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Haunted by a fellow inmate in much worse shape than she is, Carrie is at the breaking point. Her discharge hearing goes swimmingly, but Dar Adal sinks that too. At wit's end and losing her grip, she sends Saul a message that she gives up and can't keep fighting the situation like this. morning, she's free on a 24-hour furlough -- but that creepy lawyer from last week, Paul Franklin, is waiting in her house and insistent that she meet with Martin Donovan to discuss his client in the morning, or else she's going right back inside.
After a long day of learning that everything is gone -- bank accounts and passport frozen, car missing, TSA no-fly list, the whole deal -- and a nice coded warning from the compromised Virgil -- she shows up back at that hot ginger rando's house for a sleepover. She wakes up the day -- robs the guy while he's sleeping, because Carrie Mathison rules -- and is ... immediately picked up by the scary lawyers. Like the second she hits concrete they appear out of nowhere like it's the Matrix.
Meanwhile, Dana is so fucking stupid. She helps Leo escape from the mental facility and they run around saying poetry to gravestones and poetry to airstrips and it's so, so awkward and awful. I guess you guys have a point, because she was pretty tough to take this week. Also, Leo manslaughtered (or maybe murdered) his little brother and he was in the hospital purely as a deal with the DA. So he might not even be the respectable kind of crazy where you get treatment and manage yourself; he might be the kind of crazy that shoots Dana in the head.
On the upside the lovely Mike Faber is still around, and super down for listening to Jessica's constant bitching.
Fara tracks the money embezzled from Iran to a football arena in -- oddly enough -- Caracas, because it turns out Majid Javadi is a huge soccer fan and only launders money through soccer fields and loves to travel under the name of a soccer player and take his corrupt Wall Street banker buddies to soccer games. Fara is of the opinion that Iran should know about this and then shoot him to death, but Saul's main thing is that he wants to interrogate the guy, meaning we're going to end up keeping him safe probably.
On the Carrie end, it is very intense. Martin Donovan admits over breakfast that he is a lawyer for an unnamed person that is totally Majid Javadi, who wants to put her on retainer as a consultant to explain the whole Tin Man operation, and how those guys got made, and how come Quinn is so fucking amazing, and all those kind of hot questions everybody's asking. After a rousing speech about the CIA discrediting Carrie in order to distract from their larger mishaps and oversights, Martin reminds her that she'll most likely be dead in six months anyway, because she's still always going to be a loose end... So Carrie! Agrees! To turn! They give her a fat wad of cash and leave her at a mall, to be a traitor and buy new traitor clothes for herself.
But then double twist! After five hours of spycraft and countermeasures, she finally makes it -- on foot, because this bitch is for real -- to Saul's house where, after some mutual wariness and general stress because of how much they stress each other out, she goes, "It worked." Turns out they had a contingency plan in case she was ever approached as an asset, which she managed to pull off even though she was reduced to running in circles and robbing random hotties and having breakfast with Martin Donovan. Saul is so proud of her for being such a good spy -- even after he and Dar Adal ruined each and every aspect of her entire life and smeared her in public -- that they hug and cry and rock back and forth on a veranda. It is sweet and it is awesome, and it's exactly the act break that happens every year on this episode.
Week: Hopefully Leo goes from bad to way worse and Dana can finally have an interesting storyline; maybe we'll check in with Brody and his hilarious heroin addiction, although frankly I'd rather see what Quinn is up to if I had to pick; and I guess Carrie -- while being all jealous of Saul's new protégée, I bet -- gets to be a double agent for Majid Javadi. A job that I'm hoping goes all season and eventually results in a field trip to Caracas, if you know what I mean. Or at least World Cup tickets.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Carrie testified that she was briefly fired for her unauthorized surveillance of the Brody home, and then reinstated for an off-book taskforce to expose Abu Nazir's American network: As the Agency's point person on Nazir, she tracked his whereabouts and tried to anticipate his moves. In the end, she was outsmarted, and that was 12/12.
Meanwhile, Saul emoted in front of Dar Adal that he wished nothing more than to publicly support her, but agreed that Lockhart's anti-CIA agenda was the key to the ugliness.
Dar Adal: "He'll go right after her. What if she can't handle it?"
Saul: "She can."
Dar Adal: "What if she can't? Just saying, her history of insubordination and mental illness might be more useful to us than a good performance in front of the select committee..."
"I won't do that," Saul barked. "I won't throw Carrie under the bus."
Carrie testified that she was on track with Brody's loyalties all along -- true even when she didn't know it -- but the Committee produced the Attorney General's secret memo offering Nick "immunity," for being a double agent. She perjured herself for the first time then, saying she knew nothing about that deal, which meant the question had to be, "At what point did the Agency know Brody was a bad guy?" Which is when Carrie's lawyer stepped in and said further testimony in this direction would compromise the ongoing manhunt for Brody... And Carrie spoke up to say Nick Brody didn't even do it.
Her lawyer wasn't thrilled about that, but agreed that the suicide vest thing from Season One -- the actual reason for Nick's 12/12 confession tape, for a bombing that never happened thanks to Dana -- is the main thing nobody can ever mention. Everything else is up for debate, including any number of scapegoats, to protect the Agency.
When Carrie called Saul, freaked out about the memo getting leaked, that was their first conversation we've seen since 12/12: He reassured her that he'd find the leak, and told her to stay strong. "Don't tell me to calm down," she spat. "I feel like I walked into a propeller." And he said, "Well, you got out alive." He asked if she was okay otherwise, and she snorted in his ear. Who knows what they really meant.
When he told Dar Adal about the leaked memo, it distracted him from downing Carrie more, and they talked about how Operation Tin Man was just the thing to take the heat off her and the hearings. Saul constructed for Dar Adal a narrative in which Dar was the suspect, taking down Carrie from the inside once again; Dar had the advantage of knowing this wasn't true, as did Saul.
Back home, Carrie admitted to having gone off her medication, because it kept her from noticing the 12/12 retaliation for turning Nick and killing Nazir, but promised that she was pursuing alternative measures to stay razor sharp without going manic: Walking a balance. "It was right in front of my eyes," she said, "And I never saw it coming."
Back home, Saul complained to his wife about being CIA Director, and worried that these hearings might destroy the credibility of the Agency, and possibly their charter itself. He didn't love Tin Man, even given the worth of a victory: "We're not assassins, Mira. We're spies. We don't kill our targets if we don't have to. We trawl for 'em, we develop 'em. And then we redirect them, against more important targets." His ambivalence about his marriage is also his ambivalence about the Agency; Carrie doesn't come up.
