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I don't have much to say about it. It was good, but good in a sort of Muggle way that belies the bonkers way the season started out. What you think will happen, happens, for the length of the hour. It's very sad and sweet and lovingly made, but seems to exist mostly as a document to stamp the end of the season. Maybe they're just all cried and crazied out, maybe it's me, but either way it was serviceable and enjoyable, and tied up the season in the proper way. I think generally people will like it. For whatever reason this show is a bitching magnet, so maybe going conventional was the smartest way to be.
Brody makes it out of the General's office alive, and gets as far as the gates of the IRGC before he's forced to take the limo driver hostage and brute-force his way out. Meanwhile, Carrie's on the phone desperately trying to get the extraction plan from a week ago back in action. But when Javadi's immediately tasked with Brody's capture -- a manhunt that could make or break the step in the plan -- it's up to Saul to make the call whether or not they should be caught.
Against Dar Adal's wishes, of course, Saul and the JSOC set up a major operation that will take them out of Iran and into Afghanistan. They spend the night in a rustic safe house, where Brody continues feeling guilty -- about the General, plus everything -- until the sun comes up. Of particular interest is the way they keep trying and failing to understand each other's perspectives, after three seasons of being intense about each other: He doesn't understand her self-abnegation, and she doesn't get his inability to be a proud soldier, when that's supposed to be all he ever was. When Carrie plays the pregnancy/destiny card, it chills him enough to fall asleep in her lap, and when the choppers show up, they're both at a kind of peace.
Which is lucky, because those aren't our choppers. It's Majid's manhunt, here to take Brody into custody for treason and leave Carrie in the wind. Turns out Senator Lockhart got himself into the CIA Directorship a few hours early, and with the President's emphatic support and Dar Adal's more circumspect approval, decided to hand Javadi one last win. It puts the cards on the table in a pretty accessible way, making every twist and plotpoint the moral decision of one person or another, but always the same basic question: At what point does the worth of the asset's life outweigh the good their death or actions will do? If it's your lover, or your surrogate daughter, or your greatest hero, does that change whether or not their sacrifice is worthwhile, when it's what they signed on for Day One?
Carrie heads back to her Tehran hotel for one last hail-mary, but Javadi has her brought in for a closed-door meeting in which he points out that the mission has been accomplished, everyone in the CIA knows Brody's a hero, and that she's gotten more than she had the right to ask. He warns her about Nick's public hanging at 4AM that night, and she begs for one more phone call. They don't say much of import, but it's very moving; moreso as she begs Saul to pull more tricks out of his hat and slowly realizes it's never going to happen: Their collective hilarity of luck has finally run out, and that's that.
It's nice that we don't get Dissolving-Capulet Carrie or a Chin-dancing jazz freakout; she takes her cues from the very exhausted and very at-peace Nick Brody, who is attending to his goodbyes with the same precision and dedication that he prays four times a day, or that sent him on his first tour to Afghanistan. While her fierce faith in their future was one kind of beauty, part of her I think realizes that Brody giving himself and his will up to Allah, in the end, might be even moreso. They didn't even know half the languages they had in common.
Nick asks her not to come to the hanging, knowing that she is Carrie Mathison and will most certainly be attending, so she's there when Akbari's widow spits in his face and puts the noose around his neck herself. Carrie literally climbs the walls, in this case a chainlink barrier, and is eventually knocked to the ground and leaves, weeping. And that's the story of Nick Brody: Eight years in a hole, three years as a monster, and one very exciting couple of months at the end there. He died knowing about his daughter, though, and with the understanding that he had touched something very rare. The rest doesn't really matter, because the rest is just about war.
Four months later, Carrie receives a commission from the Senator Director to be the new Istanbul Station Chief. Her eight-months-pregnant ass tries one more time to get Nick a titular star at that night's commemorative ceremony, and of course Lockhart can't do that without risking his own house of cards, so she bitches at a very sweet Quinn for a while before noticing that she is eight months pregnant, and runs off to take a pregnancy test.
Back home, Maggie and Dad are excited to take part in any area of Carrie's life at all, with their cribs and Babybjörns, but basically roll with it when she tells them she has no interest in being a mother, and that the things that will make her a great Station Chief are the things that will be fucking up her daughter. The Dad gets mad because that's exactly what Carrie's mother did -- take her off the board because she underestimated her own strength -- but Maggie just tells them to shut up and see what happens in a month.
Saul has moved to the private sector, and will be moving with Mira to start work in New York after he's done with their (gorgeous!) Moroccan vacation. They toast breakfast croissants to his secret victory in Iran -- which has become suddenly very diplomatic and reasonable ever since the General's death, for some reason -- and he gets to have several conversations (with Mira, Dar Adal, and even Carrie) about the emotional task of getting no credit for the thing he actually accomplished, and instead being forced out of his true home.
