Homeland's first season — how do I put this politely? — had many similarities with my first novel, The Faithful Spy. If you don't believe me, read TFS, and compare its central triangle of characters to Brody, Carrie, and Saul. If you still doubt, consider Saul's last name. Not a coincidence.

This season, Homeland's writers aimed higher, and missed more painfully. They took as a template The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the John le Carré novel that has defined spy fiction since it was published 50 years ago. But though season three traced the plot of le Carré's novel nearly beat for beat, it could only pretend at his understanding of the soul-crushing cost of espionage. And during the last few minutes of last night's episode, Homeland lost its nerve entirely, ending its season on a note of what can only be described as bizarre, almost comic optimism. Twinkle, twinkle...

In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a worn-out British officer named Alec Leamas is dangled before the East German government as a double agent. Leamas has secretly agreed with his masters at MI6 to act as bait. He hopes to convince the East German secret police that their chief, Mundt, is a British agent.

In fact, Leamas's bosses are playing a trickier game, one he doesn't understand until much too late. Before his supposed defection to East Germany, Leamas has fallen in love with a naïve, young British Communist named Liz. Late in the novel Mundt — who is in fact a British agent — brings Liz to East Germany to give testimony that shows Leamas was working for the British all along, and thus discredit the evidence Leamas has provided against him. MI6's goal was not to destroy Mundt but to keep him safe while taking down his deputy and nemesis, Fiedler. Both Leamas and Liz were simply pawns in this plan.

The British scheme works. Mundt defeats Fiedler and keeps his job. But the novel ends in tragedy. East German police kill Liz and Leamas as they try to escape to West Berlin. Liz is shot first. Leamas, who is at the top of the wall, lets the East Germans gun him down instead of jumping to safety.

The novel's parallels to Homeland's third season are obvious. Early on, with Carrie's secret approval, Saul hangs her out to dry, dangling her before the Iranians. He hopes to use her and Brody to place an American-run agent, Javadi, at the top of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The similarities persist to the final episode, when the agency betrays Brody — even though he's done everything it has asked.

But Homeland set le Carré's words to a very different tune. To le Carré, the games the spy agencies were playing didn't matter. Whether Mundt or Fiedler was in charge, East Germany would remain a totalitarian state under Soviet control. The wall would stay up, and the Cold War would continue. A sense of what can only be described as existential despair suffuses the novel. At its end, Leamas sees that Liz has died for no reason at all. He can no longer live with himself, or accept that innocent people must suffer because of what he does. He sees himself as a criminal, or at the least an accomplice, not a hero. He willingly climbs down from the wall to his execution.

But in Homeland's world, the CIA's moves matter enormously, and its case officers and agents are ultimately heroes. Even Brody. Sure, he dies, but honorably. After all, Javadi tells Carrie (and the audience) so. Yer boyfriend proved himself to everyone, babe, even me. Did the writers forget that back in episode six, Javadi put a bullet in his daughter-in-law, for no reason but to prove that he could? I'm not sure he ought to be the one making moral judgments.

And despite much speechifying along the way about the CIA's moral and intelligence-gathering failures, Homeland ended the season by giving the agency a big wet kiss. Saul's plan to remake the Revolutionary Guard turned out to be a smashing success, not just tactically but strategically. From his new position in charge, Javadi, a man who has overseen the killing of hundreds of Americans, helped bring peace between Iran and the United States. Say what? An American assassinates one of Iran's most senior officials... and the Iranians respond by negotiating a peace deal. Makes perfect sense. Nearly as much sense as the fact that Carrie and Saul somehow figured out that Iran was behind the December 12 bombing less than 24 hours after it happened.

But even harder to swallow was the way that victory turned out to be the best deodorant — not just for politicians or the agency's venal new director, Senator Lockhart, but for Carrie and Saul themselves. In the coda at the end of episode 12, four months after the end of Operation Ashtray, Carrie happily accepts a promotion from Lockhart, the man who sold out Brody, her baby daddy and the love of her life. Istanbul? Sounds great to me, chief. Lemme just schedule a C-section to rid myself of this annoying fetus, so I can get back to bizness. And if you won't give Brody a star of his own, no problemo. I've got this handy-dandy magic marker right here. Is Carrie35, or three-and-a-half? Meanwhile, Saul sits down for a victory waffle with Dar Whoosyacallit, the dude who was last seen getting him fired.

Maybe I was in no mood for happy endings, but Carrie and Saul seemed not just naïve but flat-out stupid to me in their willingness to forgive and forget. One meta interpretation of those scenes is that the writers were patting themselves on the back for having rid the show of Brody — a move they should have made at least a full season earlier. But a show that claims to take itself as seriously as Homeland shouldn't play those games.

Believe it or not, I didn't hate this season. The fact that 4,000 miles separated Brody and Carrie meant that we didn't have to watch I can't quit you moments every 15 minutes. And the separation added real poignancy to the moment when they finally did come together — with Carrie both loving Brody and needing to convince him to agree to a mission that might mean his death.

There were other standout moments: Javadi killing his ex-wife and daughter-in-law, a stark and ugly look at the real-world costs of doing business with psychopaths. Brody, realizing that nothing he could do would bring Dana back to him — and that he might be better off dead, no matter how much he loved Carrie. Quinn, in just about every scene he entered. At times Quinn seemed like the only adult on the show, the only one who fully understood the moral choices he had made and would have to continue to make, and accepted the price he had paid for them. Carrie and Saul playing back-and-forth with evil lawyer Bennett and his super-evil henchman as they struggled to track down who really attacked the agency on December 12.

If Homeland had devoted itself to solving that mystery, it would have been a smaller show this season. And maybe a better one. It wouldn't have been forced to make idiotic moves like sending Carrie to Tehran (really? No one else was available?). Instead it sermonized for a while about the moral costs of espionage before patting itself on the back for the cleverness of a plot it didn't even invent.

No matter. The ratings were bigger than ever, in part because Alex Gansa, the show's lead writer, made clear that Brody might not survive the season, and the uncertainty added a level of frisson to every episode. So we'll see Carrie and Saul again, and Quinn, too, I hope.

And maybe next year, Gansa and his crew will even decide to come up with their own story.

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