Mira: "You do everything you can to avoid making a decision..."
Saul: "I'm just waiting for the right answer to present itself."
Mira: "Well, it's paralyzing you."
Saul: "Apparently."
Heading back into Congress, the lawyer informed Carrie that she'd be retracting some testimony, after we saw this part of their conversation:
Carrie: "This is how Saul wants to play it?"
Lawyer: "It's how we both think it should be played."
Carrie: "Well, he should have asked me himself."
Carrie's written statement to the Committee stated that the hours between the explosion and her return to the scene -- when she was smuggling Nick out of the country -- were spent unconscious in the Ladies'. Again, the Committee produced testimony that she was seen bouncing from that funeral with Nick; the lawyer pled the Fifth for her, and Lockhart got pissed enough to hold her in contempt of Congress.
day, the Mad Leaker went to the newspaper: An unnamed case officer maybe was sleeping with Congressman Brody leading up to 12/12. As of that time (and still) her name was withheld for her safety and that of her active field agents.
Dar Adal: "We are pragmatists, we adapt. We are not keepers of some sacred flame."
Saul: "Doesn't have to be sacred. Just so long as we keep it lit."
(Were they talking about Carrie? No.)
Dar Adal: "Eye for a fucking eye. Quinn saved our asses..."
Carrie busted into their little brunch, ranting and raving, and this is what she said: "I assume you've seen this... Of course you have. We all know how we hate things getting out into the press, unless of course we put them out there ourselves. You don't think I know what you're doing? I know exactly what you are doing." Dar Adal watched, growling, and when they started to look he slipped into handler mode.
CIA: "Come on, sit down. Have some tiramisu. We'll talk about this."
Carrie: "There's nothing to talk about!"
CIA: "We will contain this..."
Carrie: "Contain it!? You are containing it!"
They weren't clues, exactly, but they don't contradict the truth: "Brody was your operation, Saul. Remember that. You proposed it, you sanctioned it, you ran it. Now, fuck you! Fuck all of you!"
When she was gone, Saul admitted -- for the second time -- that this was exactly Dar Adal's kind of strategy: He'd burn her in just this way, and force her out into the cold. But Dar Adal wasn't doing that. It was flattering, a smart plan to sink her, but wasn't him that did it. And since it wasn't him doing it, it wasn't really happening at all: Whoever was leaking that stuff, it wasn't coming from Dar Adal and therefore it wasn't the narrative Carrie, or Saul -- or you -- were imagining it to be.
Saul's testimony, then, was a shock. Not because it wasn't true -- and not because it wasn't part of the plan -- but because it was hard to hear. Hard to hear Carrie's mistakes blasted without her triumphs. The lows without the highs. If the information in the paper was correct, Lockhart proposed, then the Agency itself brought 12/12 down on its own head: A compromised agent getting triple-crossed by the man who controlled her.
Saul: "[That] information is flawed. It wasn't entirely an Agency matter. The case officer in question has a history of erratic behavior, she's unstable. She's been diagnosed as bipolar, a condition she concealed from her superiors for more than ten years."
Lockhart: "What else did she conceal from you, Mr. Berenson? The fact she was sleeping with Congressman Brody?"
Saul: "It was on my watch. Whatever happens on my watch, I take full responsibility. But yes, I'm afraid she did."
Back on that couch, where she watched Brody's homecoming and months and days that followed, Carrie took that one in the gut. It's the second alone scene, not for show, and one of the more problematic for those determined to feel cheated by this story. But you know what, I'm tired of doing the apologetics every week for people who shouldn't be watching the show in the first place.
If you can't handle questioning the veracity and personality and motives of the people on the show, if you can't handle compartmentalization and unstable narratives, if you don't understand the first rule of spycraft is living the lie, you are never going to enjoy this show. The show is about lies, about intimacy betrayed by agendas you never saw coming and the world turning itself upside down in front of you. Nick Brody wasn't confirmed as a terrorist for at least the first act of Season One. The show has always been this. It continually finds new ways to fit function to form, which is ambitious and beautiful, if not always entirely successful.
Every season of Mad Men is the worst season of Mad Men, to a johnny-come-lately who confuses the hype with their own responses to things. (Especially cable-prestige hype, the last TV bastion of effort-free, NPR-style intellectual cache; consumption-as-badge of honor.) The downside of watercooler buzz is the inevitable fallout when you get tired of sternly forcing yourself to pretend to like something that is not for you. And when that moment comes, the angrier you are the more obvious it is to the rest of us that you crashed a party you shouldn't have been attending in the first place. The good news is, the conversation you wanted to have when the show was trendy is the exact same conversation you want to have now: Whatever everybody else is saying. So it serves the same purpose either way. It's not a conversation, really, but it's a communal activity that brings us closer together through bitching, and I guess that's something in this day and age.
I'm not saying you're stupid if you're don't like Homeland, I have no idea who you are or why you like what you like or don't like what you don't like. In fact, I'm saying the opposite: You're only stupid if you needed three whole years to figure out you don't like it. And now all that energy of self-labeling that you did to prove how enmeshed in the zeitgeist you were -- and the later you get on the bandwagon, always, the louder you yell -- now can be turned to the activity of self-labeling that you are over it, onto to the thing, too cool for a worn-out story you never really liked in the first place. Either way it's about you, and I really don't feel like talking about it anymore.
For the rest of us, all I can say is that I still have questions about this episode, and can easily wait for week to tell me where the story is going from here, because it's a lot easier to let the story tell itself to you when you're not trying to win against the story. So, all those things above were the first episode, and there's not really anything questionable in it yet. (And yes, actually going back through all these scenes does make me feel a bit like Carrie Mathison, but the main reason I recap shows is because I want to be forced to think about them, so here we are.)
The showrunner tells us that Carrie's scene -- in which she appears at Saul's house, out of her mind after his testimony and/or rethinking their strategy -- represents Carrie's flexibility as she plays the story out: Finding Mira at the door, she goes straight into the act. I wonder if the act is not also what led her to blurt out about Nick's innocence in her first scene, actually: If this plan works, it'll do double duty at different parts in the story. First it helps discredit her as a crazy person, and then when everything is revealed, it rebuilds both her credibility and Nick's, because she comes back to being the girl who is always right, including about him. Be sure to tell him I came by," she hisses at Mira, "He had his chance."