Adal thinks he's sadder about it than he acts, but Carrie gets it: It's exactly the same way she feels, watching him walk away for the last time from the safer world they built together. And how she feels drawing Nick's star for herself on the Langley wall that night, where nobody will ever know who it stands for.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously, Nick Brody knocked the General at the top of the IRGC unconscious with a giant ashtray, and then suffocated him to death. Now, despite the mission having gone so badly that his handlers told the support team to kill him, he's still hoping that Carrie can somehow do her Carrie thing and get him out of Tehran. He makes it all the way to the downstairs door before a tense moment where he realizes he's forgotten to turn in his visitor badge from last week, on which they spent almost as much time focusing our attention as they did the ashtray on the desk, or the fact that Abu Nazir first suggested him for recruitment in that very room up there.
Anyway, he turns in the badge and climbs into the car that'll take him back to his golden cage, knowing the second the General's body is discovered he'll have no choice but to use the gun he stole from the General's desk. There's kind of a funny moment where the secretary -- I think the same grouchy one that hates Javadi -- checks in, doesn't see Akbari in his office, almost ignores it... but then comes back around to check, like "By any chance are you lying on the carpet behind your desk? Oh crap, you are. And dead as hell."
So it is that Brody's car has just been checked through the gates by a very mean man when the yelling starts. He holds the gun to the driver's neck, and forces him to drive and drive. Better get on outta there, Nick Brody! Pretty exciting stuff.
THE CIA
Carrie: "So guess what?"
Saul: "You're naming the baby Saul."
Carrie: "I'm pregnant? That's crazy! No, I was just calling to say that I missed my plane to Geneva..."
Saul: "Peanut, you motherfu..."
Carrie: "It's okay though because guess what? Despite you trying to have my boyfriend literally murdered, he has completed the mission."
Saul: "What are you talking about?"
Carrie: "General Akbari lies dead in his office, from which Brody just called me."
Saul: "Just for the sake of argument, isn't that also what he would say if he had been turned again, or captured, or..."
Carrie: "Does every episode of this entire show have to be about this? Just assume at this point that I am right, instead of presuming that I'm wrong. You will save so much time."
Saul: "Don't dismiss the possibility he's leading security forces to your location right now, and confirm for me you're aware of what happens if you're caught."
Carrie: "Goonies never say die, Saul."
Saul: "Cool. Enjoy dying, or not dying. I'll call Majid Javadi and see if he knows anything about this."
Javadi: "Oh, I'm well aware. Administratively speaking, today is already quite the shit sandwich."
THIS PARK
Remember last year when Brody freaked out on that reporter lady I loved so much? Like he just started walking and twitching away into the trees? Well, this is a lot like that. He hangs around this park for a long time, looking six-five and ginger and spooked, and then eventually gives up and goes back to the car he took away from his driver, and that's when Carrie shows up finally and knocks on the window.
Brody: "Gah!"
Carrie: "Sorry to make you jump!"
Brody: "It's okay I'm just a little nervous today!"
She drives him to her car, on the other side of the park, and then they get the hell outta there, to a safe house in Garmsar that is just far enough away for one (1) conversation about where Nick Brody was born.
CIA
Dar Adal: "You have a look on your face like we're not going to kill Nick Brody today."
Saul: "I have that look every day."
Dar Adal: "I know, and I just hate it."
Majid Javadi: "Listen up, ya boners. I got a manhunt going on here. So you better hide them really well, or else let me find them. Or optimally, for me at least, both."
He has a good point, which is that if he fails to catch the person who did this assassination -- after he got in there on Javadi's name, on Javadi's watch -- he will look like he is not very good at the job to which he was just promoted. So he has to show a lot of hustle out there, hopefully a body count, or else the point will be that Javadi is only preferable because he is alive, versus being dead.
Saul: "Yeah, uh, um, uh..."
Javadi: "I recognize that sound in your voice, that inability to commit. He's with goddamn Carrie Mathison, isn't he."
Saul: "I mean, did we not all know with 100 percent accuracy that this is what would end up happening?"
Javadi: "You understand if they get caught together, she will be tortured to death? You get that? And you'll have to disavow?"
Saul: "I have to go, bye."
Dar Adal: "That's why I'm saying we should just turn them in immediately, so Javadi can save Carrie at least. The mission's over."
Saul: "I mean, but he's so heroic! He did such a good job. And I promised..."
Dar Adal: "He is a fucking terrorist. It's your last day as director. Take your foot off the gas, and your hand off my leash, and let me kill the shit out of this guy. C'mon."
Saul: "Actually, no. Let's save everybody. We're saving everybody."
THE DESERT
I was born in the desert, he says.
Brody: "The Mojave. My old man was stationed at the Air-Ground Combat Center."
Carrie: "How do I not know that?"
Brody: "He'd just die if he knew what I was. How things ended up."
They arrive, after another hour, and the house is beautiful. He parks himself in the bathroom forever. His dirty hands, his streaked and sweaty face. When he looks in the mirror what do you think he sees? What does he think?
"I was born in the desert," maybe. Maybe he thinks about the dry sun and the arid prayers; how every desert is the same desert when you're trying to be born. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity," maybe. His old man was a soldier once.
