Going into the series finale of Homeland, fans found themselves facing the fact that Carrie may have been willing to kill her mentor for the greater good. According to showrunner Alex Gansa, even the writers room was split on whether she would do it.
He told TVLine: “We have a really close team. And it’s been largely a smooth ride. [But] at the end everyone was just feeling all of these emotions and it got intense. The conversations got intense about how far Carrie would go, and how far she wouldn’t go.”
In the end, however, the show had another twist on its hands as Carrie tricked Saul’s sister Dorit (Jacqueline Antaramian) in order to get the name of the asset. The plan had been for Carrie to mix two liquids together which would knock Saul out and then she would signal for a kill team.
She rubbed the poison on his neck after Saul refused to give up the name of the agent, but in the end called off the kill and left Saul tied to a chair. Carrie then headed to Dorit in Israel and told her her brother had died of a stroke. Dorit then gave her a USB drive that Saul had left her to give Carrie in the event of his death.
This drive had the name of the agent on it, as well as an ironic moment that saw Saul telling Carrie in a video, “In the end, who we trust in this life is all that matters.” Carrie passed the name on to Yevgeny (Costa Ronin), who gave it to the Russians.
They then released the flight recorder that revealed the president’s helicopter was downed due to technical failure, and global catastrophe was yet again averted on Homeland. Things ended badly, however, for the Russian agent, who killed herself after learning the Russians had her name.
For its final scenes, the Homeland series finale jumped forward to two years later. Carrie is in Moscow, in a relationship with Yevgeny and on her way to a Kamasi Washington gig. While she is feeding her love of jazz in Russia, Saul receives a message in the spine of a book, the same way he used to communicate with his Russian asset.
This time, however, the book is Carrie’s memoir Tyranny of Secrets, and it’s Carrie who is working as his Russian asset. Her message to Saul (going by the codename Professor Rabinow) reads: “Greetings from Moscow, Professor. The Russian S400 missile defense system sold to Iran has a backdoor. It can be defeated. More updates to follow. Stay tuned.”
Speaking of this final scene, Gansa told Entertainment Weekly, “We knew we wanted Carrie to wind up in Russia. We had that as a landmark ahead of us. But how she got there and what happened when [she] got there was very much up for debate.
“One way to end would be to have Carrie exiled in Russia and living in some Soviet-like apartment block in an incredibly grim situation, isolated from the world like Ed Snowden. But we wanted more for her than that. So we gave her a companion and gave her a duplicitous relationship with him, yet a genuine one at the same time. And also a mission. She takes the asset’s place…And she begins to repair the relationship with Saul.”
Asked by TVLine how genuine her relationship with Yevgeny is, he said: “This is open to interpretation, but my feeling is that it is a real relationship, in the way that Carrie Mathison has real relationships. She is, by nature, attracted to duplicitous situations. So she can have real feelings for this guy and at the same time be betraying him.”
The Homeland series finale and all other episodes are streaming now on Showtime.