The thing we know, Dar Adal is notifying Saul that Carrie is trying to follow-up with the reporter who published the original story, which by any measure is nuts. They both know she's going to tell the truth, to try and clear Nick's name so she doesn't have to clear her own, and again it serves double duty: It gets Dar Adal riled up (and thinking he's been right all along that she needs to be put down) and gives them a pretext to commit her. And again, it establishes a trail of breadcrumbs for the endgame, after we get Javadi, and additionally it makes Dar Adal look more than a little foolish, as Saul uses his mythology-of-self to sell the story he wants to tell:
"She's out for blood, Saul. We keep her away from these guys, she just goes somewhere else. Look, we knew this might happen. We planned for it. I just wanted you to know I'm gonna stop her."
Here's what she tells the reporter before security arrives: Her name is Carrie Mathison, she's been with the CIA for fourteen years, and she recently came quote "under attack" by them, as evidenced by the reporter's own story last week. (It's been a week, what's been going on this whole week?) She says that nobody at the CIA was in a relationship with the Langley Bomber -- which is verbal legerdemain, Nick isn't the Langley Bomber -- because she wants that on tape as a soundbite unto itself. Then she tries to get the reporter to admit the CIA's responsible for the leak, on the way to making herself look crazy as hell:
"The CIA gave you that story! To set me up for the Big Lie! Nicholas Brody is not responsible for the explosion at Langley!" She claims she can prove it, and that Saul Berenson knew this when he testified before Congress last week; in fact, that "everything he said was bullshit." She goes into the mantra that saves and damns her, every time -- "I'm not the one who got it wrong. I'm the only one who got it right, and for the longest time I couldn't get anyone at the CIA to believe me" -- and then DC Metro shows up. She blames Saul again for this, perhaps keeping Adal's name out of it, and ascertains that the reporter told her editor Carrie was coming in. They bring her in on a 24-hour psych hold, pending a full commitment hearing, and cart her away.
This is when it gets interesting, because this is when the game is actually afoot: This is when the compartmentalization actually has to happen. Before, even going to the newspaper, even crying alone with her TV set, that was all pretty what she'd be doing anyway. But now the spy part comes in, because she has to simultaneously go crazy and not go crazy. She has to live one lie while holding fast to another, and hope that whatever gets squeezed out between those two halves of the anvil is still cognizant enough to save the world.
We know it'll be a horrible four weeks before she's free again, she doesn't even have the comfort of a number. She's just going in, and maybe never coming out again -- and this may be relevant down the road, because she's also poisoning the value of her psychiatric care, making it into a game inside a game. You can't have breakthroughs and sudden moments of honesty when you're playing a person who is like 85% yourself and 15% lies, so her time inside is actually less healthy than never going in at all.
"I know what a commitment hearing is. I just can't believe they're actually going through with it," she says, sounding completely rational and completely nuts at the same time, as is required. "I get it. Someone tries to tell the truth, you counter by calling them crazy. I admire the move; it's elegant, but it's unnecessary. Tell them that, I'm standing down. I've learned my lesson."
Again, it's double duty: It compromises her credibility for now, while establishing a retroactive narrative for the end. Even calling the intake doctor a "CIA shill who's trying to shut me up," she tells as much of the truth as she can, regarding her medication and her compensatory routine: "Considering I'm chained to a gurney in a hospital gown, I'd say I'm beyond calm, I'm fucking Zen! I just can't do the meds anymore." She mentions blaming them for missing the 12/12 clues, and then abruptly changes her story about his part in her confabulation: "I see it already, the doubt on your face, but I am CIA. You can verify it. Unless of course they expunged my records, which ... come to think of it, is a real possibility."
She laughs, which in some ways is the most Carrie she's been all year: She loves those kind of mental trapdoors and mise en abyme tricks when she's manic. It's part of the pressured speech alliteration stuff she did after she got blown up that time, do you remember that? This is the most off-her-meds stuff I think Carrie (baseline, actual Carrie who is being a spy right now) does the whole time. Not her histrionics and hysterics later, just this little joke with herself at the pieces snapping together: A story about a girl telling a story about a girl telling a story about a girl.
When Quinn comes to visit, he's extremely worried about her -- and perhaps off on his own drama, as the person who suffered Nick Brody to live -- but I don't know how much he knows. The Big Plan is obviously restricted to just Saul and Carrie (cf. Mira, for example) but I don't know if anybody else believes in Nick's innocence. Anyway, she just yells and bitches and Harry & The Hendersonses him to leave, because while he's giving good advice -- calm down, stop putting me in the position of having to kill you down the line -- it's all meant for a girl who is fictional.
The best she can do is use him to sell the lie, since we still don't know his full allegiances with Dar Adal, or with anyone: "He sent you here, didn't he? Saul. He sent you to threaten me?" Which is double-duty too, because Saul and Carrie know how he's chafing under Dar Adal, so it can't be as simple as blaming Adal, ever: It's always got to be Saul. Which has the additional value of freaking the rest of us out, because she seems so convinced that Saul has hung her out to dry that a lot of viewers were disgusted with the show based on his heel-turn alone.
As were her family. The part of this story finds Saul doing damage control with her dad and sister before the hearing, which means turning their rage -- which mirrors ours -- into worry for Carrie. Bringing them into the narrative, knowing how useful they can be when they're on high alert.
"...The way she's carrying on, she's her own worst enemy. You need to reign her in. She can't be running to a reporter every time she gets upset... She's not fighting back, she's making herself a target. The Agency runs on secrecy. There are people who want her indicted on criminal charges. Best thing you can do for Carrie right now is convince her to stay inside." Which, he clarifies, doesn't necessarily mean the Psych ward: "I mean out of sight, someplace she can level out. You know she's off her meds, right?"
I admit, I do find the circumstances surrounding her ongoing residence at the hospital a little confusing, but I guess it also serves the double-duty of giving her something to push against, a sort of control-trolling that her family is so good at giving her a pretext under which to freak out, both authentically and inauthentically. It puts them on the board for later, while keeping open the (false) possibility that she could go free. And actually, assuming -- and why wouldn't we -- that her family's also under Iranian surveillance, that's another two whole households having daily conversations about how fucked up and fucked over Carrie is getting. That's more than enough reason right there, actually: Selling the ultimate story that she's been burned.