DEBRIEF
It's on the news when they assemble for Scott Ryan's breakdown: 16 SEALs in two Black Hawks and two Chinooks, all coming out of Herat, Afghanistan down a ridge to the safe house, and then 210 minutes later, coming back out. The Chinooks will stay on the Afghani side until they're free, or to support the Black Hawks if they get into it.
Dar Adal: "It being in this case, of course, a huge international fuckstorm that involves the US military -- JSOC, so like, the entire military -- exfiltrating the assassin of the thirdmost important man in Iran."
Scott Ryan: "I don't make the decisions, I just ... vaguely seem to do everything, on the TV show we're on."
Dar Adal: "Oh my God, where is the JSOC guy? He is so neat. Not that you're not fabulous, but I was thinking since it's SEALs he might come back."
Scott Ryan: "I know. He was like a sexy ghost. Hey, who is the Director of the CIA?"
Dar Adal: "Ordinarily that would be a stupid question, but today of all days it's a valid question with a stupid answer, which is that Saul Berenson is the Director for eleven hours and ten minutes, and then it becomes Andrew Lockhart."
Scott Ryan: "Or his evil twin."
Dar Adal: "Or his evil twin. You never know Lockhart's level of being a little shit until it's too late."
Scott Ryan: "I don't know how many hours 210 minutes is, but I bet it's less than eleven so we're good."
If it weren't poor Nick Brody and Carrie at stake, I would like to imagine the clock strikes thirteen: Everybody's hair raises up in the air as Andrew Lockhart becomes the new CIA Director, and begins to gleam with an unearthly power. With just a wave of his hand he drops the Black Hawks out of the sky, there to remain forever, skeletal machines that were no longer needed, half-buried in the sand. Here lies the last loose end.
SAFE HOUSE
Carrie: "I got blankets! The desert gets cold but at least we have this place to stay. The literally nicest place you've been since the day Langley exploded. And it's not even that nice! Unless you are Gwyneth Paltrow and think things are nicer the less convenient or pleasant they are, in which case this would be the bomb."
Brody: "I'm not Gwyneth Paltrow. This place is okay though. You haven't made me be on heroin or shot me in the gut yet so it automatically wins."
Carrie: "I'm sorry the last several months have been so hard on you! They've been pretty shitty for me too, I'm not gonna lie. But I don't think either of us really deserve it. So then why are you in such a foul mood? You should be staring at me with whirling crazy stars and nebulas in your eyes like I am doing at you."
Brody: "Carrie, I clonked a man in the head and then suffocated him to death."
Carrie: "Yeah, but you're a terrorist. You do shit like that."
Brody: "Not anymore."
Carrie: "Let us remember who that man was. He chained children together -- tens of thousands of them -- and sent them into mine fields. Into the battle lines."
Brody: "I appreciate you trying to cheer me up with that story, but honestly I just feel like feeling a little weird today. Do you know what hormones are or what brain chemistry is? I have all things in my body right now, all the ways a person can feel, times a hundred, going crazy, bouncing their chemistries against each other, making me feel like a nuclear bomb that will never explode."
Carrie: "That is how I feel, literally, all the time."
She was born in the desert too.
(Ring-ring.)
Saul: "You at the safe house?"
Carrie: "Yeah. He's being a real downer."
Saul: "Well, Peanut. You were right about him, for the thirty-sixth episode running. He did what he said he would. Albeit in the most ass-backward hair-raising Carrie Mathison way imaginable. The good news is, you will not die there. Scott Ryan is sending the cavalry."
Carrie: "That's a bit of a relief, to be honest."
Saul: "I'll meet you in Germany."
Carrie: "Oh my God, Saul just gave you approval and validation!"
Brody: "Cool?"
Carrie: "Brody, you clearly don't understand what that means. If Saul Berenson tells me I did a good job, I turn a flip like a circus poodle."
Brody: "No judging, because obviously Abu Nazir, but objectively you guys are pretty gross with each other sometimes."
Carrie: "On that note, what do you think will happen when we get home? I think we will get married and our children will be gingers without mental illnesses. They will give us many medals, Chewbacca will be there. I can wear a pretty dress."
Brody: "I think I am already dead and have not yet lain down."
Carrie: "You're so funny. Grumpy old grump."
"There was this man in Caracas, a doctor. He called me a cockroach. Unkillable. Bringing misery wherever I go."
Carrie: "I feel like you are not on board with my happiness concept."
Brody: "But I mean, he's right. I have faith in Allah and in you, but that's about it."
Carrie: "Was this not all about your redemption? I am pretty sure we put you back together specifically so you wouldn't have to feel bad about almost blowing up those people that time you didn't blow anybody up."
Brody: "You can't redeem murder with more murder. That's like washing your hands with blood."
It breaks down into a very interesting thing, which is that they are so bonded on so many levels that it's almost impossible to see over the top, into the ways they are different, creating a "wait, who are you?" situation. For Carrie, even hating him connected them more strongly, because it was about America: They were two sides of a triangle with America at the top. For her, this is the one thing that is very simple: You give yourself to America, like you offer yourself to God. All your body, your mind, your spirit and your soul are things you may lay down on that altar.
