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Saul's beef with Javadi is that back in 1979 they were actually kind of bros, spy-bros during the revolution, but Javadi ended up executing four people Saul was trying to get out of the country, in a very fucked-up serial killer way, because Javadi is kind of a fucked-up serial killer. So you can see why Saul is so excited about this whole deal. Then Saul got Javadi's wife out of the country, to be like Eff You: It's his daughter-in-law and grandson that MJ was staring at when he first got to the US and had his sandwich problem.
So last we saw Carrie, she was being kidnapped and taken to an interview with Javadi, which looked like it was going to be very scary. When we check back in with the team -- Quinn, Fara, Max -- it certainly seems that way, since they lose track of her almost immediately. But then it's a double-fakeout, because she only submits to like two questions before popping him with the entire embezzlement scheme Fara and Saul have been tracking. So all the dudes around the safehouse that are his bodyguards now would totally shoot him dead if they found out, and Carrie wins. I'm still on board, but it's getting kind of exhausting when they keep pulling this same trick over and over.
Javadi won't go with her to Saul right away, because it would be breaking protocol, so they arrange to meet up in a few hours once she's provided random data on Operation Tin Man. Carrie goes home -- to be stupidly pregnant and have a stupid bathroom drawer filled to the brim with about a million positive pregnancy tests -- and then back to the safehouse where Javadi's hopefully getting turned. The pregnancy brings back all that "I don't like Carrie when she's a woman" stuff, but also seems pretty cheap because what else can they do to her: Pregnancy is like the Godwin's Law of female protagonists, in that it's a huge, natural, important occurrence that somehow always feels more like a plot twist than a life event; there's always that convenient-miscarriage specter hovering overhead, like an asterisk. But it does put a different spin on a lot of past scenes, like when she dumped out all her pills and made that "oh well" face in the mirror.
I looked it up on WebMD and they say you should probably stay on at least lithium when you're pregnant, because the risk of birth defects is outweighed by the effects of pregnancy on your disorder. But the show is such an unreliable narrator that at this point it's like, "Assuming those are real pregnancy tests, assuming Carrie is actually pregnant, assuming that she actually went off her medication, assuming they're not going to suddenly reveal that it's Quinn's baby and they've been secretly married since 2008, assuming that she's actually Carrie and not just a spy impersonating Carrie impersonating a pregnant person."
Since it's been almost twelve hours since she last did some weird bullshitty thing, Dana's decided to take Jessica's maiden name -- which is Lazaro, because symbolism -- and then move out of the house altogether, which some girl we've never met before. Jessica acts like this is a problem for about four seconds, and then tearfully lets her go, because obviously it's not a problem. I can't wait until week when it turns out her mysterious friend "Angela" is actually a cougar disguised in a trenchcoat.
Andrew Lockhart approaches Dar Adal with the intention of being bitchy about Saul behind his back, and Adal totally plays into it, but then when he calls Saul to tell him about it he totally acts like they weren't being bitchy behind Saul's back, like they are best friends. They are not best friends. The only reason we were hanging with Dar Adal in the first place is because he was friends with Peter Quinn, but now Peter Quinn is in our group so I don't know where Dar Adal gets off acting like he's still popular. He barely ever was! Anybody can see how fake he is, it's like, be a better friend or else stop calling me all the time.
Oh, and there's a deeply unsatisfying conversation with Mira where she keeps demanding that he yell at her about cheating on him while also yelling at him that it is totally okay that she's cheating on him, and they both look like assholes but mostly Mira.
On the way to Saul's safehouse, Javadi just needs to make one quick stop at his daughter-in-law's house, where he kills everybody. The younger woman gets a quick gunshot to the head, but his ex-wife that Saul helped escape, she earns herself a psycho face-stabbing with a jagged shattered bottle. Even Quinn is like, "This is simply too much for me today." They round him up, leave the grandson there to cry surrounded in blood because they're the CIA, they were never there, and then they take him to where they're gonna torture him. He's like, "Can a brother get a clean shirt?" because he's covered in several people's blood, and then Saul punches him in the face.