Carrie's gearing up to throw another Quinn-related fit, but her advocate reminds her that acting crazy is the opposite of what she needs to do, so she stays chill. It's not really worth it. The first round involves a request to be released to her family, so they're there like Saul said, urging Carrie on his recommendation to seriously comply with her medication. Maybe this represents a message from Saul, I don't know. They make a point of bringing that up. But it's also real:
Carrie: "I've got a hearing in about three minutes, the whole point being that I don't need anyone telling me what to do. You said you would help! You're not helping when you pull this shit!"
Fam: "Did you not go to a reporter and divulge classified stuff?"
Carrie: "Fucking Saul told you he was worried about me, and you believed it..."
And now, they think and she knows, they're on his side. Which is exactly what it's about: Alienating her from outside support, to sell the story of her treason. While also, you know, doing exactly that. "God, he's... He's trying to crush me, when I am trying so hard to do what's... What's right. Fuck. He pretended to be my friend, and he's not.. No different than you."
And then to add to the trumped-up (or not) med-related freakout that provided the context for their part in the narrative, Carrie abruptly ducks out of her own hearing before they've even been seated by the Bailiff. Which means this whole scene was about one thing: Sending the family back out into the world with a tale of woe. There is literally no other reason for this. Saul set them up with certain cues, and Carrie jostled them right back into place. I have no problem with this part of the story at all. It actually makes more sense this way.
Immediately thereafter we get our first real, serious hint that there's something we don't know:
Quinn: "I went to Carrie's hearing today, and I saw her being hauled off, kicking and screaming... She didn't lose it, we did that to her. We did it. I would never bail on you in the middle of something, but I want you to know what's going on here is not okay with me."
Saul: "Peter, it's been a rough week. I'm aware. But we're onto something. And if it leads to where I think, it will all have been worth it. Just have a little faith."
Quinn: "The thing is, I don't. And when this is over, I'm out."
Saul: "We'll see when we get there."
Saul turns it into a thing about the kid in Caracas that nearly sank the mission and got killed anyway, but Quinn is all about compartmentalizing. The story uses that, too, against us: When he says "It was my mistake and I'll deal with it," he's telling the truth. He works out his kid-related mourning by terrorizing the bankers in the other storyline; this is about what it's about. "I don't know what the hell we're doing," he says. "I really don't."
But I guess the concern all over Peter's wonderful face is enough to send him, at least, to check on her. And again, clearly there is something we don't know. I thought he was just letting Dar Adal busy himself with destroying her and figuring she was better off doped up. I literally thought that was the whole plan, that he was just trying to run the clock out until something else occurred to him (which is, I think, why that conversation happened in the first place, to make us think that he was paralyzed, instead of on fire more than ever) and know that she was safe. But it works, still, better the other way:
Saul: "Carrie? I am so sorry..."
Carrie: "Fuck. You. Saul."
It's the opposite of the scene that started the episode: He comes, perhaps knowing he shouldn't, to check in with her, the way she showed up at his door, perhaps knowing it was risky to do so but also fit within the narrative -- for Iran, for us, for the CIA -- so it was permissible. And now when he comes here, the mission is fully in play. All I remember really striking me when we watched it to begin with was that she didn't seem particularly angry, from inside her Thorazine haze: She just seemed sad. And he seemed sad for her.
They meditated on the difficulty of the mission, at a time when she was too past her own limits to play any role at all. But because this mission, even more than most, is about presenting the truth as though it were a lie, it works. And this is just in the first week. Already in the first week she's looking at this story of a girl and wondering how she's supposed to survive. Already in the first week she's put herself on the anvil in a lot of ways, but particularly in the way that was her last defense against this nightmare for the last two months: They've medicated her, against her will.
And there was a moment where she lost control of that, and it stopped being pretend and it started getting real, which is the real beauty of this trick: At some point, in living the lie, those distinctions stop mattering. And so when we check back in, over the Carrie halves of the two episodes, the story will have been so deliriously and finely twisted that the truth literally will not matter. That's the entire point of compartmentalizing, that's the entire point of living the lie, and -- where have you been? -- that's been the ongoing story of this show from minute one. Nick was just a story, about a boy telling a story, about a boy telling a story.
But I think this is where the whole "I feel cheated, I feel tricked, this show is a liar" stuff really starts revving up, because this is the conversation -- not argument -- that your brain has to have with itself:
Is Carrie crazy? Yeah, but not like you mean. But is she crazy? Yes. Like she belongs in a mental hospital crazy? Yes. But she's not really supposed to be there, it's like a game. Is it? Because she sure looks crazy to me.
Is the CIA fucking her over? Yeah, like a dozen times in a row. But not like you mean. Aren't they setting her up as this insane slut who fucks terrorists? Well, yeah. She's also kind of an insane slut that fucks terrorists, though. If you think about it. But Saul wouldn't do that to her. Do you not see Saul doing that to her? On the TV you are watching? So Saul's an asshole, then. We hate Saul. Nope. Wrong again.
It comes down to the show banking on the fact that you would never expect this performance out of Carrie Mathison -- despite this shit being her entire job -- because you wouldn't expect this performance out of any single human being. Nobody burns this bright, nobody can be crushed down this hard, nobody would willingly sign on to be the biggest intelligence joke since David Petraeus, especially with the misogyny that comes with it, nobody can skate the waves of brain chemistry this nimbly, nobody can hold this many versions of herself in her mind. It wouldn't occur to you, that a person could survive this -- much less do it willingly.
It also wouldn't occur to Majid Javadi.
CARRIE
"I know what you're doing. You think I'm vulnerable. No, worse than that: You think I'm weak. And maybe with just the right incentive, I'll turn against the people who did this to me. So whoever the hell it is that you're working for -- the Syrians, the Israelis, the Iranians -- you tell them I would rather die in here."
Brave words from a brave girl, but at three AM when a woman who could be your stunt double is screaming down the hall like she's being attacked, it's hard to remember how much she meant them. To the degree that she did: It was an invitation, we'll learn in an hour, to double down. To prove their intentions to turn her.
The language -- "get her on the bed," "get her legs" -- is precisely the kind of nightmare narrative that would get Carrie up and down the hall, at least to stare into the room as the hold the skinny blonde chick down and drug her. One of the orderlies, and they are rough and not great people, spots her and she runs back to bed, slamming her door behind her.
Dick: "Everything in here okay? I'm not gonna repeat myself."
Carrie: "Everything's okay."
Dick: "This door stays open."
She stares at the wall and prepares for another night of horrors. It's been a month. She hasn't got the comfort of knowing we've rejoined her narrative downstream, implying something is about to happen. She has no idea when change is coming; if you asked she'd tell you she was pretty sure it would have happened by now.