Even with the sedatives still washing out of her system, even in her guise as a double agent, she could sit in that poisoned garden and tell Martin Donovan to fuck himself for joking about that. And so when he says that he is damned for killing this evil man, she can't even hear the words: You're a Marine, she says. You're a weapon of the state. Like I'm a soldier, like Quinn is a soldier: When you sign up for service what you are saying is purely, "I will kill so other people don't have to. I will get my hands dirty to keep innocents clean."
Sometimes you get shot, sometimes you do the shooting, but either way it's the thing you signed up for and it's the purpose and meaning of your life. That's what you're agreeing to do, and it is a beautiful and a necessary thing. And what Brody is doing in this safe house is moving the goal posts, adding addenda to that. Which changes her view of him, and changes her understanding of the way he sees her. If you change the rules, if you say "sometimes following the order is not sanctified," then everything is up for grabs.
I think he's wrong -- that's why it's called service -- but you can see how it hits Carrie even worse. After this whole season especially, the idea that you can just say no, reprioritize and say we are no longer holy, that's the worst and saddest thing he can say. So she fights him on it. Because as happy as she is to be with him, what he's really saying is that the unbelievable struggle and torture and monstrosity she has undergone -- giving up not just her body but her mind, her unique existence as a person named Carrie Mathison, on that altar -- are something dirty, or tawdry.
Carrie: "You're a Marine, the rules are different."
Brody: "No. Because I'm not really one. And I haven't been for a very long time."
Carrie: "If that's how you view the service we do, why would you..."
Brody: "It felt like killing. I don't know how else to say it. I was just a guy, killing another man. It wasn't holy, it wasn't service, because I am not that person."
The worst thing Quinn ever could have said to her, and he only made the mistake of saying it once, was that this whole operation was about her love for Brody, and not for her country. To her they are the same thing, and she's actually right about that, but to have it put this way so bluntly: We are murderers, war is murder. That, she can't do.
Carrie: "By the way, I'm four months pregnant. From that time Quinn refused to kill you at the lake, which I guess makes him our daughter's godfather. Not that any of us know that."
Brody: "I wish I knew that four months ago!"
Carrie: "I am telling you now! Don't be a dick about it. I am enough of a dick about it for both of us."
She gets that terrified look in her eyes -- Have we said the unsayable at some point? Did I fuck this up? -- and stumbles backwards, to tell him nothing is certain, who knows what the US holds, what happens when they get home. No pressure. Lots of therapy but no pressure.
"Look. I don't know what happens back home, either. What kind of a life we have, or we don't have, whether it's together or apart. But there will be a life. And I'm not sorry about that. Not for one single second. Because I happen to believe one of the reasons I was put on this Earth was for our paths to cross."
The other main one being, of course, to stop 9/11 through time-travel and elbow grease.
Carrie: "Call me crazy, fuck it. I know I sound crazy..."
Brody: "Nope. It actually sounds like something to hold onto."
She's not wrong. The balls-out, horribly earnest way she's saying it is tough to look at -- that's our Carrie! -- but the truth is that she is right:
The boy who loved America so much he tried to burn it down, and the girl who loved America so much she set fire to herself.
CAVALRY
The sound first, and then the light; his head in her lap, sleeping for the first time now that he's home. It only takes Carrie a few seconds to grab her purse and her Brody and run out to meet the choppers, when they come.
It takes even less time for her to realize what's happening, that Majid's men have found them, and tell Brody to run.
On the ground with her hands over her head, as they clap him in irons and drag him away, she's never looked so small. And when she desperately tells them to call Majid Javadi, she only gets smaller when they tell her he's well aware of what's happening here.
SAUL
Gets the call from her, begging to hear this is all part of the plan, seconds later. Alone at the safe house.
Saul: "Hey Scott Ryan and Dar Adal and Andrew Lockhart, can I ask you what the fuck is happening here?"
They: "You probably already figured it out, but..."
Saul: "You fucking pussies. Who called Javadi? Who recalled the Herat SEALs?"
Lockhart: "POTUS, via me. PS, I have your job now."
Saul: "But we had 210 minutes! It was all going down just fine! He's an American asset! A person! We promised him safe passage..."
Dar Adal: "You're sentimental, because of Carrie. It's kind of cute."
Saul: "I'm sorry, it's a sentimental idea that we are loyal to our own people?"
Dar Adal: "He's an asset, yeah. That goes both ways. Individuals don't come before the mission. The mission objective is to keep Javadi at the IRGC. You're blinded by hope."
Lockhart: "Think about it like, this is your legacy. The Iran thing is you, it's your last thing. And now it will always be the last thing. We are keeping you from hurting yourself."
Saul: "You're talking actuarial bullshit, which is up for debate. I'm talking about heroics, which aren't. We could have had both."
Lockhart: "Either way it's over, bro."
Saul: "You bet your ass it is."
IRGC
Looking particularly feral, French Lady Carrie is caught once again in the lobby of her French Lady hotel by Javadi's men, and taken to another private meeting.
Javadi: "Let me guess. You're going back to the uncle's house to hide out and come up with one more Carrie Mathison trick?"
