3. Carrie is pregnant. First, yikes. Wasn’t she guzzling tequila just last episode? Second, unexpected pregnancies have been a TV-drama trope for time eternal; we should have known Carrie would end up with one as the writer try to raise the stakes in this season of inconsequential-yet-excruciating conflicts. Third, the dad has to be that random redhead she stole from, right? Or does the timeline work that this could be—shudder—Nicholas Brody’s kid?

2. Majid Javadi goes on a killing spree. So much for any hope that Homeland might offer up a non-cartoonish bad guy. It wasn’t enough to have Saul relate the backstory about his former friend slaughtering CIA assets. We had to witness the disturbing spectacle of the deputy head of Iranian intelligence entering a suburban American home, shooting his daughter-in-law in the face, and stabbing his ex-wife to death with, as Quinn terms it, "a fucking bottle."

That’s some Game of Thrones savagery. But that show's bloodbaths resonate emotionally because the violence is usually perpetrated by or against a character viewers have come to know, and because of what that says about the show's universe. Javadi killing his old family out of spite says a lot about Javadi being a sicko, and little about the world at large. (Though it must be intentional that all the innocent people we’ve seen offed this season have been Muslim or Muslim-affiliated—a reminder for Americans of who gets else harmed in the War on Terror.)

The more shocking thing about this storyline: The question it raises about our supposed heroes. It makes some (some) sense that Saul would want to keep the Javadi operation confined to a small team for now, but to not have another agent on the ground tailing this high-value target was idiotic. The show wants us to lay this miscalculation on Saul’s singleminded thirst for revenge—Carrie, rightfully, asks whether the guy he knew all those decades at all might have changed at all. But for the head of the CIA, whom we’ve come to respect as wise and coolheaded, to be so careless commits the worst sin of television implausibility: making the characters seem fake.

The dumbness of the operation felt even dumber in contrast to the pretty-intriguing portrayal of the resources and know-how the CIA has (or that Homeland imagines it has) at its disposal. People uttered the word “drone” over and over to drive home the current-events relevance of the episode, but at least the show has offered a plausible surveillance replacement for the far-fetched, spy-movie cliche of hyper-detailed, real-time satellite imagery. And Fara's racial-profiling comment was interesting; initially, it seemed as though she was objecting, but it more turned out that she was impressed at the ability to call up residential demographic info in an instant.