Week: Saul yells and yells and interrogates and then enhances the interrogation, I'd wager. Quinn is conflicted about their methods and whatever, and I'd guess he and Max comfort Fara who has been here for all of five minutes and suddenly is part of torturing the head of the Iranian CIA. Dana probably robs a bank. Carrie takes 137 more pregnancy tests.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Saul brought Quinn in on the Big Plan, now having lured Majid Javadi into America to make Carrie a double agent. With Saul's home life -- such as it is -- falling down around him, and his Directorship of the CIA in question, he was still a much cooler customer than Quinn when the time came for Carrie to get kidnapped. While waiting, Carrie helped get Dana home from her ill-advised road trip; now she's on one of her own.
EYES ON
While Carrie does some deep breathing exercises -- again with the yoga -- Quinn and Fara report on her disappearance. Max rolls up late, and Quinn doesn't understand his joke about taking a cab to a CIA safe house because Quinn doesn't understand jokes because Quinn is a person who is also a gun. Max and his new supercrush Fara send Saul some drone footage that underlines Quinn's big takeaway from this brief, which is that Carrie is just gone, probably with a bag on her head somewhere.
Quinn: "...Anyway they drag her into a truckstop outside Germantown and then we lose her. They never even came back for the car."
Fara: "Can we check it for possible identifiers?"
Saul: "Not even if there was a child in there with the windows rolled up. Think like CIA. We don't have any other surveillance stuff? We just lost her?"
Quinn: "I know, right? You look adorable staring into this webcam like this. You look like a Wise Old Owl."
Saul: "I don't trust technology!"
He wrinkles his cute old man nose and grits his teeth at the technology. He could go for some peanut butter straight out of the jar right about now, I think. Just stick those big bear fingers in there and go to town.
JAVADI
Carrie wiggles under the eyes of her two guards as Javadi chatters, on his way back into the room. He is pretty jovial because he is getting a new double agent today; what we don't know is that he is also crazy as fuck, so that might also be contributing to his overall chillness.
Javadi: "So that whole stripping you naked, poking around in your orifices, long drive in a black hood thing. That was pretty rough, probably."
Carrie: "Yeah, but I get it. Since you're a terrorist and everything."
Javadi: "Okay, because I want us to be friends. I want us to trust each other."
Carrie: "LOL."
Javadi: "So to speed that along, let's give you a lie detector test about some shit."
Carrie: "That is the opposite of trust but okay."
Q: "Is it March 2013?"
A: "Yeah. I haven't seen Nick Brody in maybe three months. Or if you're counting back from my last menstr..."
Q: "Are you married?"
A: "To America, yes."
Q: "Do you know who I am?"
A: "A dead soccer player? Just kidding, you're Majid Javadi. Second in command of Iran's Intelligence Directorate, and its most stylish dresser."
THE BEAR & THE MAIDEN FAIR
Mira: "I really, really want to talk about how I'm cheating on you."
Saul: "I really, really don't have time for your drama."
Mira: "I really, really want to rub it in that I came back from Mumbai because of 12/12."
Saul: "I really appreciate that but I really, really don't care who you're fucking."
Mira: "I really, really want you to know that I am classy, and did not fuck him last night."
Saul: "I would like to point out that you only brought him over because you thought I was duck hunting with the oligarchy."
Mira: "It is not my fault you came home early. But we are getting off-track."
It is a lot of coded married-people nonsense, frankly, but basically she is giving him the option of buying back into their arrangement, or else giving up completely. It is a conversation they've had about a thousand times before that basically comes down to whether Saul is married to her, or to America; whether he is a man who sleeps in a bed, or a bear that eats peanut butter out of the jar.
Or alternately, they are agreed that he is paralyzed and waiting for an answer to make itself clear to him exactly what he is, and she is using Alain Bernard to shock him awake. She'd built a life in Mumbai, and left it behind, and Saul has not done her the same courtesy: He is still playing spy games, Carrie games, Dar Adal and Andrew Lockhart games, and seems less interested in her than ever. Their life is static and he's fine with that, because it's never the person playing World of Warcraft 24/7 that sees the problem. If he could see the problem, there wouldn't be one.
And when he tells her about Lockhart and the CIA betrayal that went down, she immediately sees what happened, why he's more detached than ever: His house was invaded, so he ran home, to find that invaded too. Somebody taking shots at his goose, the goose he wanted, everywhere he looks. And that is a tough row to hoe, but it's also not going anywhere: When things are taken from you, you get them back or you admit you didn't care about them that much in the first place. Our behavior proceeds from our priorities, not our intentions.