Carrie: "You better not hurt him! You better not do anything to that assassin that just killed the General of your country's military, that you now have in custody!"
Javadi: "I am always so amazed by how crazy you are. But listen, you think I'm this rabid animal just because..."
Carrie: "Uh, just because you're constantly torturing and murdering anyone that threatens your cowardly survival instinct? Or sometimes just for fucking fun?"
Javadi: "Valid."
Where's Brody? Evin prison, sentenced to death by hanging, before a military tribunal, on his arrival to Tehran. In public, tonight at 4 AM, with Akbari's widow and his sons standing by. Old-school justice. They'll hang him, everyone will cheer, and then they'll go to morning prayer. They will feel themselves knit back together, by this justice. Grateful that the beast who came into the city, slinking, a beast in the form of a man, and betrayed them all -- made them feel foolish for cheering him on, with his empty words and empty eyes -- has met his just end.
Carrie: "You find a fucking way to stop it."
Javadi: "Um, or what? You'll what, make this whole season meaningless? Then you're just some crazy knocked-up girl. Saul's just some ambitious son of a bitch that ran out of time. America's just a monster and Iran's viciousness is justified all over again. Does that sound great to you? Do you not remember drooling down your fucking chin for this?"
Carrie: "It won't mean anything. This had to be both."
Javadi: "You're two women right now. One of them knows you sound like a crazy, hysterical asshole. The other one has spent the last three years so desperate to save him you've warped your frame."
Carrie: "Don't talk about me like I'm a hypocrite. It's okay to be a soldier and a person."
Javadi: "In theory, yes. In practice, you're gross for doing this for impure reasons, but grosser to keep reiterating it. With his child in your belly, talking about America."
"Who Brody is, that's for Allah to know. But what he did there can be no debate. It was astonishing and undeniable. And what you wanted which was for everyone to see in him what you see. That has happened. Everyone sees him through your eyes now. Saul, Lockhart, the President of the United States. Even me."
Javadi: "And to be honest, that's a lot. And if you weren't a woman, I'd love you just as much for this no matter why you did it. All he did was what he was trained to do, while you did things no human can be trained for. But it's over now and you need to get okay with that."
Carrie: "Take me to him. Shut up and get me in."
Javadi: "Carrie, he's at peace. He's at a kind of peace, awaiting his end. Don't fuck that up for him. Don't send all the chemicals rocketing around just because you're selfish."
Carrie: "Phone call. Two minutes. I have no idea what you're saying because I am on fire all the time. I wouldn't know peace if I stared it in the face. The closest I ever came to peace was electrocuting my brain, my memories, and even then my last thought was of him."
He gives her the phone not because it's the right thing to do -- it isn't -- but because she is Carrie Mathison. She needs very little, but what she needs she needs a lot.
Carrie: "Girl, don't you worry. Saul's gonna scramble every helicopter in existence..."
Brody: "Stop. Stop hoping. I know how much you love him and how much you depend on needing him. I loved Nazir, I get it. But this has to stop. I can't be worrying about you right now. You can't be frayed when I go."
Carrie: "It's not false hope! I can do this, I always do this. You assholes always say I won't do it and then I do it. Max and Virgil and Quinn and me, we can..."
Brody: "You're being cruel."
Carrie: "Don't you dare..."
Brody: "Not to me."
He begs her to stay away from the ceremony. He knows she won't.
She begs him to stay on the line, just to breathe. She begs him not to go.
But she knows he will.
HOTEL
Saul: "I wish I could do something, but... You know I don't even work there anymore?"
Carrie: "I mean, what about Amnesty? Or Human Rights Watch?"
Saul: "You're only a couple hours out, Peanut. That's not how they roll."
Carrie: "But then how are we going to fix this?"
Saul: "We're not."
Carrie: "No, I understand that, but what I am saying is, how can he be saved?"
She doesn't really believe him until he says -- his voice going soft, the way it does with Carrie and only Carrie -- how very sorry he is.
Then she breaks apart.
4 AM
Their breath is fog. The square's half a football field wide, surrounded in chainlink. The driver begs her, the whole time, to go back, to get out; she just pushes forward, cutting through the crowds like a knife, until she is against the fence. Men with guns stand facing the crowd, facing away from the spotlights and fanfare.
The widow puts the noose around his neck, after spitting in his face. Their sons are meant to rejoice, but it's the middle of the night and they are growing boys, and their breath is fogging.
As his body swings, she calls his name. Over and over, climbing the fence to the very top, to see into his eyes; they knock her down and she grunts, hard, on landing. But she never stops watching. They burn together; they always did.
She wouldn't know peace if it stared her in the face. And it is.
FOUR MONTHS LATER
Saul brings Mira croissants, in the top-floor tented lounge of their beautiful Morocco pied-à-terre thing, those gorgeous white buildings with the blue trim, those narrow Dickie Greenleaf streets. She's got a headline in her hand, when he returns.
"In a stunning development at the Geneva summit, Iranian diplomats have offered IAEA inspectors full and unfettered access to the regime's nuclear sites in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions..."
Mira: "Saul, this is you. You did this."
Saul: "Not just me."
