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After three days of interrogation, Brody finally gets a second to rest in Tehran, where Majid Javadi continues to be passive-aggressive and kind of awesome. Carrie has, of course, shown up in town because you have to be as close as possible to the shit you're stirring if you want maximum chaos. Fara's uncle provides a safe house to plan the operation, while Saul gets Alain to agree to a trade: His freedom for two Mossad agents to join the party, arrange the assassination, and help retrieve Brody after.
Provided with some kind of cyanide device, Brody's suddenly picked up and brought to a strange neighborhood, where the General pulls a weird move and ends up sending Brody in to be vetted by Nassrin, Abu Nazir's captivating widow, who's been living here ever since Nazir died. After some complicated interactions, Brody heads back out into the street where -- as Carrie watches from the sidelines -- he's finally welcomed publicly as the hero of Langley. On the way back to his compound, he destroys the device.
Which is fine, because when we pick up the story six days later, it's clear he's never going to be anywhere near the General: His propaganda value, as the US discovered last year, is simply too high for him to do anything more useful than just being Nicholas Brody. POTUS is pissed, Lockhart's still being a sweetie about everything, and even Saul must admit that Dar Adal's (usual) plan to murder Brody is probably the best move this time.
Carrie knows that Nick's not actually the enemy of the US he pretends to be -- or does she? -- but something in Saul's voice as he tells her to get out of town and scrub the whole thing alerts her to the fact that her Mossad buddies are going to be killing Nick really fast. She calls him up from the other side of a courtyard where he's about to pray, and back home even Quinn is getting kind of fed up with her way of ruining everything all the time.
Nick loses the hit squad and -- with Dar Adal, Lockhart and even Saul's valid points about Brody's dissociative tendencies ringing in our ears -- reports directly to Nassrim, who finally puts him in an office with the General. After spilling the beans about the entire operation, even the embezzlement stuff about Javadi, Nick abruptly murders the General in his own office, and cries for a while before calling Carrie up and asking for a ride out of there.
Very suspenseful, between the constant reevaluations and re-routings of the plans they love to outline for us all the time, but even moreso for the clever overture feeling to the proceedings: We come full circle on Nazir, on Nick's Al-Qaeda ties; on a sort of microcosm of every way we have ever felt about Brody, every way Carrie has, and the country has; the way one man's terrorist is another man's patriot... Every person he's been, on the entire run of the series.
Which is, in itself, a miniature of the entire series, since the unknowability of Nicholas Brody was always the focus, even when he was gone. And in turn, all of which -- especially given the intense lingering on a scene where Carrie catches her baby bump in the mirror of her Tehran hotel room, and presumably realizes for the 197th time that she is, in fact, pregnant -- makes me wonder just what the fuck is going to happen week.
Is there any way he can possibly survive this latest thing? And if not, did he accomplish his redemption? Is that even a thing that exists in the universe of this show? Is it even possible, to tell his life in a way that has more brightness in it than the dark? Was the whole season secretly an epitaph for a man who wasn't there, and won't be missed? He's always been one that found beauty in faith -- in the US, in his calling, in Allah -- and I guess that's how we have to roll, for now. Tougher than it sounds, and -- I don't know about you, but -- the heartbreaking Mass Effect music playing over the finale teaser offers zero fucking comfort.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
It was so great when, after weeks and weeks of abuse and insanity and pregnancy tests, Carrie got to look Majid Javadi in the eye and say Nasser Hejazi, the dead soccer player he is a little bit gay about. That was so great. Less great was when Saul put his wife's boyfriend in a quote "dark fucking hole" for being Mossad, but mostly for being his wife's boyfriend. This is not great, because they were on a break. If you want your wife to act like a wife, act like a husband and not a raccoon.
Anyway, Brody's in Tehran and there are no dwarves left to save him and no extraction plan when it's over and no chance of this working out okay, but the play is still in play.