What's really horrible is that whether she has an escape hatch or not, it's a matter of professional pride to avoid ever finding out. How bad would it have to get for her to pull the cord? And if it were that bad, and the cord didn't work, how bad would that be? You give up part of your agency to the Agency, sure; Quinn gave up his entire self, and so have they all. But when you think about this complete deprivation of free will -- how Brody just lives in the Tower now, how Carrie just lives in this hospital until further notice -- which maybe never comes?
That's surrender, the kind the Prophet was talking about. That is bravery on a level that retroactively supports every time people would talk about what an amazing agent she was, and we'd watch the show and be like, "Really?" Because it's not just the insights, the color-coded walls of weird, it's not just the instincts about Brody and her skill with turning assets: It's also the field work, which we have barely ever seen. And of the things to like about this episode, even if you hated it, that's the biggest one: My God, she is good at her job. In other time and other vocations, that amount of humility and trust would earn you canonization. Or at least martyrdom.
FARA
I am also keeping a dossier on this thrilling story about the intricacies of banking, so that eventually I will be able to sum it up for you. For now, though, it's facts. This week they do a "heist montage" kind of a scene where you at least see the money and how it flows, but it's still pretty dry nonetheless. I like that they're not scared to put the blame where it lies, but I think part of the reason most Americans don't understand the degree of corruption in the finance sector, and its co-option of our nation's government, is because it's so hard to dramatize.
Anyway, Fara followed the money missing from those wire transfers, and where it goes is a subsidiary of the bank in Caracas (yep), turned into small bills on the third Friday of every months, and then laundered through the box office of the weekly futbol match at the Estadio Capital. A low-level but simple scheme that Fara estimates has processed over $45M in ten years.
The mysterious majority shareholder of the home team, then, is the person who is ultimately using this money to fund Al-Qaeda operations, including 12/12 (which is why it was important that we get the original laptop during Tin Man) -- but the owner's hidden by the structure of the club's board. But the information indicates that it's probably Nasser Hejazi, which is funny because he was Iran's goalkeeper for the 1978 World Cup and also he is dead.
Saul and Fara keep quiet when Adal drops by, because if this is going to save Carrie (and maybe even Nick) it's got to be an end-run around him, and they have the following exchange:
Saul: "I left the DOJ documents on your desk."
Dar Adal: "You still want me to handle that?"
So when Dar Adal shows up to cockblock Carrie's discharge, we know it came from Saul: That he is still playing out the clock, waiting for a bite. There's no way for him to know that Javadi's already made his first overture, either, so he's operating on even less information than Carrie is. However, he is doing it from a comfy chair and gets to go home at night and have a nice cup of tea out on the deck. You know what I mean?
Saul: "Whew. Really starting to hate that guy, but he has his uses. Where were we?"
Fara: "Nowhere. A dead goalie from a million years ago is not running Al-Qaeda, sorry."
Saul: "My new theory is that Majid Javadi wants to retire, which is why he's taking the chance of embezzling from this money that he's supposed to be trafficking for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard."
Fara: "And he does love soccer. And he would be pissed at the American bankers profiting from this. So I guess if we can confirm that he's obsessed with Nasser Hejazi, maybe from childhood, then we've followed the cash for real."
CARRIE
First medical staff, than an independent evaluator, and then the board -- which includes her Inside Man, Abby the social worker -- will decide on her discharge. Unlike a month ago, it will be to her own custody, which is just one of the many advantages to being compliant with your meds and attempting to act like a normal person instead of a wild heathen.
She gets a little nervous when her family doesn't show up, but then it's time for the thing to start. The last advice they give her, going in, is to thank the board for all the help they've given her, which is meaningless -- but happening for the same reason Saul is letting Dar Adal burn her today. It's nice to know we're being helpful, even when we're not.
I don't know what the Plan is here, exactly: WE know neither of them meant for her to stay in there for a solid month, so I guess now she's just going to hope for a discharge, and if she isn't approached by that lawyer immediately, they'll probably ramp up the public disgrace factor and she can find some new way to flame out. That's my guess. She wouldn't go back to the paper -- as we'll see, that was a federal crime -- but something. All you have to do is find the right community to do it in front of, like when she freaked out at the brunch in front of Dar Adal and who knows what other spooks and retirees.
A round-robin edit goes through the various medical facts, if you're interested: They've titrated her lithium up to 1800mg, she's doing okay in group and crafting, particularly ceramics, she's a Helpful Hannah when it comes to delivering food on the ward, she's a "good example for her fellow patients." Which we missed, but it's easy to believe. She gives such a shit about people, it's amazing. Maybe her trainwreckiness, her patriotism, her heroism and her compassion all come from this same thing, this lack of ego that allows her to do a job that would have most of us suicidal in three months.
The independent guy recommends outpatient, Carrie confirms that she lives 15 minutes away from her father and sister and they are in fairly constant contact -- no clue yet as to why they're not here, which I guess would account for her nervousness, since it damages the healthy-Carrie narrative in at least two ways -- but they're not even worried about that, she's already sold them.
At the door, she ducks her head -- in that way she always does, upon remembering the concept of other people having authority over her, or thinking they do -- and mumbles her thanks for all their help in her efforts to pretend to be crazy and then get better from her pretend craziness. Their indulgent smiles are patronizing, but you can also tell how much they like her. After what they must see every time they're called to session, any amount of time spent with twitchy Carrie would probably be like having a glamorous Hollywood dinner.
DANA
Helps Leo escape from the institution, driving her mother's car. Let's not dignify it.
CARRIE
Soon enough, Dar Adal has delivered the DOJ paperwork pronouncing Carrie a "threat to national security" in her "current state of mind" -- which, her advocate points out, was just approved by four mental health professionals -- but it's no use. The government claims to be worried she'll go back to the newspaper, violate some more federal laws.
"That was over a month ago, when she was off her meds," lawyer Patricia protests, which is probably an accurate response, but as the board says, you give up parts of your Constitutional protection when you join the Agency. And shortly, they're trying to take her back to her room. The lawyer asks for a moment.
She promises to file an emergency appeal, but Carrie's like, "Did you see Dar Adal deliver that DOJ paperwork? I don't know how much it has to do with Saul, but he's a black-bagger from inside the CIA and seeing him means we might as well give up." I do wonder whether she imagines this to be a battle between Adal and Saul: For a lot of the episode it feels like it, even though we saw Saul order him to sink her discharge. But I guess they are doing it for such different reasons that it makes sense it would feel that way.