Mira: "Just you in the sense that it was your entire life. Other people were involved, but only one person has been aiming for this since that day Javadi showed himself to us."
Saul: "Okay but I feel weird about it. Come with me to Washington, for this thing."
Mira: "I'm going to New York to set up our house. I'm certainly not stepping in that monster haunted house of a building. Neither should you. Langley is no home to you."
Saul: "It's for the dead. The annual commemorative ceremony. We've got 132 stars to put up this year. Someone's got to say goodbye."
Mira: "Did you make a plan to see Carrie while you're there?"
Saul: "I made a couple calls. I'm not gonna push it."
Mira: "That's so weird, though! You guys love each other like..."
Saul: "I would like to sit quietly beside her without looking her in the eye, for one hour. That's the meeting I want. Because otherwise I won't know what to say, or where to look, or if I should hug her, or apologize, or what I would be apologizing for, or... I won't know the words."
DIRECTOR LOCKHART
Lockhart: "You look fancy-free! Glowing. When's your family leave coming up?"
Carrie: "I will probably need a couple hours, I guess."
Lockhart: "What a funny joke!"
Carrie: "Anyway. Isn't it so cool how Saul was right about everything? Like, everything-everything? Makes you wonder what he'd be able to accomplish without a pisher up his ass all the time, doesn't it."
Lockhart: "One thing I would never argue is the idea that Saul Berenson is ever wrong about anything. You and I have that in common."
Lockhart: "I couldn't keep him on, Carrie. I hope you understand why."
Carrie: "Agree to disagree, I guess."
Lockhart: "That's exactly how he would have put it!"
Carrie: "Uh, that's how anybody would put it. It's a common phrase that people say. But especially in situations like this, where I am fully trying to act like a human being and you're doing everything you can to freak me out."
Lockhart: "I know, I'm not even trying. I'm just naturally unctuous. Listen, do you want this job?"
Just like last year, Carrie's been offered the youngest Station Chiefery in Agency history, in this case running Javadi out of the former Constantinople. Last time, she turned it down for love, which blew Saul's mind for exactly as long as it took her to get Brody out of the country after 12/12. This time, what's keeping her here?
Carrie: "Can I pick my people?"
Lockhart: "Mostly. I want you to keep Tony Shadid as Deputy, for the transition..."
Carrie: "You and I both know I'm talking about Quinn and Virgil and Fara. And if Jacob is very, very good over the hiatus, possibly Max too."
Lockhart: "As long as you bring in Saul as a contractor, we'll basically have our same show but without the main thing about our show. That should ease the transition too."
Carrie: "Hey, no big deal but could Brody have a star at the ceremony today?"
Lockhart: "Oh, honey. Do not do this to me slash us slash yourself."
Carrie: "He fulfills the criteria, sir."
Lockhart: "He wasn't technically an employee of the CIA."
Carrie: "Bitch, nobody is technically an employee of the CIA then. 90% of the spy game is not telling people you are a spy. But fine. He was still an Agency asset, who died -- heroically, I believe -- in service of his country."
Lockhart: "Okay but everything up to that last day is pretty... I mean, he was an avowed terrorist, lady. There's a videotape of him confessing as he straps on a vest, which the world thinks is from six months ago. Then of course there's the endless hours of footage during his recent shit-talking press tour through Iran..."
The story she wants to tell is the true story: He was a United States Marine who was captured, and tortured, for eight years. Whose love for his country shined so brightly that it became a flame. Who was a trained attack dog that killed because it was what he was created to do. Who was sent back and forth so many times he eventually knew no master at all: Who saw the Red Queens for what they were, and realized the only things he truly served were God, and love. Who committed one last sin to save the world.
But those are stories reserved for the ears of a very special few, is Lockhart's point, and that's a truer and a more important story. This is a story about what we did, and continue to do, and by telling this story you take away the sacrifice. Our hands don't stay clean if we roll in the wreckage; she's not protecting the innocents if she puts them through this story. If she disrupts the narrative, at this point, she takes away the beauty of what he did.
Because the real story is that a little boy who loved guns and tanks and soldiers, and most of all his country, grew up to be a Marine. He sacrificed much more than his life, and ten years later came back a beast that climbed slowly back into the light. A thousand pieces of a man, each one of them stronger than you or I, knit themselves back together: Through unshakeable faith, and an uncommon love, in the end he died without sin. His back was straight and his eyes were clear and the last thing he saw was something beautiful.
And the official story -- war hero and former Congressman, unfairly nailed for the 12/12 bombing, died on a rogue mission to destroy Iran -- is so much closer to that truth than the truth would be.
Carrie: "He was a US Marine who was captured and tortured for eight years. Who are we to stand in judgment?"
Lockhart: "No one's judging him, I'm just not memorializing him on the walls of this building. It's not that complicated, honestly. It makes more sense to let the story tell itself properly, than to problematize the whole thing. It makes him less of a hero when you do that. It is incomprehensible why you would do this."
