Homeland recap: season four, episode eight – Halfway to a Donut

‘Carrie has no real option but to let the Taliban take Saul, but it doesn't make the act of doing it any less unpleasant.’ Photograph: Twentieth Century Fox/Ilze Kitshoff/Showtime

Spoiler alert: This blog is for people watching Homeland series four. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen season four, episode eight

Read the episode seven blog here.

‘There are only wrong choices’

A taut hour of spy games shot through with moral complexity and character-driven drama – Halfway to a Donut is the strongest episode of Homeland we’ve seen in quite some time, and certainly the best of the post-Brody era. It’s also, not coincidentally, the first time in a long while that Homeland has properly used its other great central relationship, Carrie and Saul.

In Homeland’s early seasons, that pairing – Saul as the bruised mentor, Carrie as the self-destructive mentee – felt no less watchable than the relationship between Carrie and Brody. So I’ve been quite disappointed by the lack of screen time between Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin lately, with it limited largely to Carrie and Saul briskly meeting in corridors. Perhaps the show has been deliberately keeping them apart, figuring that doing so would make tonight’s standout scene even more powerful.

Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison and Mandy Patinkin as Saul Berenson.Photograph: Kent Smith/PR

If that was the intention then it worked a treat. Watching Carrie desperately try to dissuade Saul from putting a gun to his temple as the Taliban moved ever nearer was stomach-churningly tense and desperately sad. We knew from the episode’s outset that Saul wouldn’t willingly play the role of a bargaining chip for Haqqani. His attack on the guard who spotted him dangling from the ceiling looked like pure opportunism to me. He wasn’t hanging himself as some clever stunt to escape: he was hanging himself because he would rather die than have six Taliban leaders released from prison.

For a moment, I genuinely thought Carrie would fail. That she didn’t underlined the closeness of their bond, with Saul’s implicit trust of Carrie winning through. Of course, this being Homeland, there was an added complication: Carrie didn’t actually lead Saul to safety, as she promised him she would; instead, she allowed him to be recaptured by the Taliban.

A number of critics have drawn parallels between Carrie’s decision-making and America’s larger conduct in the Middle East: every decision she makes, even the ones that are, on paper, sound, have unpleasant or unintended consequences. That’s certainly true here. Carrie has no real option but to let the Taliban take Saul, but it doesn’t make the act of doing it any less unpleasant, especially with Saul screaming “you fucking lied” down the phone at her. Which isn’t to say that Homeland is providing some sympathetic defence of the US here – at times this season the show has been truly damning in its assessments, Drone Queen birthday cakes and all – but rather that ultimately it is an intractable situation. There are, as Carrie says, only wrong choices.

It doesn’t help when the people you’re supposedly working with are quietly plotting to undermine your efforts. A separate conflict was taking place down the corridor from the control room as the ISI officials faced down against Lockhart and Ambassador Boyd. Lockhart is at his best when he’s in attack mode and here he briefly thought he had an upper hand, before it was snuffed out with the realisation that the ISI had already told the Taliban where Saul was. “I was really looking forward to telling those people to go fuck themselves. But I don’t see that happening now,” Lockhart said, gloomily.

Aasar Khan tells Carrie about Dennis’s treachery. Photograph: Twentieth Century Fox/David Bloomer/Showtime

Still, Carrie does now at least know who switched her pills, after Khan revealed Dennis’s treachery to her in a Tinker Tailor-style meeting in the car park. Our former suspicions of Khan have subsided a little: he’s aware of the ISI’s nefarious acts but doesn’t seem to be actively involved in them. The same can’t be said of Dennis, who is knee-deep in murk. How will Carrie deal with him? You’d expect her to force him to play the role of triple agent, though that has its own risks. Dennis is far less discreet than he thinks and poker-faced Tasneem is as shrewd as they come.

Notes and observations

• “Halfway to a donut” was how Dennis described a balushahi, a Pakistani delicacy. Not quite sure how that plays into the episode title. Anyone have any theories?

• One minor reservation in an otherwise strong episode: that line about Saul “ending up with his head in a basket like James Foley” felt quite crass.