THE BRIG
Saul: "I still don't like you very much. Because you bugged my house, but mostly because Mira used you to make a point. A point she had verbally explained to me dozens of times. So now that you are a real person, I feel foolish and also like making you feel bad."
Alain: "I'm Israeli. I don't feel bad, I feel mean. And I feel also like I fucked your wife."
Saul: "See, that's the kind of shit I am talking about."
Saul tells him to get Mossad to supply two agents in Tehran to be the new dwarves, but really they will end up being the new Max and Virgil, who aren't dwarves at all. (One is a gorgeous fashion model elf of the woods who is kind of dumb, and the other one is a tinker goblin with one Dobby finger stuck permanently in his ear.) Alain says, "No I can't!" and Saul says "Then get ready to enjoy the rest of your life here at the Fairfax County Dark Fucking Hole Extended-Stay Suites." Then Alain says "Okay maybe I can!"
DAY 3
Brody has been saying his cover story -- which is pretty much his real story -- over and over for three days. There is a man who looks like Bluto doing this part, and there are cameras and lights, and Brody looks like one hundred percent of a mess.
Bluto: "But before you got to the Tower of David and met that strange monster-doctor-villain-angel, who was it that shot you in your abdomen?"
Brody: "I don't know, jerks?"
Bluto: "Are you full of AIDS?"
Brody: "I do not have HIV, which is the virus that causes AIDS."
Bluto: "How do you know that? You have been inside containers and towers and jeeps this whole time. When did you administrate this test?"
Brody: "Actually I have an entire drawer full of negative AIDS tests."
Bluto: "Are you a huge heroin addict now?"
Brody: "No, that was just a fake out. I mean, obviously I have an addictive personality, that's like what this show is about. Me joining cults, me doing what I'm told so people will love me, me handing over accountability at every turn."
Bluto: "You are a fucking train wreck."
Then Majid Javadi comes in and I guess killing the hottest dwarf this side of Thorin Oakenshield did not calm him down any from being very pissy and angry all the time, because he is still very pissy and angry. One thing he likes is, when Brody is miserable. Which is kind of like being really into chocolate, because you are always going to have chocolate around, just like you will always find Brody to be absolutely miserable.
One thing that confuses me is when we talk about Brody being redeemed and people say, "How is that even possible?" as though he has done very many bad things. He actually hasn't. All the bad stuff he is supposed to be doing all the time, he either didn't get around to it or it was a very good thing. He shot an Al-Qaeda sniper in the head, Tom, and saved a CIA agent by killing a corrupt politician, the Vice President. He snapped the neck of a man who makes suicide bombs, who had rebar through his chest at the time. That's all he has ever actually done: The rest of the time he mostly prays and acts super intense.
He masturbated at Jessica, which was pretty rough when that happened. But it wasn't evil.
What he is going to realize over the course of the episode is that redemption is not something that other people validate for you: it is a thing you have to remember for yourself. He is such a broken, contingent man. He needs other people to mirror back at him who he is. And what this episode does is take us from here to there.
I think of it this way: everybody always gets mad at those deluded ex-gay ministry guys, because it's nice to be angry at people sometimes and feel like your self-righteousness justifies it. But I don't hate the ex-gay guys, because they don't hurt anybody. All they are doing is telling a story, about them not being gay, on such a massive scale, because if everybody believes it, it must be true. They are outsourcing their person-ness: They need all of us to get on board with how not-gay they are. And that's incredibly gross, but mostly it's sad to me. If they weren't so sure that other people are in charge of them, that the outer consensus supersedes their inner world and voice, they wouldn't be so scared of their gayness in the first place. And that is a sad and terrifying way to be.
It's also the Nick Brody way to be, and that's what this episode is about. (Given week's teaser with the Mass Effect music, probably the finale, too). That means this whole season has been about that, and really every season has been about that. Whatever Nick is, it's something rest of us decide and he agreed to. We make him a terrorist, we make him a hero, we make him a saint, we make him a war hero, we make him a Congressman, we make him a husband and a father to kids he barely knows, we make him the Vice President or a Big Man in Tehran. And because he doesn't know any better -- because it was conditioned out of him, in Boot and then a hole, by Issa and then Carrie, by the Doctor and the Seven Dwarves -- that's who he is. A blank spot filled in by other people's wars.
