The fifth season of Homeland just premiered in the US and will be back on UK screens this coming Sunday (October 11), so get ready for some metaphorical whiplash.

Few shows manage to yank us around with quite such regularity as Homeland, which can go from being one of the best dramas on the box to one of the worst within the space of a season - sometimes within the space of an episode.

But we keep coming back, because when it's good, it's really, really good. Here are the very best and very worst moments of Homeland to date.

The Highs...

Carrie puts Brody under surveillance (Season 1, episode 1, 'Pilot')



The first season of Homeland built its sense of queasy paranoia not just around the question of returned prisoner-of-war Brody's loyalties, but also around CIA maverick Carrie's morally questionable off-the-books investigation. After years as a hostage, Brody's struggle to reintegrate into normal life with wife Jessica and his children was haunting and often uncomfortable to watch, but another layer of intrigue was added by Carrie watching every moment from her apartment, eating Chinese food like she was enjoying a Netflix marathon.



Carrie and Brody's getaway (Season 1, episode 7, 'The Weekend')

Showtime



Carrie's obsession with Brody was a genuinely strange, sickly thing back in the early days, her intense suspicion that he was a terrorist gradually becoming muddled up with the pair's undeniable sexual chemistry. The two sides collided to powerful effect in 'The Weekend', in which Carrie and Brody go to a cabin in the woods for a blissful escape which is cut abruptly short when Carrie's true agenda is revealed.



What's more, Brody's innocence at this point seems certain, Carrie looking suddenly ignorant as he explains his Muslim conversion: "If you lived in despair for eight years you might turn to religion too, and a King James Bible was not available." It's easy to forget how effectively the show had us fooled at this point.

Brody revealed (Season 1, episode 11, 'The Vest')



But not for long. The script was flipped again four episodes later when, during a wholesome family outing to Gettysburg, Brody slips into the back of a tailor shop to collect a bomb vest from one of Abu Nazir's associates.



As a steely Brody asks whether the blast will sever his head cleanly from his body, it becomes stunningly clear just how right Carrie has been about him all along. Brody's storyline was over-stretched by its end, but season one teased out the 'Is he or isn't he?' question with admirable precision.

Brody's arrest (Season 2, episode 4, 'New Car Smell')



The start of season two marked what might have been Homeland's strongest run of episodes ever, burning through storylines at a breakneck pace which saw Carrie's mentor Saul finding out the truth about Brody just two episodes in, and Brody being arrested two episodes after that. Many other shows would have stretched out the former until mid-season, and delayed the latter until the season finale, and though the season couldn't sustain its pace, these early episodes are thrilling.



Carrie and Brody's smouldering reunion is loaded with more tension than any of their interactions before, now that Carrie has the upper hand on an unsuspecting Brody, and after everything she's been through as a result of Brody's subterfuge - from professional disgrace to electroconvulsive treatment - it's hugely satisfying to see her finally win.

The interrogation (Season 2, episode 5, Q&A')



Though it's a pity this haunting, often shattering episode isn't set entirely inside the CIA interrogation room where Brody is held, instead of cutting away to less compelling side plots, it still stands out as one of the show's very best and most character-focused hours.



The introduction of black-ops agent Quinn and his ruthless bad cop techniques is memorable, but it's Carrie's masterful interrogation of Brody that stands out as an encapsulation of their whole relationship - both of them manipulating each other while simultaneously being more honest than they can be with anyone else.

Their power dynamic has shifted so radically in such short order that it's dizzying to watch them here, Carrie in impeccable control as she systematically lays Brody bare, gets him to finally confess and reveal how broken he is, and turns him into a double agent.

Carrie's hallucination (Season 4, episode 7, 'Redux')

David Bloomer



Logically, it makes no sense at all for Brody to make a reappearance at this point, although the anticlimactic handling of his death definitely had us wondering. But this was still a heartbreaking mid-season twist, as Carrie, suffering a psychotic episode after being drugged, seemingly staggers right into the arms of a calm, comforting Brody.



Cue the reveal that she's still hallucinating, and is actually with mysterious ISI officer Aasar Khan (Raza Jaffrey), who's quietly asking "Who's Brody?" Regardless of how you feel about Brody, having Carrie's reliance on medication exploited as a weakness was a chilling and believable turn that made the ISI - and specifically Carrie's counterpart there, Tasneem (Nimrat Kaur) - seem a genuinely formidable threat.

Carrie talks Saul off the ledge (Season 4, episode 9, 'There's Something Else Going On')



The extended kidnapping of Saul was one of several smart moves made in season four, introducing a multi-episode threat with real emotional stakes, and it culminated in this quiet, painful exchange between Carrie and a defeated Saul. With the US government going to whatever lengths necessary to get him back, he ends up as the centerpiece of a deal he wants no part in, being traded back to the US in exchange for five high-value prisoners.



With Saul literally refusing to budge, it falls to Carrie to convince him, imploring "No more dying". It's such a satisfying scene in large part because - after a season that saw Carrie sleeping with yet another asset, Aayan (Suraj Sharma) - it shows Carrie at her most capable and effective, the nuanced way she handles Saul making sense of why she's so revered within the CIA.