Carrie knows, better than anybody, how much of his life was lived in the eyes of others. She was the first audience, but hardly the last: When he was a hero, when he was Issa's father, when he was the Langley Demon, when he was the Vice President of the United States, when he was a cockroach in the Tower of David, when he was a Big Man in Tehran, when he was the monster that murdered our beloved Akbari; all of these things were him, because he was a man that lived in our stories. Who was beaten into living that way, by boot over here and then by Nazir over there.
She's happy to live in the shadows, to be unnamed -- to be a thousand women, all the time -- because her interior is more vivid and more varied than most. But she knows, because she loved him, that he was only a cockroach when people were wrong about him, when he was in hiding. The one time she tried to make him live Carrie-style, it nearly killed him. It's not enough for him to be loved by Saul, and Andrew, and Majid. He needs to be loved by the world, so that the world can put itself back together.
QUINN
Wishes he were more surprised, when the first thing she asks him outside Langley is for a cigarette. He snorts at her, but she promises not to light it; only to wave it around dramatically, in rhythm with her complaints.
Quinn: "What did Lockhart do now?"
Carrie: "Besides screwing Saul over? That asshole gave me Istanbul. Station Chief."
Quinn: "I can see why that would bother you."
Carrie: "It's this stupid baby in my womb that is the problem. I wish I had been thinking clearly for the first forty weeks of this pregnancy!"
Quinn: "I sense this is not the time for a Toldja So."
Carrie: "I thought, if Brody dies I would have a piece of him. I don't know of any other children of his I could probably have just by asking. Except for Chris, of course, but who the hell wants that kid."
Quinn: "You loved him. People have been having babies for that reason literally as long as there have been babies."
"It took getting this far to the fucking endgame to realize it's impossible. Quinn, I can't be a mother."
Quinn: "Because?"
Carrie, verbatim: "Because of ... me. Because of my job, because of my ... problems."
Quinn: "Homegirl, everybody has 'problems.' If we waited to be perfect we'd never fall in love at all. We'd never do anything."
Carrie: "No like, specifically like... I'll be a great Station Chief. Fearless, obsessed, ruthless."
Quinn: "It's true that being Carrie Mathison is a limited skillset, but..."
Carrie: "But now those are the same reasons I can't do this. It's not like last year, it's not like wondering if the raccoon can coexist with the man inside us. It's so much worse than that. Station Chief and Mother are opposites."
Quinn: "First of all, you're splitting and that's a symptom. Nothing is purely one thing, nothing is pure opposites. Second of all, I am the wrong fucking dreamboat to talk to about this."
Carrie: "Oh right, don't you like... have a kid? And also kill one recently?"
Quinn: "I had a son. I fucked it up. You think you're being smart but you're just being cruel."
Carrie: "Don't you dare..."
Quinn: "Not to your daughter. Nobody is ever going to be calling you cruel to anybody other than you, because that is your default. You think because the world is unbearable and your pain makes you as big as the whole world, you can fix your problems -- and fix the world -- by hurting yourself. When the truth is, all of your problems are separate issues that can be dealt with one by one. They are not all one big thing crushing you, they are lots of small things you can deal with. I had a kid, I fucked it up, it would be sad to stand and watch you do what I did. The end. That has nothing to do with Istanbul or Nicholas Brody or Andrew Lockhart or Majid Javadi or your dumb mother or your crazy father. It has to do with what it has to do with. And it has to do with the fact that you are not alone, and you do not need to consider these problems in the context of being alone. You have a family, you have a country; you are a hero. Get it together on this one. I'm like your only friend, you should listen to me more."
OLDSCHOOLER DINER
Saul laughs at Dar Adal when he arrives in town, for even looking at the menu; he gets the same thing every time. The joke is twice as big, we see, once the waitress arrives: Saul gets the same thing he does, too. "Two Old-Schools, coming up."
Dar Adal: "And congratulations on Geneva!"
Saul: "Bleh."
Dar Adal: "You're the only thing anybody's talking about. They're calling you the Maestro."
Saul: "And Lockhart's gonna dine out on our luck for the rest of his life. Why didn't you get shitcanned too? You've got all the qualifications for being remaindered, you're experienced and loyal and discreet..."
Dar Adal: "You're better off in the private sector for sure."
Saul: "So come with me. One phone call, I can triple your salary."
Dar Adal: "I'm a lifer. I'm not as strong as you."
Saul: "Keep it in mind. season's going to be very different."
Dar Adal: "You sound romantic. You sound like you're missing us. Are you saying you wouldn't come back, if Lockhart begged?"
Saul: "Never!"
Dar Adal: "You would."
They called him the Bear, and they call him the Maestro. It's not a world he wants to live in, but it's not a world he can leave either. Saul and Mira never had children, but he's a father just the same. He's got that, too.
We go on burning, just the same. We stand up in the wreckage and we dust off our wings and we head back into the dark, or we wouldn't be us.
CONDO
When she feels the baby kick for the first time, she screams. She's alone in the house, breathing hard as she feels it move. As she feels it turning real. We'll never know her move, though: Dad and Maggie come in through the door, just as she's calming down. They've got cribs and a Babybjorn and the jolliest, most put-on smiles.