Do you know that thing about George Washington's Axe? First they replaced the handle, and later the blade. So you're looking at an axe that George Washington never actually touched a single part of, and yet it's his axe all the same.
Nick Chopper had a curse put on his axe, by a witch of Oz, and first it cut off his legs and then his arms and then his head. Slowly he replaced every part it cut off, with tin. And then he was the Tin Man of Oz, and no part of Nick Chopper was left. And yet he was Nick Chopper, all the same. Just empty inside. Without a heart, but somehow able to love nonetheless. Extended that grace.
MASUD SHERAZI
Carrie checks into a hotel in Tehran, which is not a thing you knew she would be doing but also comes as no surprise because she is a crazy person who would, of course, put herself at the center of the extraction plan she is still making up. She is playing a French lady and has brown hair, and is so fucking beautiful it's a little scary. After we're treated to the beauty of Iran and the city for a while, she heads on over to Fara's uncle's house.
Point being that Carrie pulled the same shit on Fara that Saul pulls on her. Would she put herself and her monster baby and her pride and her actual mind, her existence as a unique individual named Carrie Mathison, on the line for her country? Of course she would. That's the best thing in her.
Everybody will keep saying, "Oh, Saul treats you like his attack dog," and she will keep saying, "How is it that you think I'm not aware of this?"
A lot of our concerns for female characters are really a way of taking their agency away from them, because they don't know any better; a lot of time feminism is the mask it's wearing. If Woman X doesn't know she's being abused, doesn't that make it worse? No, it means she's not being abused, because who the fuck do you think you are, to make decisions like that for a grown-ass woman? And who are you to trivialize abuse by acting like a fictional character is a real person in the first place?
At first, Masud is not feeling her. At all. They do the thing where he's like, "You're CIA, right?" And she just points those giant Carrie Mathison eyes at him like, "How rude, you know I can't say that out loud. 99 % of being a spy is not telling anybody you're a spy."
Then he yells at her for the contraband satphone he received for her, which she assures him never went through Customs and it's just lying fake CIA Customs stickers, which chills him out because it's cool to think about. Then Masud and Carrie collaborate on being awesome with each other, and the whole mood of things changes. It's wonderful.
Masud: "So then my niece is CIA too? Working against her own country, tsk-tsk."
Carrie: "Uh, no. Working for her country. See how that works? Here's a picture of her gorgeous face she wanted you to have."
Masud: "She wears the hijab there in America?"
Carrie: "Yeah, everybody treats her like she's not capable of making her own choices, because it's fun to be racist while pretending to be feminist. Also, she misses you and Tehran and I think it's a sentimental, cultural choice as well as a religious one."
Masud: "I cannot see my constantly bitching brother being okay with any of this."
Carrie: "My understanding is that his bitch ass better find a way, because Fara pays his rent."
Masud: "Okay, I am cool now."
Carrie: "Whew! That was fun. Trust me that I will be making endless demands of you and act entitled to everything and if you don't read my mind and do it perfectly how I imagine it, I will be a real asshole to you. I am Carrie Mathison, brown-haired French Lady, and I have poor social skills in every language."
HOTEL
While Majid Javadi and the General chat about what is Brody really and how can he still be alive and kicking after the egregious shit that has been happening to him for three seasons of this show, and you start thinking maybe the whole Phase II will happen in this episode and that will make the finale super crazy -- which, you would be right about that train of thought -- Carrie gets the sat phone back to her hotel.
Saul: "How are things? How is the uncle and that phone?"
Carrie: "First he was like this, but then he was like this. How is your Israeli prisoner?"
Saul: "Mossad is sending you two Iranian nationals that are even ruder and scarier than you are."
Carrie: "I'll believe that when I see it."