So she is right to force the issue and right to say the words -- "Get angry at something, get angry at me, even" -- but I would say the bigger part of commitment is recognizing the person's limitations. If you ask someone for something you know they can't give you, then you're setting the entire thing up to fail. And if this were the first iteration, she'd be the asshole, because she's elevated it past his capability to respond. But this is like the fifth separate time and way she's tried to crack this, so it's on him, even though she's doing this in a truly awkward way.
If you don't want me, you don't have to have me; it won't hurt my feelings if you let me go. But if you let me go, you will become a wild thing, and you won't be human anymore, and as a person who loves you it would be incredibly gross of me to let you make that decision, because I am on the outside: It's not the person playing WoW 24/7 that sees the problem. She'd just be walking away from something that's already gone.
That day he offered Carrie the promotion, which I think was the day of the two funerals, which would put it at 12/12, the big fight they had was about whether or not she was like him, a beast that walks like a person, or whether she was what Mira wants him to be: A man who can make decisions. Her stance was that choosing Brody was the fuller and more beautiful option to take, because it was the choice to be a whole person; his stance was that they were both broken and unfixable and thus anything but pure beastliness was doomed to failure anyway.
We will never know one of them was right, thanks to Majid Javadi, but we do know that Mira is doing a damned fine job of this, considering how little she has to work with. She won't say she loves this Alain and she won't say she doesn't, but he gives her a ton of things Saul is refusing to give her. You can't keep a houseplant on the shelf in a dark room forever, and the houseplant isn't a bitch for dying. They just keep asking each other, over and over.
Q: "Are you married?"
A: "..."
THE SMILE
Q: "Do you still work for the CIA?"
A: "Somehow. Some inscrutable how."
Q: "An analyst."
A: "Excuse me, case officer."
Q: "A spy."
A: "A spy on administrative leave."
Q: "Who knows you're here?"
A: "Nobody. The Bear and Quinn, but technically they don't know where I am anyway."
Q: "How come my lie detector keeps saying you're a liar?"
Carrie: "Look. I agreed to this with Martin Donovan on some strict parameters."
Javadi: "Hardly matters now, does it?"
Carrie: "That lie detector doesn't mean shit as long as these thugs are in here with us. I'm already a traitor and a crazy lady, I don't need guns to the head too. Everything looks like lies when you're freaking the fuck out."
Javadi: "You can trust them!"
Carrie: "Oh, like you trust me?"
Javadi: "LOL."
They leave, and he starts back in on her, but that part is over now. For a show that is quickly redefining itself, and its legacy, in terms of manipulative fakeouts, it's still pretty powerful:
"Are we completely alone now? Is anyone else listening to this? No? Cool, then we're done. Now it's my deal. Now we talk about Nassir Hejazi, the goalkeeper for the 1978 Iran World Cup Team, under whose name you embezzled more than $45M from the Revolutionary Guard. Now we talk about how you're an enemy of your own state."
It creeps out. The Smile.
Javadi can't move, so she stands up, looking down. He seems ashamed, almost. They walk outside, both chatting up the guards in Farsi; she sends one of them for a Fiji Water just because she can.
Javadi: "That was pretty bad ass, Miss Mathison."
Carrie: "I know, right? Thanks."
Javadi: "When did you and Saul cook this all up?"
Carrie: "About fourteen hours after you bombed Langley. I had some errands to run."
Javadi: "Is it okay if I give Saul all the credit even though you're standing here right in front of me, being clearly amazing?"
Carrie: "It makes you a shitty person, but we already knew that, so whatever."
Javadi: "He used you to lure me. Saul Berenson. Still, after all these years, putting other people's lives on the line."
Carrie: "Well, those things are all true. Let's go talk to him! Say you turned me, I'm recruited, and then I'll take you there. It will be fun."
Javadi: "Right now?"
Carrie: "No, you can finish your cigarette first."
Javadi: "Okay, I'm down with whatever you want. You got me, it's over. But that's not how we do things. It'll look weird."
Carrie: "I don't care, make it work. Have you not noticed I am fucking full of beans right now? I feel like the sun and the moon and Christmas, after the month I've fucking had. You can take it from here."
Javadi: "No seriously, I can't. We have to go by the book. The book I wrote, admittedly, but it is what it is. The plan is, test you with the polygraph and then you go get something for me. Something small but valuable. That can't change."
