After eight seasons of ups and downs, the Showtime drama series Homeland finally came to an end on Sunday night with an eventful series finale. Once a critical darling, then a punching bag, then somehow an underrated show, Homeland has been through it all. And while the series never came close to matching that incredible, Emmy-winning first season, once it finally disposed of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) the show started to evolve in exciting ways. But whether set in Germany or Pakistan, tackling terror at home or abroad, the heart of Homeland has always been the relationship between Carrie (Claire Danes) and Saul (Mandy Patinkin). And in the series finale, that relationship was broken.
Homeland Season 8 was structured to somewhat mirror the show’s first season, as Carrie’s captivity in Russia at the end of Season 7 raises doubts over whether she’s been turned into a Russian agent or not. Through it all, Saul defends her, but in the final few episodes of the season Carrie made the conscious decision to betray her country in order to retrieve the black box from Russia. You know, the black box that contains the flight recording from the helicopter that went down early in the season, which killed both the president of the United States and the president of Afghanistan.
In the series finale, it appears as though Carrie has agreed to kill Saul for the Russians. They want the name of the spy Saul has been operating inside the Russian government for decades, and if he won’t give it up, they figure killing him will then give Carrie access to the spy and thus the ability to out him or her. But Carrie does not intend to kill Saul, she only wants him to think she will. Instead, when he won’t give the name up even in the face of death, she goes to his sister in Israel and tells her Saul is dead, which then triggers her to give Carrie something Saul gave her in the event of his death: the name of the asset.
Image via Showtime
The asset is outed, and subsequently commits suicide rather than be captured by the Russian authorities. Carrie feels terrible, as she should, but the threat of a nuclear war with Pakiston has been sidestepped. And then the episode then flashes forward two years. At first, it appears as though Carrie has fully turned. She’s living in Russia and in a relationship with Yevgeny (Costa Ronin), and has written a tell-all book about betraying her country. She’s basically Edward Snowden.
But then in one final twist, Carrie sends Saul a message using the same method of passing information that Saul and his Russian asset did. She’s now a full-time spy working from inside Russia. Roll credits.
Homeland showrunner and co-creator Alex Gansa granted a number of interviews in which he talked at length about the Homeland series finale ending, Speaking to TV Line, he addressed whether Carrie’s relationship with Yevgeny is real, or if she’s just playing him:
“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. These are the situations that Carrie thrives in. And this particular situation is one she can be content in. And almost happy. She’s got a smile on her face at the end.”
Image via Showtime
In other words, kind of a new Nicholas Brody. Gansa also told TV Line that the conversations amongst the producers and actors about how far Carrie would go in betraying Saul were, uh, intense:
“As we got nearer and nearer to the finale and as the end was in sight, everybody had very strong opinions about how the show should end. And there was a lot of back and forth. 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. Whether she would turn the asset in. Whether the asset would get killed. All of those things were so profound in people’s view. And everybody wanted to leave the show in a way where their characters were true to themselves. There was a lot of conversation about that throughout the last few episodes. Everyone — cast members, directors, writers — was in a froth about how to end the show. To say there was some free-floating anxiety would’ve been an understatement.”
They also very seriously discussed having Carrie kill Saul:
“That [climatic Carrie/Saul] scene went through a lot of iterations before it wound up being the ruse that it eventually wound up being. There were many incarnations of that scene, one of which had her actually [killing him]… I wrote those scenes. And every time I [took another pass at them] I was like, ‘I just don’t believe Carrie would actually do this.’ So we backed out. We backtracked and figured out another way to do it.”
Image via Showtime
Speaking to Deadline, Gansa says Patinkin was adamant that the show end on a hopeful note:
“Mandy really advocated, like vehemently advocated for a hopeful ending. He did not want this to be doom and gloom. He did not want the world to descend into a nuclear exchange. He was very adamant amount that. Really lobbied hard for a hopeful ending of some kind, and I really hope we achieved it, because I think he was exactly correct.”
Gansa told EW that the Homeland series finale isn’t something that had been planned out for years. In fact, they really discovered it while breaking this final season:
“We started talking about the finale as we got episodes nine and 10 as we were breaking the season. Like, ‘If we make this decision here, where is it going to lead? How are we going to get to an ending that we like?’ 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 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. So I felt like it worked.”
Indeed, the idea behind the episode’s coda was to hint at a repair of the relationship between Carrie and Saul in progress, as Gansa explained to Deadline:
“Carrie really did betray Saul, really did betray her country, really did affect the death of a very important American asset in Moscow. And here is Carrie, at the very end, replacing that asset, becoming that asset, herself, and the glimmer of a repaired relationship with Saul is possible, at the very end. So, that was what we were going for, in that last 15 minutes.”
Image via Showtime
And as for the final final shot, you may notice that when Carrie returns to Yevgeny’s side at the jazz concert that the music is a bit more chaotic. That was intentional, and meant to reflect that Carrie is still in the spy game and will never really be free of it, Gansa told EW:
“We definitely curated those songs, so that shot of Carrie was a cacophonous mix of sounds and you sense that it’s in that chaos that she thrives.”
So is this really the end of Homeland? Gansa’s answer wavers from “never say never” to “almost certainly,” butells EW that right now, this feels like the conclusion:
“As [co-creator] Howard [Gordon] has said, ‘never say never.’ All of us are happy with where we ended the show and the series. Another chapter doesn’t feel necessary at the moment. But who knows what’s going to happen. Who knows what Claire and Mandy want to do. Who knows what Howard wants to do. We don’t know what that looks like. For now, it feels like closure.”
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Homeland Series Finale Ending Explained by Showrunner - Collider.com
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