Saul: "I didn't tell them very much. They really love being kept in suspense. They will bring you lots of weaponry to the uncle's house so can go spy shopping for Brody."
Quinn! He's not doing anything in particular, I just wanted to say his name. I just wanted to draw sketches of him in a million notebooks, doing things like chopping wood and holding infants and riding around on a motorcycle with his helmet on for safety. I just wanted to watch the part where even Dar Adal had a mission from God to catch Peter Quinn in the shower.
Saul: "Peanut, I have a satellite over your hotel right now."
Carrie: "Can you see me? I'm standing on the balcony..."
Saul: "Are you wearing a headscarf?"
Carrie: "OMG technology."
Saul: "That was just a joke. I can't see you because it's the middle of the night."
Carrie: "That was a humorous joke. I'm so glad we love each other again."
Saul: "Start the timer on that one. I'm sure you'll pull a Carrie at some point soon."
She catches her baby bump in the mirror behind the bar shelving, and she's like, "Oh shit am I pregnant? I better take a pregnancy test."
SHERAZI
Those Mossad dudes are ruder and scarier than Carrie, just as predicted. She treats them exactly like Virgil and Max, which is to say she treats them like she is a 7-year-old and they are bad dogs. Eventually they roll over so she'll stop being Carrie at them, and she rewards them with the target's name: Danesh Akbari, head of the IRGC. She gleams brightly, wanting their jaws to drop to the floor and wondering what a Mossad would look like speechless, and they do not disappoint. Then all three of them get very excited, in a spy way.
The boys pull out all kinds of weapons and bombs and shit, just like that part in Pretty Woman where they finally let her shop, and then the diamond at the center. A needle thing that is full of cyanide. She will get the needle to Brody, somehow, and then ASAP the boys will blow up a motorcycle with C-4 so while everybody is like, "What was that blowing-up sound," Nick can cyanide the General and then run away through a specific door. The boys will pick him up, swing by the hotel to get Carrie, and then everybody leaves Iran. Fairly quickly, I would imagine.
HOTEL
When Carrie gets back to the hotel, there is a very specifically creepy spy part where the hotel manager is like, "Those scary dudes over there want to be scary at you. Sorry we live in a police state where shit like this happens all the time, but it is your fault for coming to the Middle East, where everything is bummers."
She "acts" like she is an entitled Frenchwoman who does not need this shit today, and makes just enough of a scene that people will notice if she never comes back to the lobby for reasons of being murdered, and then guess who? Majid Javadi. Who doesn't like doing anything unless he can do it in a creepy, horrible, passive-aggressive, pathetic way.
It is interesting to see the way he reacts to being unmanned, as opposed to the way Nick does, or the way Carrie does. Because so much of himself and his culture is about that, taking it away from him is just torture. He has already done so much renovating in his own head to make it seem to himself like survival by being a traitor and a beast and a servile boot-licker is actually like the coolest thing a person can do, if you see what I'm saying. So when they take away that option then he really has no other choice but to attain equilibrium by doing some quick honor killings, or shooting a sexy dwarf in his sexy dwarf head, or being mean to Carrie, or whatever. Whatever's on the menu today, of poor old fuckface Majid Javadi, just doin' the best he can.
Javadi: "I liked you better as a blonde. Sorry about the short mini-kidnapping, but I am also trying to stay sane here. Just like you and Nick. Who by the way doesn't matter to me at all and is totally expendable. The mission is Akbari. Say it to me."
Carrie: "The mission is Akbari. Fuck you."
Javadi: "Oh thanks for this cyanide by the way."
Carrie: "No problem. You dick."
Javadi: "Akbari never leaves his office during the day due to him being in constant danger, but for some reason he is going somewhere tomorrow. So I told him, he better talk to Brody. I don't know if he is listening, or what he is doing. And even if I did, I would be all cagey and vague about it, because God forbid I just act normal."
HQ
Saul: "What that means is, this is definitely happening in this episode. One way or the other, this mission is going to be closed by 9 AM, Tehran time. Let me tell it to you while Nick Brody stares at things, in a voiceover."
