regional desk somewhere, or you would be the head of an embassy?) Anyway none of this matters, as it turns out.
After a serious "look at your life" talking-to from Saul, Carrie immediately demonstrates classiness when she and Brody sneak out of Walden's funeral -- the guy they killed, a fact they are still keeping secret -- so they can fool around upstairs at Langley somewhere. Carrie decides to pick Brody over the CIA -- because she knows she can only really focus on the CIA while she's doing CIA, and the CIA is not actually her boyfriend, and she would like a boyfriend and for his name to be Nick Brody -- but this also does not matter.
Because while they are up there making out, and Saul's off commending Abu Nazir to his rest off the coast in international waters, some other dissident group, or so it would seem -- with access to his suicide video and his car and a shit-ton of explosives -- uses Brody's car to BLOW UP THE ENTIRE CIA.
Gone are Cynthia and Finn Walden, gone is David Estes. 200 dead, in all. Jessica and the Brody kids are fine, although Nick's parting words to Mike Faber about being the man of the house (a total class move!) and his confession to Dana about having been formerly a suicide bomber take on a freaky perspective once the baddies release that suicide tape.
Carrie has her brains knocked around in the blast and spends some time assuming that Nick Brody has just blown up the entire CIA and thus probably should get shot, but eventually they chill out and she loads him up with cash, new identity and the rest of it. So, lots of flirting with this "Murphy Brown lied to us" stuff about how she must choose between her job and her terrorist, which never actually becomes that at all, sidestepping it in a really neat way. Nick's presumed dead, so his suicide tape is mostly just further embarrassment for his family, but yeah: Way to toss 'em a romantic obstruction that not even Carrie's delusions can carry us over.
As Saul is learning that he's just been King Ralph'd to the top of the food chain, and getting ready to welcome his wife back from overseas, Carrie and Brody are all set to escape to Newfoundland when Brody realizes she's tricking him and in fact will be pulling the Ol' Carrie Switcharoo on him so she can go back and clear his name and they can finally be together. In the season's final moments, having said goodbye to the love of her life, she surprises Saul in the act of saying prayers for the 200 dead, and for herself in absentia. And the smile of the Bear in this moment, the last image of the season, I would say, is worth easily six to eight Saul Hugs.
So what do we think? All day long I've been so antsy. I decided the smartest thing they could do is make a list of everything that you might think would happen, like five possible outcomes, and then actually do the third one, and but with elements of the first one and the opposite of the fourth one. You know what I mean? Just make it believable enough that the only people left bitching are the people who would bitch no matter what, while still making it not incredibly obvious. And I would say yes, they accomplished at least that. While sparing Quinn, no less.
While it felt long, it also felt like a lot was happening, and anything that seemed initially problematic was either undercut or reversed by the thing that happened, by design, so there's not a lot to worry with. If last season was the season of Surveillance, and this season was the season of Celebrity, they've taken out enough of the CIA infrastructure and secrets -- not to mention the Brody Family infrastructure, and secrets -- that season could really be whatever it wants to be: Jessica and Mike crumbling under the pressure of being the Brodys without Brody; Carrie battling all kinds of new CIA dickhead authorities; Brody having Nova Scotia problems for like three episodes; the whole thing. Quinn, though. Lots of Quinn. That's definitely necessary.