Carrie: "Like what?"
Javadi: "Operation Tin Man. The reason you were brought in to begin with."
Carrie: "No prob. I can fake that up by this afternoon. Meet me at a coffee shop in seven hours, cool?"
Javadi: "Cool. I still have an errand to run."
Carrie: "Make it quick."
Javadi: "Enough already. You should be more deferential to me, even if I'm your prisoner. Saul should have trained you better."
Carrie: "Oh, because you're a man? Fuck you, you're not a man."
They drive her to this railroad overpass somewhere, some desolate place that feels like the road trip Saul took with Eileen, and then just drop her the hell off. Still wearing her ill-fitting workout gear they put on her naked ass. For some reason I really love it when she gets dropped off in the middle of nowhere like that. I have a panic attack if my phone battery dips below 50 percent, but there she is just joggin' her way back to civilization like it is no big deal to her.
BAD BROMANCE
Fara: "Oh, so you're in a shitty mood? What else is new. Hey, why don't you tell me an incredibly detailed backstory about your personal connection to Majid Javadi? Since it's the midpoint episode of the season, probably that'll matter in the back end."
And boy does he ever. There's a picture of him and Javadi in a Tehran bistro with their wives, spy buddies just before the Revolution. Saul had recruited four assets in town, including a Poli Sci professor and a concert pianist with a Khomeini connection. When the Shah came down, May 1979, he needed to get all four of them out of there, and Javadi offered to help by housing them while their exit papers were getting done.
But when Saul finally came to get them, his old friend Javadi had killed 'em execution style and lined 'em up on the carpet: Javadi's way of getting into the new regime. Disillusioned by his own failure, and Javadi going Colonel Kurtz, Saul arranged to bring Javadi's wife Fariba and their son to the US, before quitting the CIA for a minute. So the upshot is that a woman of Saul's basic age is under witness protection somewhere in the US, and that's how Saul in some slight way won.
(Spoiler! She is in DC for some reason and not California like Saul thinks, maybe by accident or maybe by design or maybe just because old ladies don't give a shit about the rules, living with her son and daughter-in-law, who gets watched sometimes by terrorists eating sandwiches.)
Fara: "Oh, so when you say he's crazy you mean..."
Saul: "He is fucking serial-killer crazy."
Fara: "And you plan to turn him?"
Saul: "You can recruit a civilian easy, but turning a spy is tough. He already thinks he's his country or his organization, so you're not just wedging in there. You're turning him into something else."
Fara: "Complete renovation of a man's soul, identity and values? That sounds doable. What if we try this, what if we have Quinn stab him in the hand, and then Carrie can say she's in love with him."
Saul: "You'd be surprised how well that works."
LAZARO
Dana: "Hey, Mom! Old buddy old pal, how are your feelings and whatever?"
Jessica: "What do you want for real?"
Dana: "I need you to take me to the courthouse. Name change. Nobody hates Dana Brody more than Dana Brody."
Jessica: "While that last statement seems iffy, I actually get your overall point. Maybe I should go back to my maiden name."
Dana: "That's exactly what I was thinking, too. Plus it appeals to your narcissism, which is everybody's prime way of dealing with you, so I knew you'd go for it. Dana Lazaro?"
Jessica: "Sounds nice. I kind of always figured you'd disown me at some point, so this is a real honor. Plus as installment #35 in our ongoing mourning period, it's highly symbolic. Not enough things in our horrible lives are symbolic enough. Maybe after the courthouse we can set fire to all of your dad's stuff. Except a flag, because obviously we would be lynched. It's the one thing we haven't done to piss America off yet. I'm quite proud of that."
THE CONDO
Saul: "Where are you?"
Carrie: "I just walked to my house and called you on that burner phone I keep in my kitchen. Good news is, I turned him. Bad news is, he didn't want to risk both of us dying by alerting his men, so we took a shor..."
Saul: "You were supposed to bring him here!"
Carrie: "Uh, do you suddenly not trust me to make decisions? His protests were legit."
Saul: "No, I'm just super bitchy today! I have at least three valid reasons to be intense, both about this and in a general sense! Now, where did he take you?"
It hits her in the gut. Now that it's over, she can be full of beans, but she is also working with a worn-out adrenal system and a pit in the pit in her stomach; when they take the net away it's still scary even now that she's on the ground. Several different kinds of hangover.