Nick Brody stares at all the things while Saul describes them, but for our purposes neither of those is necessary. The General will say hi to Nick, Nick will come at him with that needle, and that will be that. The rest is just details that erase themselves as soon as they come up, because obviously however they think it's going down, it is not going down that way. It is probably going down the opposite of that way, but definitely Carrie will insert herself and her infinite chaos into it somehow. On the "Carrie" part of the whiteboard it would just be like a question mark, circled a billion times. Never forget that Carrie Mathison is always an asterisk. You can't plan for that shit.
Quinn: "Um okay and what about Carrie's crazy pregnant ass. Why is she in Tehran at all, and what is her deal today and why is she still going to be there in the morning and not on a flight back here and why did she even go there in the first place. It's legitimately confusing."
Saul: "Carrie's just doing Carrie, Quinn. It's sweet of you to worry and probably a good idea, but either way she is running point and will not be leaving the operational theater until such time as Nick Brody or the pieces of Nick Brody are in her possession."
BRODY
morning, a.k.a. Murder O' Clock, and Brody is very sleepy! He needs his rest, but Bluto ain't havin' it. This is a surprise trip we're taking. I don't think I would enjoy that much. I like field trips, but when you're in this precarious of a situation, no amount of surprises is a good amount. Brody yells at the man to find his shoes! But it is a ruse, a shoe-ruse, because really he needs to grab his cyanide needle that he was passed during a physical exam yesterday.
They put him in a car, and everybody at the CIA starts running around like ants in a stomped-on anthill, and then the cars start moving. Nick in a car, Carrie with the Israel boys, and the General on his mysterious errand.
For some reason I was tickled when somebody said this line: "The convoys are converging!"
We end up in a town square kind of place where several roads intersect, Darvazy Gar neighborhood, and it is all so very gorgeous. They cordon the people off because some kind of silly regime drama is about to go down. Then the General gets out of his car and stands there looking very sharp and very huge. Nick Brody nervously walks across the cobblestones toward him, very clearly palming the cyanide device. The, because he is a drama queen I guess, the General gets back in his car and drives away. Where they have come is not for a meeting, but for Nick to go in this house and get vetted by somebody else first.
Who? I don't know yet. Quinn, Google that shit real quick. Okay this house is where... aw, jeez. This is where Abu Nazir's widow Nassrin Mughrabi lives. They lived together for two years while he was getting brainwashed, they both love the same man, and they are a couple of broken sons of bitches now.
She takes him to the dining room and they sit at the table, vibing at each other, tears in their eyes, so happy to see each other and so sad to be alive.
Nassrin: "When I last saw you, you were like a soldier going to war. Now you look like you were put in a storage container and shot in the stomach and got hooked on heroin and then dwarves happened to you."
Brody: "You know what I am really into? Allah. And terrorism, separately. I miss Nazir so much all the time that it feels like I'm getting stabbed. But at least I blew Langley all up."
Nassrin: "It has come to my attention that you didn't die, because here you are."
Brody: "Yeah, but my daughter tried to commit suicide."
Nassrin: "Oh my God that's crazy. I am totally suicidal too. Isn't that so weird and funny? What are the odds."
Brody: "That fairytale Doctor told me I was a cockroach. You and me, we survive. We crawl out of the rubble and we gather the bodies. Like for example, Issa. Our child that was killed that time."
Nassrin: "Yeah, I was thinking about him too. No offense but why are you in Tehran?"
Brody: "Just because I hate being on the run. And also on heroin. And also you Al-Qaeda dicks kind of owe me."
Nassrin: "Yeah, that's pretty true."
Brody: "I just want to stop running."
As always with Brody, he's lying by telling the truth. And that makes it heartbreaking, of course, but also sets you up for one last trip around the ol' Brody whirlpool of what is even going on in there. Because he only tells the truth, and is never telling the truth, you wouldn't ever be hugely surprised, if he turned at whatever point. Shocked, but not surprised.
