Can Carrie Mathison live a normal life? Homeland's meandering season four finale and season five's taut premiere 'Separation Anxiety' both pivot on the same question, and what's startling is that the answer might actually be yes. We've seen Carrie try to make a clean break from the CIA before – that was back in season two's premiere, which found her gardening and teaching and deliberately avoiding the agency's calls in the wake of her psychotic break. It lasted all of half an episode.

Here, her assimilation into domestic life in Berlin seems jarringly smooth: having almost drowned her daughter last season she's now completely comfortable with motherhood, and content in her low-stakes security gig. Watching her new serenity as she takes communion, and drops off Frannie at school, and bikes home to her blank slate of a boyfriend (Alexander Fehling), it feels like the Carrie we know is undercover.

Stephan Rabold



But two years have passed, and there's good reason for Carrie's priorities to have shifted. Back in season two, it was Carrie's belief that she'd been wrong about Brody that pushed her into retreat, whereas here she's out not because she thinks she's wrong, but because she thinks the agency is wrong. Saul and Dar Adal's deal with Haqqani was the final straw for Carrie last season, and two years on she and Saul are still playing the moral blame game.



It's not clear why Saul is so sour on the seemingly philanthropic Düring Foundation, for which Carrie works, but I thought his comment about Düring getting rich off prisoner labour during World War II was an interesting nod to the notion of German collective guilt. Carrie has chosen to move to a country whose national identity is coloured by past sins, just as much as her own identity is coloured by hers.

"You spent the last 10 years killing people, it's not enough just to stop," says Carrie's prickly colleague Laura (Sarah Sokolovic), and soon after we see Quinn back in action as a black-ops assassin, taking out any confirmed target on Saul's orders without question. This is Carrie's past, albeit a blunter and more brutal version of it. She used to be the drone queen, and now she's trying to be a private citizen.

Stephan Rabold



Obviously Carrie's clean break can't last – even without the season five promotional campaign screaming, "The only way out is back in!", it's clear that Homeland needs her in the CIA, and so events are already conspiring to bring her back into the fold. She's tasked with securing safe passage to Lebanon for her boss Otto (Sebastian Koch), an assignment which ultimately lands her face to face with one of Abu Nazir's henchmen, now a Hezbollah commander, who tells her "I will never stop fighting you."



Meanwhile a CIA data breach in Berlin reveals that German intelligence services have enlisted CIA surveillance on jihadists living in the country, a violation of the country's own privacy laws. The publication of the incriminating document by Laura is an obvious but effective ISIS parallel, and for all the many times Homeland has reinvented itself in the past, this Snowden slant feels promising. It's a new angle on the ideas about surveillance and privacy which has always been theoretically at the core of Homeland, ever since we first saw Carrie spying on the Brodys from her living room.

As shaken as Carrie is after she's kidnapped, she seems just as shaken by the CIA's re-emergence in her life, and it's clear that although she's run away she hasn't really moved on. "You don't have to vet secret documents, you don't have to go to Lebanon, you don't have to do anything if you don't want to," her boyfriend Jonah says – the problem, of course, is that a big part of her does want to. Maybe she really has been undercover in Berlin in some sense, playing a role, trying on a new lifestyle, and now that the agency is beckoning her cover has been blown.

Stephan Rabold



Other thoughts:

- Who else is thinking Carrie's boyfriend might be shady? There's no actual evidence of this, except that this is Homeland and therefore nobody's to be trusted.

- Frannie's resemblance to Brody is slightly less uncanny now that she's older and her hair's less ginger, but she's still one of the best cast children on TV.

- Anyone who read my season four recaps will know that I'm not a fan of the Carrie/Quinn romance, but I have to confess something. When it looked for a brief second like he might be about to rescue her from the Hezbullah commander… I was totally on board for that. I don't even know why – I hate when capable characters like Carrie are turned into the damsel in distress for no reason! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

- Took me a second to realise why I recognised the Berlin bureau chief, Allison – she is of course Miranda Otto, aka Eowyn! She also doesn't appear to have aged a day since the Lord of the Rings films came out.

- Although we've skipped over so much, we got a hint of the fallout from season four's bombshell – after discovering that Saul was in on the CIA deal with Haqqani, Carrie tanked his campaign for the directorship. Which seems like the least he deserved, frankly.

- Of course Carrie's boyfriend is red-haired. If Quinn is still hung up on her, it's fairly obvious what he needs to do at this point.















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