And what about Brody?

GORDON: His was a very tricky character. He became a kind of Rorschach test for everyone involved from the studio to the network to Alex and me.

GANSA: Howard and I talked so much about: What was he like when he comes back? How does he relate to his family? Is he able to show emotion? We just went around and around in circles on this stuff, and didn’t come down on one side until we saw how Damian played it.

How much are the writers’ individual politics a factor in the room? Do things ever get politically heated?

GANSA: I’ll let Howard speak to the “24” room, because that was a much more politically charged story environment. There were people who had very different and divergent opinions in that room, and there were a lot of real, real conservative types, and some real, real lefty types. And that led to some really interesting conversations. I’m sort of sad to say it’s a much more homogeneous group on “Homeland.” But we try really hard to not be polemic or didactic in any way. We choose to ask questions and not answer them.

GORDON: The thing on “24,” it was a divergent group of political beliefs, but I don’t think that affected the story. Occasionally, maybe. But we all recognized that storytelling is agnostic. Once you start dressing it up as a platform for some kind of ideology or point of view, it becomes propaganda, and I think the audience can smell when it’s counterfeit like that.

On “24” a lot of the plot lines were attributed to politics — did that ever make you. . . .

GORDON: Crazy? It was particularly disturbing to me, because the charges were as broad as stoking Islamophobia and being a midwife to a public acceptance of torture. Obviously anyone with any conscience is going to take these seriously. But look, we also recognized too that you can’t just hide behind, ‘‘This is just TV show.’’ That’s a little like the Twinkie defense. So we actively engaged and reconsidered how we told stories.