He walks out into the street, and the people of the neighborhood come up to be all adoring of him for blowing up the CIA, and being famous, and it's pretty mortifying really. Carrie is stuck on the outside of the mob, watching. What she doesn't see is Nick destroying the needle as they drive him back to the compound. If she did, she'd know what it meant, but because we're being taken on a very specific and subtly-designed journey this week, you're left with many possibilities as to why.
CIA
TV Interviewer: "That video you made, you said I love my country. But they don't love you. And also you are a terrorist. What is the deal."
Brody: "I explained it in the tape, but okay I will say it again. To love the idea of America is to hate the actuality of America, because it is lying to itself about what it is. Republican values are just a Frankenstein monster of corporate agendas kissed by patriotism and made into virtues. And that's my whole country now. So I blew it up."
Saul: "This guy with this stuff, man. What a piece of work."
Dar Adal: "I can't believe he's being so bitchy about us and it's not even behind our back! He is on TV saying these things. It's like the time I conference-called Lockhart and didn't tell him you were on the line, so he would talk about what a bitch you are..."
Saul: "And then he totally did! Andrew Lockhart is not a good friend."
Dar Adal: "And neither's Nick Brody. Hey, I've got an idea."
Saul: "Is it that you wanna kill Nick Brody?"
Dar Adal: "Oh my God are you psychic?"
Saul: "No, it's just the only thing you ever want to do."
Lockhart: "Well, my close personal friend the President of the United States is furious."
Saul: "Uh, I know that because he's my best friend and we were just on the phone too."
Lockhart: "He told me to tell you that you are not skinny enough to pull off that top."
Saul: "Uh, that's funny because he told me that I look fully adorable. Now, about Nick Brody."
Lockhart: "Dar Adal, what are your thoughts? Just kidding, I already know what you're going to say."
Saul: "But did you know that I was about to agree with him?"
Dar Adal: "Wait, I finally get to kill Nick Brody?"
Lockhart: "Oh my God Carrie's gonna go HAM."
Actually, Lockhart continues his trend from last week of being pretty cool. I love that he has flipped on us in this way. I always waited for Estes to show some kind of life or at least of not being a total fucking creep, and he never did. He blew up before that happened. But Andy Lockhart, he's a sweetie, just really charming and insightful about shit. He sayts, "He's spending his days with the same people who brainwashed him in the first place, and one thing we know about Brody is this is a guy who changes his mind. You placed a major asset inside the IRGC, Javadi. That's a huge victory worth preserving."
Lockhart: "Do you need a hug?"
Saul: "We don't have time for that. We have to kill the shit out of Nick Brody."
Dar Adal: "Oh my God when I put on my lucky red underpants this morning I did not know they were going to work this well. Thanks, lucky underpants."
Lockhart: "How will you do it?"
Dar Adal: "Those Mossad guys are meaner and scarier than Carrie Mathison. They will probably do it for fun. I will just call them and say do it."
Saul: "Okay, but don't tell Carrie. I don't know if you know this, but she can be a little sensitive about Brody. She can be kind of intense every now and then."
HOTEL
Carrie: "Saul, don't be basic. Of course he is talking shit about America. Don't take it personally. That is how propaganda works. This is the plan working."
Saul: "Or, this is the plan failing and your crazy boyfriend is going crazy. There's just no way to know."
Carrie: "Kind of like at the beginning of the season when everybody was being crybabies about this exact trick being played on them by the show."
Saul: "Kind of, except instead of being whiny armchair quarterbacks about it, we are going to straight murder a person."