...And the lows

Dana Brody's love life



Dana and Finn. Oh, Dana and Finn. While the teen romance between Brody's daughter and the Vice President's son started out as inoffensive enough in season two, it rapidly became the worst thing ever once they killed a pedestrian in a hit and run.



This weird non sequitur of a storyline blighted what should have been the season's best episode in 'Q&A', and sucked up vast, inexplicable swathes of screen time throughout the season that could have been better spent on literally anything else. It was the first evidence of the Homeland writers' apparent secret mission to launch a CW spinoff series, and the first warning sign of just how lost the show would become, with Dana spouting lines like: "Whatever we felt, we broke it. We killed it, just the same way we killed that woman." Yeesh.

By the time Dana got involved with another troubled bad boy in season three, and huge chunks of story were once again devoted to their doomed romance, we really began to wonder if the writers were pranking us.

Brody's Skype chat with Abu Nazir (Season 2, episode 10, 'Broken Hearts')



There was a lot about Brody's communication with his terrorist boss Abu Nazir in season two that didn't sit right. First, Brody sent a warning text message to Nazir from inside a closed meeting at the Pentagon. A couple of episodes later, Nazir ordered newly elected congressman Brody to suspiciously skip out on a high-profile fundraiser at the last minute in order to kill a tailor in the woods.



We just about swallowed our incredulity, but the scene in which Brody dials up Abu Nazir via Skype (on a Blackberry, no less!) from his CIA safe house, and proceeds to scream deeply incriminating things down the line at him while agents hover outside his door, was a step too far. Looking back, 'Broken Hearts' was the episode that finally forced us to accept that Homeland was in trouble.

Saul's inexplicable bigotry (Season 3, episode 2, 'Uh… Oh… Ah…')

Bob Leverone



"You wear that damn thing on your head, it's a big 'F**k you' to the people who would have been your co-workers," Saul snapped at new recruit Fara (Nazanin Boniadi), his point being that her hijab was disrespectful to those killed by terrorists in the CIA bombing. Because… Islam = terrorism.



When we asked Boniadi about this out-of-character turn, she very diplomatically called the moment "true to life". And we're not arguing that it is, for some people, in some situations. But for Saul Berenson? Who's spent three decades working for the CIA as Middle East Division Chief, and spent years living in Beirut? Who's so often painted as the voice of reason and tolerance and empathy? Nope.

Chris Brody

Kent Smith



Poor Chris. Listing him here feels mean, because he's suffered enough humiliation as Homeland's most inexplicable character. It's unclear why the writers bothered giving the Brodys two children rather than simply make Dana an only child, because even though Jackson Pace was technically a series regular, his contribution to the show was comically non-existent.



"Hey dad, are we gonna finish our game of hearts?" "Dad? Are you coming to my karate recital?" "Wow! There's a big screen TV in every room!" This is a sampling of the more memorable lines of dialogue Chris ever had. It got to the point where we assumed Chris was about to be revealed as the evil mastermind behind everything, so baffling was his continued existence. In season three, Brody went to great pains to see Dana one last time but seemed to have forgotten Chris was a thing. As had we.

Brody's casual post-murder exit (Season 3, episode 12, 'The Star')

Didier Baverel



The first time Brody got away with killing a high-ranking official in his office - Vice President Walden, back in season two - our suspension of disbelief was stretched. But the second time was even more ludicrous, and pushed an already shaky storyline into the realms of insanity.



Though Brody's loyalties had wavered, he ultimately proved his allegiance to the US of A by talking his way into the office of General Akbari, the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, and bludgeoning him to death. All fine and dandy, until Brody casually strolls out of the office and past Akbari's security detail, none of whom notice the dead body of the official they're meant to be protecting. Brody is seized and executed for the crime later on, but the fact that he made it out at all was nuts.

The aftermath of Brody's death

Didier Baverel



Given how much of the first three seasons was spent on the Brody family - not just Brody himself but Jessica, and Dana, and even live-in surrogate dad Mike - it will never make sense that they vanished without a trace midway through season three. We never needed to see even a single frame of Dana's love life again, but that didn't mean we needed to pretend the entire family never existed.



When Carrie ran into a random friend of her late father's at the park in season four, who proceeded to give her some convenient emotional exposition, all we kept thinking was how much more powerful it would have been if Carrie could have run into Jessica, whose relationship with Brody we'd spent two seasons caring about. Instead, the only character who gets to react to Brody's death is Carrie, who - no matter how much we may love their twisted romance - spent a cumulative total of maybe two weeks with him.

Season four finale 'Long Time Coming'

David Bloomer



While season four was deservedly hailed by critics as a return to form, its finale was a bewildering disappointment, dropping the previous episode's cliffhanger with no resolution whatsoever, and jumping forwards in time to focus on Carrie's domestic life in the wake of her father's death.



The forced romance between Carrie and Quinn had been simmering under all season long, and yet their relationship still felt so undercooked that the payoff made no sense (not to mention how Quinn made it out of Islamabad at all - a plot point skipped over presumably because the writers had no idea. Even Carrie doesn't know.)

From the soapy reveal of Carrie's long-lost half brother to the clunky handling of her intimacy issues, 'Long Time Coming' dropped the ball so spectacularly that it diminished everything that came before, and makes us worried for season five.

What are your personal best and worst Homeland moments? Let us know in the comments!

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