Jason Butler Harner stars as Paul Franklin and Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison in “Homeland.” (Credit: Kent Smith/Showtime)
Uh oh. Crazy Carrie is back. She’s so crazy that Quinn had to go and do something drastic to quell the crazy. It’s for her man, yes, but she endangered the operation!
Anyway, that all happens towards the end of the episode. Let’s go through, blow-by-blow.
We start with the severely cuckolded Saul delivering breakfast in bed to Mira. She asks him to bang in sick so they can, well, bang in bed. People use the expression “bang in sick,” right? If not, they should start using it again. So Saul can’t bang in sick, so we don’t see him bang in bed (thankfully) because he has a meeting with his old buddy Mike at the White House.
When Saul gets there, Senator Lockhart is there and he’s all “Gah! This guy!” but Saul pulls rank (which he has for the next nine days) and makes Lockhart leave so that he can discuss business with Mike. “Your security clearance is one level below operation,” he tells Lockhart.
The senator is all, “Wah wah wah, Mike, this Saul guy is out of control” and Mike is all, “… and in this case, he’s correct.”
I’m paraphrasing Lockhart here. Saul totally schooled him though. And when Saul shows Mike the documents for a plan that includes regime change in Iran, Mike gets pretty psyched.
Meanwhile, Mira is meeting in a coffee shop with the dude she cheated on Saul with to break it off with him. He’s pissed! He tells Mira he loves her, but she just says, “Don’t say that!” and walks out.
We later see this guy sneaking into Mira and Saul’s place and setting up some sort of tracking device on their home computer. Woah! What a bad choice of extramarital lovers, Mira!
Carrie and Quinn try to figure out who the real Langley bomber is, after cross-checking Javadi’s intel with clients of Leland Bennett.
Fara is supposed to have shown up to help them, but we see that she’s in the parking lot, struggling with whether or not to actually go in. She opts not to. She bangs in sick! But for her, it’s not to bang somebody, it’s because she was so disgusted with the plan of letting Javadi return to Iran, that she just can’t stomach going into the office. We get a glimpse into her homelife. She lives with her father who she tells that she’s in banking, not working for the CIA. His health is poor and their relationship seems to be strained.
After a second day of banging in sick, Fara is visited by an agent who is like, “What’s up? Why did you visit the place where Javadi killed people on your sick day?”
The agent blows Fara’s cover that she’s working for the CIA. He’s pissed, saying if anybody back home in Iran finds out about this, they’ll all be hanged.
Saul tells Dar Adal that Mike signed off on the mission and he’s taking it to POTUS. That means President of the United States, for those who didn’t know what “bang in to work” meant. Dar Adal asks Saul, “Does Carrie know you’re going?” and Saul says, “She can’t even suspect it.”
At the end of the episode we find out that this trip she’s talking about is to see the smack-addicted Brody in Venezuela.
But this isn’t the only thing that Saul has been keeping from Carrie. Saul says that Javadi said as far as he knows Brody didn’t move the car at Langley. And Carrie is all, “he told me definitively that Brody didn’t move it! Why would he tell us two different stories?”
And Saul says, “Is that a question or an accusation?”
Ooooooh!
Carrie yells at Saul for not sharing info with her. They chill out and then Quinn asks Dar Adal to approach Leland Bennett and tell him to tell the lawyer that the CIA is after him. This of course prompts Paul Franklin to contact Carrie for a secret meeting, which he does by texting the William Carlos Williams line of poetry that gives this episode its title. (Notice how it’s all in lowercase? They’re being true to the poet!)
They meet at a church. Carrie throws some money in the collection bin and lights a candle, telling Paul Franklin that the candle is for “all the departed.”
He then asks, “You orthodox?”
She says it was an old boyfriend.
Paul Franklin asks Carrie to look into what Dar Adal has told Bennett. He wants her to tell Bennett and Co. what part of their business is under investigation. It’s a set-up, of course. The next time she meets with him she’ll tell him that the CIA knows who the bomber is.
“They’ve connected your firm to the guy who detonated the bomb at Langley,” she tells Franklin.
Franklin freaks out and admits that the guy is still in the country.
This is when the action really heats up! But before we get to that part, let’s just go over Carrie’s personal life.
In this episode, Carrie also visits the doctor about her pregnancy. We learn she’s three months pregnant. She doesn’t want to know the gender of her child. She comes clean that she had been on 1800 milligrams of Lithium and boozing a lot for the first part of the pregnancy, but she’s not doing that now. The doctor tells her to avoid stress. She’s all, “Gah! I got off my drugs that prevent me from going crazy for this kid, and now I have to chill out at work?”
She also discloses that Brody is the father! It’s not the one-night stand guy that became a two-night stand guy when she needed a place to crash.
So Leland Bennett tells Paul Franklin to get the bomber out of the country. Franklin agrees and then sets up a meeting with the bomber at a motel. He’s nobody we’ve ever seen before.
The CIA is watching from all angles, and they see Franklin get out of the car with a gun that he has put a silencer on. Carrie is freaking out. If Franklin kills the bomber then it will be a lot harder for her to prove to the world that her baby daddy didn’t kill everybody at the CIA.
So that’s when Carrie runs out and tries to intercept Franklin and keep the bomber alive. Quinn is on the roof with a gun, ready to shoot anybody if necessary. And that “anybody” becomes Carrie!
He shoots her in the bicep. Luckily Franklin doesn’t notice that she’s been taken out. But yeah, he shoots the bomber twice in the face and then fills the motel bathtub with acid so he can dispose of him “Breaking Bad” style. The guy will have no finger prints! The guy will have no body!
On the way to the hospital, Carrie asks Quinn, “Where the f— is Saul.”
That’s when we see Mr. Berenson pull up to the Tower of David, as referenced in the third recap of this season. That crazy abandoned high rise that is now a junkie outcast community in Venezuela. The last shot of the episode, a bloodshot junked out Brody!His leg is twitching and he smells bad enough that Saul needs to cover his nose with his hanky t
And credits!
Grade: B+