It's been six days of this, by the way, so you can see where he is coming from. But also, Carrie is the best and it will kill her if they kill Nick Brody, so it's a bummer in that way, too. She gets kind of desperate as she reads between the lines, because obviously Dar Adal is going to kill her boyfriend at the slightest possibility of doing so, and all she has to say is the one thing she always has to say:
"I have been proven right in every episode of the last three seasons. Thirty-five episodes of me being right about Nick Brody. Even when I thought I was wrong about Nick Brody, I was wrong about being wrong. So shut the hell up and stop killing my baby daddy, or I will get very Carrie on you very fast. And you know what about that is, I am way over here in Tehran, and you are way over there at the CIA. So ya feelin' lucky, punk? Because I can fuck shit up epically without even trying. And what you're telling me is, I need to motherfucking apply myself. How do you see that going, Saul?"
Saul: "I guess so. Get on a plane this instant!"
Carrie: "Oh, 'okay.'"
Saul: "I will see you soon, Peanut."
Quinn: "Saul, you know she's not getting a plane, right?"
Saul: "I am fully aware of that, Peter."
MOSQUE
In fact, the second she gets off the phone with Saul you can see the Tetris of her mind flipping things around and putting them back together into the most amount of crazy she can think of. It takes less than one second.
Before you know it, Masud is putting a sat phone in Brody's pocket, and she's calling him, and they are looking at each other across the courtyard of this mosque.
Carrie: "I see you on the other side!"
Brody: "Good one. Hey, what's going on?"
Carrie: "Well, I was just wondering if you are brainwashed and a terrorist today."
Brody: "No, but I will tell you what. I would rather be a pretend-terrorist in Iran than anything that has ever happened to me in America on this show."
Carrie: "See but the thing is, pretend-terrorists don't exist. You are being a terrorist either way, it doesn't matter how you feel about it. Your intentions don't matter."
Brody: "Then I guess I am a terrorist. Thanks for making me feel weird about it."
Carrie: "It gets worse. You are about to be assassinated."
Brody: "Like in the hour?"
Carrie: "Like see those two guys walking toward you that look scarier than me? They are going to kill you in a second. In one second."
Ryan Scott Ryan: "Uh, why is he on the phone? And why is he acting like he just got the heads up that we are about to kill him?"
Saul: "I have this weird feeling that Carrie Mathison is fucking everything up."
Dar Adal: "Must be Sunday!"
She just keeps begging him to leave the square with her, just run off into the city and the wilderness and get free. He keeps pointing out how crazy she sounds -- "Regroup for what? To make another fucked-up plan?" -- and it's true, she doesn't have a lot of equity right now that she can put on the table for him. She is having trouble understanding that for him, this is the only way out. It keeps being the only thing, the only thing, the only thing. "You can be a Marine again kind of, you can be an American again kind of."
Then all of us watching the show don't really know what he's planning either, although in retrospect it's the most conventional thing that's the proper thing for him to be doing. This is why: because until there is a bullet in his actual brain, there is still a shot at going home. Beginning the work of reassembling himself into a man… getting back the things he lost down the hole. What looks to us like desperation, high-stakes gambling, is to him a crack of light from very far down.
Quinn: "Oh yeah she definitely warned him."
Dar Adal: "How is it possible that this surprises me?"
Saul: "Peanut, I am going to fully punch you in the face."
Carrie: "Shut up, Saul. I am doing something right now, Saul."
Saul: "I mean seriously this is beyond the pale. Even for you."
Carrie: "So not only did you let Quinn shoot me in the shoulder, you also are mad at me for doing exactly what we all knew I was going to do?"
"I am mad at you because Javadi is my redemption. I'm mad at you because in the same way you think you could have stopped 9/11, I think I can fix Iran. I can save the world, and that will make everything else retroactively worth it. And you are fucking with that. With me. With the only thing I have ever wanted in my entire raccoon life."
Saul: "Do you not remember the last six days of him blowing us off, talking shit about us, refusing to be ex-filtrated, refusing to move forward or backward, not talking to us? And now you have a brainwashed terrorist crazy person, loose on the streets of Tehran doing God knows what..."
Carrie: "Again, are we surprised by any of this? Don't be disingenuous."
Saul: "This time I am not kidding. Get on the plane."
Carrie: "Or what, you'll send more Mossad agents to kill us? I dare ya. Keep 'em coming."