On the other hand, fuck that. Carrie wheedles Patricia's phone out of her and places a call to Dad, who mysteriously never showed up: It turns out somebody told Maggie it was cancelled last night. It's interesting that she's like, "Was it Saul?" Not Dar Adal, not the Agency, but particularly Saul: Like she can read the tea leaves. Because in fact if Saul were the one sinking her battleship today (which he is) you can see how that would be comforting in a way: Sending her a message (which he is not) to stay put and on course.
Or maybe they're still in sync, and she knows that he thinks she should give Javadi another chance.
Or maybe routing it through Dar Adal and the DOJ is a massive chess play, in that it loops everybody who might be a mole into the situation. There it is, I think. By loudly using another agency to block her discharge, he's signaling to any mole in any agency, including the leak we know exists, that Carrie is for-real burnt. Does that check out?
"Dad, I need you to do something for me, okay? Saul's not talking to me anymore, so you have to. Tell him that I give up. Tell him I can't stand another second in this place. I'm going out of my mind. Tell him that I'll do whatever he wants, just not this."
Last time we saw her, she was goofed out and telling him to fuck off. She's been preserving this unstable, vague narrative about being a puppet in some way to his needs, but this is a different thing entirely: This is baseline Carrie, finally pulling the hatch. That discharge snafu was the actual last straw.
In her suit, chock-full of 1800mg of Lithium, hair brushed, she walks back with an orderly, wondering if that was the button or if, when pushed, the button does nothing at all. The girl from last night is wracked, bent in a wheelchair, parked in a corner, dead to the world. Just not this.
"Your nails have gotten long," says the nurse, later, as Carrie seems to contemplate just actually going nuts for a while, throwing in the towel: "We'll have to trim them later."
DANA
Leo tosses her phone out the window when Jessica -- whom Dana's named, in her ever-so-snotty Dana way, "Jessica" -- and there is literally nothing going on here that you haven't seen a million times before, which is fine because Dana's just here to be the fallout of Nick. She saved the VP, a monster, the world, and didn't know it; maybe on some level she blames herself, like Quinn and Carrie in their different ways, for not keeping him from doing it twice. Or maybe she's where Carrie was, up in that hotel room: Horrified that nothing was ever real.
Mike Faber leaves a light-touch voicemail on Dana's phone, because she still trusts him and because there's no point in doing otherwise; Jessica just wants to scream. As Leo negotiates the sale of her car to a chop-shop, coming on strong for extra cash but then folding once one of the mechanics recognizes her, Jessica pulls herself together. Soon they'll have no way of finding the kids at all. But I'm guessing by then it'll be too late.
They meet with Leo's parents, who are all about reporting the car stolen so they can get their kids back. They act like it's because Dana is the daughter of a mass murderer, but how much is that just what Jessica's hearing? The truth is, the Carrases are terrified of Leo, not just annoyed by him like Jessica is, but because her kids are pretty healthy (in spite of everything) that wouldn't occur to her.
And because we don't know the whole story yet, we agree with her: These people are assholes, and they want to call the cops because her daughter is a monster just like her father before her. Nothing could be further from the truth, perhaps, but the easiest story is the story that tells itself: This is one that benefits them all, the truth benefits nobody, so it's a win-win. It couldn't matter less what the truth is: It's agreed that the Carrases think she's a bad influence, and it's agreed that Jessica resent the hell out of them for it:
Dana becomes a burden to them all, once again, and once again she's the mule to everyone else's pain. Even on the run.
THE CONDO
Abby's jovial and joking when she comes to rouse Carrie, sending her on her way with immense pride. By the time she gets home, with her beautiful doctor's-bag luggage, she's more confused than ever: What step is this? What play is this? Where is the wine?
Paul Franklin's waiting for her, in the same living room that she fell in love with Nick Brody and the same room she finally tracked down Abu Nazir. She tells him to get the fuck out, skipping pleasantries; the fact that he doesn't protest means she was right the whole time, he was recruiting her as an asset the whole time, and he's sprung her out of the hospital now. So now she's indebted to him.
If she weren't so committed to the role, to playing coy as he lays the trap, we might see a hint of the Smile. But she's good; too good for us.
Franklin: "We went to a lot of trouble to get you out, you can gimme two minutes."
Carrie: "If I'd known, I would have stayed..."
Franklin: "First of all, that's a lie. (We've heard you give up multiple times over the last month; your family is tied in knots; nobody trusts your supervisor anymore.) Secondly, it's only a 24-hour furlough. You need us, our dirty judge, to arrange a permanent release."
Carrie: "What's the catch?"
Franklin: "Just breakfast, tomorrow morning at 8, with a partner in my firm. That's it."
Carrie: "Uh, is it?"
Franklin: "I mean, you're right that it's fishy, but I honestly don't know what comes after that. Why not just listen to the guy? See what he's up to?"
Carrie immediately packs a bag -- thinks about, but leaves behind, her gun -- and runs downstairs, to hit the road. Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe we're painting a picture of paranoia: The CIA, the hospital, were all just too much. If she can't be counted on to have breakfast with the guy who sprung her, she's not gonna dance with the one who brung her.
Somebody who won't even cooperate with the enemy is for sure somebody who won't cooperate with the people that did this, right? I mean, what's she gonna do? "Yeah, actually I am super interested in treason, that's so weird you would bring it up. Do you know anybody interested in benefiting from my breadth of knowledge? You know what, what's your guy doing right now? I don't want to dilly-dally."
But her car's gone, so she sets off on foot. The part, it's easy to believe. If the car is gone, then somebody has gone to the trouble of setting up a narrative to squeeze and scare her: You're looking at frozen assets, no-fly list, the whole thing. So it's time to try that out. But playing a pretend rat on the run is a whole lot like actually being a rat on the run. You still have frozen assets, you're still on the no-fly list. Your car is still missing. The Agency still doesn't want you. There is no exit button, there aren't any escape hatches; the truth still doesn't matter.
SAUL
Saul's pissed to hear about this sixth-circuit judge that let her go, it seems, but tells Dar Adal he's sure it wasn't her family who petitioned her release, but nobody knows where she is now. She is in the wind. She is in the cold.
"She's angry and vulnerable. Right now, she could be saying anything to anybody. The Agency's still weak, it could die of the common cold. And she's a full-blown contagion. Find her. Get her off the street."
But the street is where she needs to be.