Dad: "Do you have a rocking chair? I was thinking I would make a rocking chair."
Carrie: "Make a rocking chair? Just make one?"
Dad: "I am antsy. I am nervous waiting for this girl."
Carrie: "Well, the doctor said the ultrasound looks perfect, so that's a shocker."
Them: "Uh, why would that be a surprise? I mean, what good news!"
Carrie: "Thing is, I won't need this stuff. I'm moving to Istanbul the second she's born."
Maggie: "Great, you can strap her in the Bjorn and..."
Carrie: "Uh, no. What I'm saying is that Quinn made just enough of an impression on me that I can verbalize why I am crazy about this. I'm not taking the baby."
Them: "Oh, that's a very Carrie move, but..."
Carrie: "-- It's sick! I know it's sick. But I have to choose. I feel strongly that I have to choose. You two know more than anyone on Earth how bad it gets."
Maggie: "I've been thinking about that. A lot. And I think a baby will be good for you. You need a reason to be healthy. You need something to be strong for that isn't just your slippery patriotism. Something that is yours. That way, you'll know you exist."
Them: "You will be astonished by the love you have for her."
Carrie: "No sign of that so far."
Them: "It happens. It's an actual science thing that happens. You aren't smarter than God."
Carrie: "That's up for debate. But one thing I do know is, I am terrified."
Dad: "Two tours in Baghdad, and now a baby's bringing you to your knees?"
Carrie: "That's exactly it. I've never been scared before. I don't have the infrastructure."
Maggie: "Look, can we just take this day by day?"
Dad: "You're not leaving this kid, like your mother did you..."
Maggie: "Yeah, that's exactly as sane as I was lobbying for. Good job, you two."
Dad: "I'll take her. I am merely a hundred years of age."
Maggie: "Oh my God, are your bipolar cycles synchronizing? You both need to stop being fucking crazy, right this minute. I demand it."
Them: "We'll see how you feel."
Carrie: "I always know how I feel. It's usually the only thing I know. And right now, I feel scared. Scared, is how I feel. And sad, I'm so fucking sad."
"And I am so fucking scared."
CEREMONY
Lockhart reads the names out; we join them in the last eight of the 132. All of them have stories we'll never hear; many more have stories we'll never even know exist.
"No matter when or where they served -- no matter if their names are known to the world, or only to us -- each cherished colleague remains a constant source of inspiration and courage. They all heard the same call to duty, and they all answered it without hesitation. They are our heroes. They are America's heroes. And that's how we'll remember them."
In the silence, they think. Funerals are a funny thing; a time bomb that never feels as meaningful as it's happening as the silence in the minutes, hours, days to follow. You can't hold 132 people in your head, not even as long as it takes to say them. That's why we have walls, and ceremonies, and stars. As long as there have been people, there have been monuments to the ones left. That's how we remember them.
When we take our leave there are so many ways to process it, as people. As many as there are people, perhaps. Sometimes we think of it as growing apart: I am over here, and you are over there. Sometimes we feel left behind, and that hurts and can feel good, too. But the truth is we don't grow apart; we always in each other already, as much as we ever were. We go on burning.
The crowd, the mourners and the day-players and those who are there because they have to be, all shuffle out and up, to the reception. Quinn leaves her to sit, wait for the room to empty out.
The Bear spots her, as he presses a limited amount of flesh, but knows enough to look away. When he finds her, he'll sit down as he never left. No big talk, no tears. She'll smile, her beautiful smile flashing competence, flashing presentness, and they'll gruff at each other, so full of love it shines from them.
Saul: "Lockhart gives a nice speech."
Carrie: "He's a politician. It's all he'll ever be."
Saul: "Congrats on Istanbul. The only thing you ever wanted; the thing I tried to give you."
Carrie: "Congrats on Iran. And can I just say, fuck this place for letting you go."
Saul: "Peanut, when it's over it's over. Pull down the shades and go home. Dignity is a gift we give ourselves."
Carrie: "But you won, Saul. You won. It matters."
Saul: "I guess I did, and I guess it does."
Dar Adal snags her, marches her upstairs for a "situation," for Lockhart up in the complex who desperately needs her. It's a nice feeling for them both. There is no such thing as growing apart.
But it's hard to remember that, as she watches Saul slowly walk through the crowd, and into the light.
LATER
She knew him before she ever saw his face. She climbed into the walls of his house, and heard his sleeping breathing, and fell in love with him. She traveled side-by-side with him, through his trauma and his recovery, their hearts beat in tandem long before they met, and when they met the whole sky lit up. The purpose for which they were put on this Earth. She brought him back, so many times, she hauled him up out of there, every time it got dark. So few of us are ever really known.
Downstairs at Langley is dark; they've taken away all the chairs and left the stars on the walls. It's empty, empty even of the memories we brought today. Empty of the pain, and the death; empty of heroes. It's just a room, and a book locked up tight with every name we're allowed to know; it's just a wall, with stars named in the book. It's just a space, where a woman draws a star upon the wall, the perfect size, as though it were left there purposefully for him.
She has a million names, and the star has none. But it shines on her, nonetheless. It always will.
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.