God knows what is, indeed, what Nick is doing. Good LORD, they are both so crazy.
Nick: "Nassrin, I need to talk to you. It is specifically about talking to Danesh Akbari."
Nassrin: "Yeah, obviously that is never going to happen. You can tell that I vetted you, due to how you are not dead, but he doesn't need to let you in the bubble."
Nick: "Uh, in this case he does. His very life depends on it in a literal way."
Nassrin: "Oh, I didn't realize it was such a big deal. Hang on, I'll grab my purse."
Lockhart: "Oh shit, what is he doing now?"
Saul: "It seems per Javadi that Nick has managed to get into Revolutionary Guard HQ. Either to tell Akbari that he is being assassinated so Javadi can spy for the US, or to kill him."
Quinn: "I bet both."
Lockhart: "I bet neither. I bet he is butt hurt because we just tried to kill him, and he is going to go tattle on us just to be a dick. That's what I'd do."
AKBARI
Akbari: "Oh my God, fine. Whatever. Come in here and just be alone and crazy with me, the most paranoid person in the entire Middle East."
Brody: "Trust me, I am going to tell you some insane shit."
Akbari: "First of all, I will tell you some insane shit."
Turns out that in this very room, a decade ago, a cleric named Abu Nazir came to him telling about a beautiful ginger Marine Sergeant with a very tiny mouth and a very large amount of crazy inside of him. "The jewel he had found, this sword for Allah. This treasure."
It's sweet. I like it when they talk about how much Nick and Nazir loved each other. It is a very pure and good and strong thing, shot through with the sickest saddest thing imaginable. A vein of gold with poison running through it. Maybe the only way Nick knows how to love.
Akbari: "I mean, Majid Javadi is the worst, everybody knows that. But the CIA?"
Nick: "Yeah because he pretends to be this soccer player to steal money."
Akbari: "That sounds like some shit he would do. Anyway, I'm going to go murder him real fast. You sit tight..."
Nick: "See that huge crystal ashtray that has been foregrounded in like every shot of this entire scene? Just sitting on your desk being very present in this entire scene?"
Akbari: "Oh, dammit. The one day I decided to try not being paranoid, and look what happens."
Then he is bonked, and then -- in the room where it all started, where Allah brought Abu Nazir to tell the General he'd found something beautiful enough to use for wicked reasons, to taint the purest heart with death and politics -- he is snuffed out. Nick kneels over his body like a lover, and holds a pillow over his face, and as the life drains from his body, the weight on Nick's back gets lighter, and then it's done. Then he's calling Carrie, to take him home.
WEEK
Who knows? I bet it is going to be very fucked up, though. I wish you could say Nicholas Brody had a good run, but really he didn't. The only thing worse than a short brutish life is a long one. Measured in brutality and loss and anguish, he's had the longest life of all. They replaced the handle and then the blade and they called it George Washington's Axe, but it wasn't, really. At that point you gotta ask yourself, why is the label important? To the axe, I mean. It's important to us, but the axe is still good at being an axe regardless of its historical import. And really, talking about the axe that way -- about being something it never was and can never be; about being the thing holding the place of something that will never exist again -- only serves to make it feel worse for not being George Washington's actual Axe.
When I think about Nick Brody, it's kind of the same thing. We keep calling him Brody, and we keep on loving him in all the different ways you can love him, as though he's Nick Brody. But really he's just like Nick Chopper. He's a machine that's been renovated and torn down and built up and replaced and rejiggered and retooled so many times, by so many loving hands, that he's everything and nothing at once.
But where the Tin Man's chest is empty, with Nick we find a uniquely powerful and a truly beautiful love for exactly three things: For Allah, for Dana Lazaro, and for Carrie Mathison. And if you think that's not enough to justify a life, you haven't been paying attention. Lives don't ever need justifying. Only living. So maybe he will.
But most certainly, he will not.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps Homeland, Hostages, The Good Wife, and Masters Of Sex for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, Twitter, and Facebook.