CARRIE
The guy at the bank is a little nervous once he sees the DOJ order that froze her accounts; he asks, but doesn't press, to get her credit cards. "They won't do you much good anyway."
Walking away, broke and getting scared about the night to come, she calls up Virgil. Slowly, the camera peels back to reveal Agency flacks recording the call, watching him carefully. As an asset under her control, she doesn't want to hear nonsense' more importantly, we know they're off-book rogue buddies that do her favors against protocol, so the visual gives us all we need to build a narrative that doesn't really exist. She's putting Virgil in a tight spot, hoping he won't help.
Virgil: "It's not about the money, it's my livelihood. You're radioactive, Carrie. I shouldn't even be talking to you right now. You gotta make things right with Saul."
Carrie: "Yeah, whatever. I'm trying to do that."
Virgil: "He says you went to the press? That was fucked up."
Carrie: "No, I agree. That was nuts. It's fine now. Can I at least borrow your van?"
Virgil, eventually: "I guess. Come by and get the keys whenever. And say hi to your mom for me."
He hangs up before she can ask what the hell he's talking about; once he's gone she figures out exactly what he's telling her, and rolls her eyes. No van now, even. Not with the CIA on her tail, working valiantly to ruin the Plan they don't know about. Working hard to keep her, and themselves, safe against all enemies. Working, specifically, to keep her from going to the other side.
GRAVEYARDS
Dana recites Coleridge over Leo's dead brother's grave, and it is just horrible.
In brief: The brother was eleven months younger, an Irish twin, and he shot himself, and that's sad.
Leo: "I guess it was my job to protect him, either way."
Dana: "He killed himself. With a gun. It's hard to blame anyone but him. Believe me, I should know."
They laugh, because of how one time she cut herself open and nearly died. But also, that's not really what happened, so the fact that Leo has confabulated this "I shoulda protected my (barely younger) baby brother," this easy sentiment, is the creepiest part. I mean, who knows what really happened, we don't yet, so maybe it will make sense. Maybe Dana is right and his parents are just dicks and he's not even crazy. But I don't think that's it.
"Leave it to my daughter to fall in love on the Psych ward," Jessica says, and even she seems shocked by how funny that was. Mike comforts her about how shitty the Carrases were, and offers to talk to friends on Arlington PD so they won't have to make an official report. Jess admits she should have let him move in, two months ago, after their weekend in the hotel, but that's all they say about that. He reminds her that it wasn't either of them that broke her, in the end.
She takes Leo back to the place where her father said goodbye, back before he was ever captured, when her brother was so small. "The last true statement he ever said to me was goodbye. Everything after that was a lie." Which is, in itself, a lie. But the truth doesn't matter.
HOT GINGER
Carrie: "Hey, I'm homeless. Wait, maybe I should have called first."
HG: "No, it's cool. What's the arrangement?"
Carrie: "Uh, look at you. I don't mind working off some steam if you're asking."
She also doesn't mind fully robbing him, come morning, but for some reason I found that rather comforting. Guess what bro, don't bring home chicks from the liquor store, and maybe they won't go through your wallet while you're asleep, you know? Carrie needs some money to get some things done.
FARA
Fara: "I'm so bored with this storyline! Just give it to me straight."
Saul: "Here is a picture of 'Nasser Hejazi' in soccer gear standing to one of the bankers from last time, back in 2009. Javadi visited Venezuela one other time, in 2003, to set up the whole deal in the first place. $45M later, his weird soccer crush is going to be his undoing!"
Fara: "Okay, then let's open an OFAC investigation into his majority ownership of whatever whatever whatever."
Saul: "I am playing four other chess games right now that you don't know about, but believe me when I say we need to just chill. We don't want the Guard to execute him before we've got everything in line."
Fara: "Uh, it would be fine if he died. Remember Abu Nazir?"
Saul: "No, it has to go exactly my way if we're going to save Carrie with it, but you don't need to know about that, so I'll just hand you some crazy speech about wanting to interrogate him -- with the definite implication of uh, enhanced techniques -- which means treating him like an asset, not a target."
BREAKFAST
The partner, Leland Bennett, is played by Martin Donovan, who is always so charming with his anime eyes and also so creepy with his general creepiness. He also starts at the end and works backwards to hello, like this:
"We're not trying to buy you, really. And no one's going to ask you to do anything you're too uncomfortable with. It's up to you to draw the line you won't cross."
Like, it couldn't be more creepy than the infinite terrors you just elliptically implied, but okay. I was "too uncomfortable" when I walked in there. But also: "For all I know, you're FBI and this is a sting. Somebody shut down my bank account, and repossessed my car..."
Leland: "Your own Agency did that to you."
Carrie: "Yeah, exactly. It's a scary time in my life and I'm not interested in going to jail for discussing this with you."
Leland: "Fine, then let's go out into the garden."
Leland: "Our firm has longstanding relationships with several countries in the Middle East. We lobby on their behalf, quietly represent their interests here in Washington..."
Carrie: "I'm not new. What does your guy want?"
Leland: "Just to pick your brain, non-invasively of course. Put you on retainer. About your area of expertise."
Carrie: "Like what? Like making my own rules? Like terrible personal decisions?"
Leland: "No, like -- for example. He recently lost six business associates, on the Yellow Brick Road..."
Carrie: "Okay, so we're talking about Iran?"
Leland: "And he wants to know how they located and targeted them."
Carrie: "That line you mentioned? You just crossed it. That's CIA stuff. Fuck them. Iran was behind the Langley bombing."
Leland: "Okay, sure, but in retaliation for the Israeli airstrikes on their nuclear facilities, a storyline you maybe barely remember from last season. It was proportional response, as is Iran's way, to an act of aggression. Langley was the appropriate target."
Carrie: "You have literally drunk the Kool-Aid."
Leland: "The truth doesn't matter. I'm paid to make the argument, not wave a flag."
Carrie: "Then we have nothing to discuss, because that makes zero sense to me. Later."
Leland: "So once they've pinned the whole narrative on you, what do you think happens then? Once it's no longer about outdated, frightening institutions getting their due long past their usefulness, and it's just a novelty story about a bipolar CIA officer fucking her brainwashed boyfriend on the job..."
Carrie: "You say that like I'm a traitor. I'm not."
Leland: "Of course not. But things get blurry, don't they? You might be a patriot, but you're also a liability. You agreed to self-sacrifice, right? That's you being a hero. And when you're called upon to do that, you'll have ... six months, maybe a year. And if you haven't killed yourself by then, they'll do it for you."