Saul: "Get over it. So we lost you, so what? Where he did he take you?"
Carrie: "This country club."
Saul: "Quinn, drones."
Carrie: "Why would he still be there?"
Saul: "Because I know him."
Carrie: "It's been at least an hour since I started running to my house, Saul..."
Saul: "Because I know him. Do not challenge me today. I will literally fight you on anything, so pick your battles."
Saul: "Okay, I'm being a tool. Tell me your story of what it was like."
Carrie: "Well, it was awesome. He stares into space like he was going to have a heart attack, which was great, but then it got even better because he started swinging his dick around, like, stumbling for somewhere to stand. He just fell apart. Oh, and he whined about you, too."
Saul: "Oh yeah? What did that old so-and-so have to say about me?"
Carrie: "I can't tell you what he really said because I know it's true and it hurts my feelings too much to think about, so I will paraphrase. He said that judging by the high-risk nature of this operation, you don't seem to have changed much."
Saul: "Essentially that I am a bad-ass."
Carrie: "In this version, yes."
Quinn: "Can we storm his safe house? I am really into just storming."
Saul: "No, that would spook the entire organization. We can't always do it that clean. Look, this guy's a rabid raccoon. He only cares about survival, he took out four decent brilliant human beings to preserve himself. He's going to wuss out, that's why we did it this way."
Carrie: "You don't think he's changed at all?"
Saul: "What did I fucking tell you about challenging me. He's my Brody, homegirl. If I can't see inside his head and soul, then nothing I have ever done means anything. This entire operation is predicated on my ESP of this one dude, so we can't be..."
Carrie: "Gotcha. I get that now."
Saul: "So okay, we'll make up those Tin Man documents, and keep an eye on his house. You do whatever incredibly minimal human things your spy body requires, and we'll see you for the meet at 3."
She totes her bottle of terrorist Fiji upstairs, past the yucky broken phone and general mess of her kidnapping, and then squats for a random pregnancy test. Like the other fifty she's keeping in an unsanitary bathroom drawer, it is 100 percent positive. So I guess that's been another secret we didn't get to know.
When she sat down to pee I already was like, "Oh brother," because the conditioned response to unwanted pregnancy in a story is that it's going to be a trope. Something misogynist or just some worn-out way of throwing pots and pans at a woman's head; in the worst-case, leading to the even grosser trope of the Convenient Miscarriage. All of which is dumb because pregnancy is a huge deal and when shows bring it in, it's never that huge of a deal. My rule is, if you're going to throw a pregnancy -- or God forbid a sexual assault, that's the other main one -- you need to earn it three times over: A nearly impassable threshold that not many shows can accommodate, although some shows do nail it.
But then I thought, well, at least it puts a different spin on her whole roller-coaster of med compliance over the last several weeks. That whole "ugh" look when she dumped her pills yet again. And then too, maybe it's something to do with her disorder: Maybe these million tests are all a manic hope for things to turn out different. You can't tell from the sheer volume when it started -- even doing it twice a day, that's still longer than she's been out of the hospital -- but you can see how she'd be like, "Fingers crossed!"
Which leads to the Darkest Timeline, in which what she's praying for is the convenient miscarriage: How much she and Saul can put her body through, before it rebels. Either way, she's got very limited amount of time -- maybe just a few more -- before the tests are no longer able to tell her anything her body won't already have let her know. Either way, she's got Saul on one shoulder and Mira on the other, asking if she's a woman or a machine. Either way, she's allowed to hope for both at the same time, because that's how Carrie always rolls.
She climbs into bed for a nap that could be as long as four hours, if she is able to calm her shit down enough to fall asleep. Seems relatively unlikely, given the day -- week, month, life -- she's having.
CIA
Lockhart: "I don't really want to talk to you, new best friend."
Dar Adal: "I don't really want to talk to you either. How's it going?"
Lockhart: "Great. Where's the so-called Director?"
Dar Adal: "He didn't tell me where he was going. Maybe for spy reasons, maybe it's making me pissy. Or with this show, maybe he did tell me where he was going, and I'm only acting like I hate him and we are best friends now."
Lockhart: "Can I just say something? The CIA is bullshit."
Dar Adal: "You have a point."
Lockhart: "Saul is awful and you are awful and all of you suck."
Dar Adal: "Thank God you're going to come fix it all, then!"