She listens to the birds chirp and she thinks about the time she nearly killed herself. Well, "the time," but the time in particular when it was too much and she wasn't managing her medication even though it was all she thought about. The birds are chirping, in this devil's garden, and she could almost smile -- Smile -- at the way this guy's telling her story to her. A story about a girl telling a story that is really a story about her, that controls her.
He's saying, "They're going to burn you." And she's thinking, "I'm already burnt. I'm out in the cold. And it's a lot warmer out here than it was in there. But there's still no eject button and there is no parachute, and the truth still means nothing at all.
Leland, quietly: "Let us help you, Carrie. We're so good at it."
Carrie: "You can keep me out of the hospital?"
Leland: "I can. I'm on your side."
Carrie: "I'm broke as hell, I don't have a dime..."
Leland: "You'll be compensated handsomely."
That is not what I fucking said. I need to function, not profit.
Carrie: "Then I never want to see you again, Mr. Bennett. I will see your client... but only him, and only face-to-face. Or he can go fuck himself, if I'm not special enough for that. And I won't name names, I can't hurt people in the field..."
Leland: "That's between you and him."
Carrie: "No, it isn't. It's non-negotiable."
"Think of it this way," says Leland Bennett. "Maybe you two can find some common ground. Put the world right. Save us all!"
It's the most disgusting thing she's ever heard. I think in three years of this show I love this moment the most, when he says this and she just spits, "Fuck you."
It's the last thing she says to him, before they set her free with an envelope of cash, let her out at a corner to roam the streets and hide from the CIA and whatever nasty black-baggers Dar Adal's got on the payroll, whatever other recruiters are watching her, listening to her family at night, and so on. It's the last thing, but also the best thing, and the most Carrie thing. Distilled Carrie: Belief, and honor, and the continual disappointment of other people's capability for delusion, for doublethink, for estrangement from their souls. For blindness to the solid human truth she can't ever seem to turn away from, or even blink, and what that must have been like to sever.
Fuck you for acting like common ground, or compassion, or communication are dumb girly things to want. Fuck you for being so far removed from the mass murder of terrorism and war that you can fucking joke about that. Fuck you for being a part of a monster that I can't ever stop killing, and won't ever die; fuck you for ensuring that the wheels of horror keep turning, and telling yourself it's just human nature, that we're made this way. Fuck you for this garden, and the birds, and the way it smells out here today, and spring on the way, and for saying it's okay that 219 people -- most of them heroes, too many of them liars like you -- died because the math works out.
Fuck you for pretending we are doing anything other than what we are doing. This business should be conducted at midnight, underground; it should be blood magic. Fuck you.
DANA
Leo wasn't in the rehab facility for treatment, his parents made a deal with the DA to keep him from being charged with homicide: Somehow he got his hands on Dad's gun, and then the brother died. Maybe a suicide pact, maybe it wasn't. Either way Leo walks, a newly only child.
I'm not saying it would be funny if Dana entered a suicide pact with her boyfriend, per se. I'm just saying it seems like an interesting avenue to explore, and certainly more interesting than the Mad Love scenario we seem to be heading straight for. Did I mention she referenced Natural Born Killers back at the chop shop? No? Well that's probably because I was too busy rolling my eyes so hard. Every year she thinks life is a movie, and every year somebody gets hurt.
Dana wakes up in the car to him and stares at him and just wants to be like this forever and whatever, and when he says maybe they don't ever have to turn around and go home, back into their cages, she can almost believe it. God love her. But I would be a lot more comfortable with this poetry-reading, homily-saying, cardboard-sentiment story if I knew for sure where it was heading.
She's the only person that could ever get through to Brody, so it stands to reason that he's the only one that could get through to her. Except he's gone, and she's already died and been reborn, so maybe her story is just this: Building in the wreckage at Langley. When your faith in Daddy -- the Agency, Saul Berenson, America -- gets blown to hell, you have to raise yourself. But once you realize that's all you were ever doing, then you see your duty was actually always to elevate everybody else around you: She's going to be fine. She inherited her soldier father's heart.
MIRA
They play it out into the last second, when Carrie shows up at Saul's house -- five hours later, on foot, a pocket of cash and infinite nations on her tail -- and he's immediately like, "The fuck are you doing here?"
Carrie: "I used every trick in the literal book. My feet are killing me. Hang on."
Saul: "Mathison, you look like hell."
Carrie: "Just got back."
"It worked, Saul. They picked me up this morning. A man named Franklin me to a house in Potomac, where I met with Leland Bennett..."
Saul: "The lawyer. What did he say, Carrie? What were his exact words?"
Carrie: "He said his client recently lost six business associates and would like to know how those men were identified and targeted. Javadi, right? Has to be. So I did it just the way you said, I held out for a face-to-face meeting, and... He went for it."
Saul, laughing: "You're an amazing person, Carrie Mathison. Amazing. You've been very, very brave."
Carrie: "You should've gotten me out of the hospital, Saul. You shouldn't have left me in there."
Saul: "I didn't know how far to push it, I maybe dropped the ball on that one. But it got the job done. And now it's almost over..."
Carrie: "Bullshit, look at the title of the episode. We're in the game now, but it still rides on me. I keep playing the game. It's a collection of selves I'm gonna have to keep in RAM. This multitude of Carries I have to continue to be. Tonight it seems maybe like that is too tall an order."
Saul: "I know that you can do it. You need rest and a nice cup of tea. You need to get over here so I can hug you back together."
So she does. It doesn't fix it, but it helps. It's warm.
The truth doesn't matter anymore, and I guess maybe it never did. But answer this: If she was never lost to begin with, why does it feel so good now, to come in from the cold?
WEEK
Among other creeps and heroes shadowing Carrie as she goes about her secret spy business: Iran, Al-Qaeda, Peter Quinn, a home invader, and... Jessica Brody? I could handle getting tackled in the middle of the night -- even naked in my own home after a stint in the snakepit -- but that is a whole other ball of wax. Yikes. Thanks, Dana. But I do think Regular Spy Carrie is a person we've barely ever (The Smile, basically?) gotten to see, so I hope she stays in the field a good long time. Also, Saul gets an early birthday present when Majid Javadi show up in the US, just like dumbass Abu Nazir before him. Why do they do that?
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps The Good Wife, Homeland, Hostages, Ravenswood, and Masters Of Sex for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as a regular column for Tor.com, Geek Love.