Lockhart: "So you're down with me bossing everybody around even though I have no clue what I'm talking about?"
Dar Adal: "Yeah, that sounds great! I am a real big fan of transparency."
Lockhart: "Okay here's my plan. I want to scare the shit out of the entire world."
Dar Adal: "Keep talking!"
Lockhart: "Like, you know how you are evil and constantly murdering people? In Somalia, Libya, Uganda, everywhere you go, a trail of dead."
Dar Adal: "Flatterer. What can I do for you? Besides everything."
Lockhart: "I need you to clamp it down. I need you to keep the twelve days until my confirmation free of bullshit. No skeletons, no unfinished business, no Sergeant Brodys, no Carrie Mathisons."
Dar Adal: "I know, right? LOL. But yeah, trust me. You will not be getting wind of anything cool or interesting."
QUINN
Carrie: "What's up?"
Quinn: "I'm standing at your magically repaired back patio door."
Carrie: "Okay, you're early."
Quinn: "I'm Quinn. Did you sleep?"
Carrie: "Does staring out the window imagining myself with a child count?"
Quinn: "Okay so we picked up a Buick at the house about an hour after you called in."
Carrie: "Is Javadi even still there?"
Quinn: "Don't know, but please stop pressing on that bruise. Here's the Tin Man file."
He stops and gawks at her Wall of Weird with all the Brody sightings, and she's embarrassed.
Carrie: "Okay, so I know what you're thinking..."
Quinn: "-- No. I'm thinking he's the most wanted man in the world and you're doing your job, the way nobody but you can. Trade burner phones with me and get in the car."
Carrie: "You are seriously the coolest bro in the entire world."
Quinn: "Right back atcha, Mathison."
COURTHOUSE
Dude: "Lazaro. And you're keeping the same first name?"
Dana: "I guess so, yeah. How long until I'm new?"
Dude: "Three weeks. Mom, I need $41.14..."
Dana: "-- I can pay for it. What name do I sign off on this with?"
Dude: "The old one. You are a real sweetheart. I guess you get that from Mom here."
Jessica: "Okay, I see where this is headed..."
Dude: "No, I'm being nice. I am just nicely saying that your husband is the devil, and your children are his demonic spawn, so changing your name should really help."
Dana: "Thanks for the paperwork? But you just reactivated everything this was supposed to be about."
Dude: "I'll pray for you!"
Jessica: "Great, thanks."
Dana: "As-salam alaykum, motherfucker."
COFFEE SHOP
Quinn: "Okay, you sit in the window and I will sit in this car with a gun, okay?"
Carrie: "Saul, is Javadi moving?"
Saul: "I know him through ESP and what he is doing now is trying to figure out how to get out of this. Also, making a point that he is not our bitch. Even though he is."
Fara: "He's getting in the car..."
Saul: "Dar Adal's calling. Carrie, this is it! Energy!"
Dar Adal: "Lockhart was disappointed to miss you."
Saul: "I am so sure. Anything specific?"
Dar Adal: "No. (Yes.) Just trying to get his bearings before his big day."
Saul: "I bet."
Dar Adal: "Anxious for a smooth transition of power."
Saul: "That's what he said?"
Dar Adal: "Yes. (No.) While remaining respectful of the work you've done. (BS.)"
Saul: "Okay, so now I definitely know I can't trust you..."
Fara: "Saul, get off the phone!"
Javadi leaves the route and heads into the suburbs, in such a way that from the drone's perspective you might think it looks like he's trying to hide under the trees. But we know something they don't -- he has a personal interest in somewhere near here, a young woman with a child -- because we watched him eat a sandwich and stalk them.
Saul: "See if any Iranian Americans live in the area."
Fara: "That's racial profiling!"
Max: "The FBI calls it 'domain management.'"
Saul: "It's also not the whole story this time, but just stick to the job."
Carrie and Quinn in hot pursuit and gaining, the HQ team quickly figures out that the house he's stopping at is rented to a CPA named Susan Roberts, who of course was married to Nasser Javadi, Majid's son, making the little boy he was spying on his grandson. What isn't on paper is that Fariba is also there, but Saul starts screaming anyway. They don't get there in time, and Javadi makes it into the house.
Within seconds he's shot Susan through the head at the door, and is dandling his grandson Behrouz, when his ex-wife Fariba suddenly appears. I don't know if she was living with her ex-daughter-in-law or what, but she's there now, and helping out with the baby, and then he's stabbing her in the face with a broken bottle, over and over and over, until she's dead.
Her defense, before she bleeds out, is only this: "You betrayed us!" She says it over and over again, this last explanation for herself and her existence. He shouldn't hate her for leaving him, when he went dark; he shouldn't murder her for getting out of the house of a beast. She was walking away from something he'd already given away. Nobody invaded, nobody forced him to change: He was the one that turned on his family, his house, when he became an animal.
Q: "Are you married?"
A: "..."
SAUL
Listens to them shouting at him, covered in his wife's blood, and screams over and over for a sitrep.
Javadi: "Now I'm ready to see Saul."
Saul: "What the fuck is happening?"
Quinn: "Two fatalities, a lot of blood, he shot Roberts in the head and uh..."
Javadi: "Tell him who the other one was. Tell him."
Quinn: "He took a bottle to her neck, Saul. A jagged, broken..."
Saul: "Wait, Fariba? What the hell, she was supposed to be in California under an assumed name."
Quinn: "It is really bad here, Saul. There's blood everywhere, Carrie's got the kid in her lap..."
Saul: "You were never there. Leave your car a few blocks away and bring him in his car."
Carrie: "What about the baby?"
Saul: "You were never there, Mathison."
She puts Behrouz down in his playpen, screaming, and they walk away. Javadi's so quiet on the ride you can still hear him crying, all the way. It takes forever.
BRODY
Jessica: "Dana Lazaro. Dana Lazaro. I like it."
Angela: "Hey, I'm Dana's friend. She's going to come live with us now."
Jessica: "Uh, what? We are having the most pleasant conversation of our lives right now."
Dana: "That's the thing. I'm not Dana Brody anymore? So we're going to just leave and I'm going to start a new life."
Angela's played by a young woman named Kimberley Drummond. Think about that for a second. Anyway, Jessica protests, at length, but eventually -- as you knew she would -- she acquiesces, pops her last $300 gift card in Dana's pocket, and kisses her goodbye. Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Lazaro.
Some theologians think of the raising of Lazarus as the first mistake: It's the trigger that sets about the whole political domino effect that eventually brings Jesus down. I always liked that, this Greek-style cycle of kindness that becomes bad luck that leads to more kindness, and so on: No good deed goes unpunished, of course, but if you're a Christian then it's just a whole lot of scary, dark bullshit suspended between those two resurrections.
All the way up, and all the way down, and then all the way up again. That's the bipolar sine wave, obviously, but it's also the way everybody works in a more general sense: You inflate, you get knocked over, you work your way up again. If you're Jesus, the hero of the story, and you raise this guy from the dead, or kill the dragon or whatever, maybe you get a little cocky and forget your humility, you go off your metaphorical meds, and then events conspire to knock you down again, and then events conspire to bring you back up, and so on. Hopefully you use those cycles to get right with yourself and more realistic about the world around you, but not necessarily.
Anyway, it's kind of on the nose for Dana to change her name to Lazaro, reborn from the ashes of her father's destruction etc., but if you know this thing about the first mistake being the miraculous kindness of humanity's savior -- that saving the world, even one person at a time, is what dooms you to be destroyed -- then the Tower of David, the whole story really, starts looking very different. Because every single person on this show is guilty of raising at least a few Lazaruses. Every single person is guilty of kindness. The first mistake.
SAFE HOUSE
A CIA drive-by reveals Homicide's already swarming the place before the cleanup crew could get there, so they call it a day on that front. Saul hides in the front yard when they bring him in, covered in blood; inside, Fara and Max can't stop staring as they walk him back, chaining him up in the interrogation room.
Out on the porch, Carrie decompresses; Quinn sighs heavily at Fara and Max's freakout and assures them it's just barely starting. He joins Carrie outside with coffee, and they agree that there are no words for today.
Back inside, Saul removes Javadi's chains, and stands him up. "You don't look like a man who just landed the biggest asset of his career," Javadi jokes, smug, and Saul breaks his nose.
WEEK
The massacre at Susan's house puts the team on Lockhart's radar, Fara thinks about murdering Javadi for who knows why, and the Mole seems to be the one who moved Brody's car on 12/12. God, I hate the Mole. But I sure do love this show.
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.