Saul and company still have their doubts about Carrie’s stability, but she proves her worth when she finds potentially damning evidence on Brody.

Carrie Matheson is a woman unto herself. Her tactics as a CIA agent (although her role may be temporary for the moment) are improvised yet well though out, put on with the ease and expertise of a jazz musician. Her ability to follow her intuition, much to the chagrin of her colleagues, allows her to take all the necessary measures needed to protect her country. Much of Homeland plays like freeform jazz, with Carrie having to be self-assured in her abilities while knowing that everything could all fall apart with one wrong note, a sentiment that was central to this last night’s episode.

Picking up from last episode’s high-octane foot chase through the streets of Lebanon, we finally see Carrie meeting up with informant and former handler Fatima Ali. We learn that, although she was supposed to meet Ali with Saul, she went straight to the mosque that she knew Fatima would be attending in order to gather the information as swiftly as possible. This is a move straight out of the Carrie Matheson handbook of defiance. You can take Carrie out of the CIA, but there’s no taking the CIA out of Carrie.

With the newfound information that Ali’s husband will be meeting with prime terrorist and Nicolas Brody caregiver Abu Nazir the next day, Carrie returns to the safehouse and relay the information to Saul. As a Skype connection is put together between the team in Beirut and those in D.C., the conversation takes a shift from focusing on the details of the information on the meeting with Nazir to the reliability of the news that Carrie has uncovered. Carrie believes with all her heart that her informant’s tip is as true as can be, the same sort of conviction she had in her claims against Brody. As long as she’s still involved with the CIA, Carrie is going to be faced with intense scrutiny. She may have lost the ability to act completely on her own accord, but she is still able to retain Saul and Estes’ good faith.

Meanwhile, back in D.C., congressional wonderboy Nicolas Brody is hamming it up at another fundraiser when Vice President Walden pulls him aside to fill his potential running mate on a meeting at the Pentagon that he’d like him to attend. Brody’s characters seems to have let his guard down slightly, especially evident when he doesn’t take immediate acceptance of Walden’s offer. He doesn’t always play into the golden boy persona at every chance he gets anymore, instead attempting to feel how much leverage he has with the Vice President, allowing the underlying tensions between the two to remain high.

Back in Beirut, Carrie begins to feel overwhelmed by sense of distrust that pervading the mission. She can recognize that her actions over the last year were self-destructive. Claire Danes continues to perfectly balance her character’s moments of pure genius with those intensely maniacal episodes of emotional instability that seem to creep up every now and again. However, as the pieces of the mission, now titled “Mission: Capture,” are put together, she can finally see her hard work begin to pay off.

As “Mission: Capture”, begins to unravel, we find Homeland once again making good on its money-maker: Those moments of pure, razor’s edge intensity where everything seems to be on the line. Last night’s episode offered a 2-for-1 deal as both Carrie and Brody came under the spotlight.

There’s a sense surrounding Carrie’s trip that the meeting between Abu Nazir and Fatima Ali’s husband may actually be a ploy to ambush American operatives, an accusation that she steadfastly denies. Carrie trusts her informant wholeheartedly, a trait that has gotten her in trouble before but one that she nonetheless holds in the highest regard in the is situation. As Saul and her sit by the phone, listening in on the progress of the mission, the look of desperation on Carrie’s face is enthralling. It’s this sense of everything being on the line for her that makes the moment so compelling. If she’s wrong about this one too, she might as well just walk away for good.

Back in D.C., Brody arrives at the Pentagon only to find out that his original meeting with Walden has instead been replaced with an urgent gathering in the situation room to watch a mission unfold in Beirut. As Brody sits he begins to put the pieces together, only to realize that is about to witness the assassination of his mentor, Abu Nazir. Acting on pure adrenaline and instinct, he sends a text to Nazir with the message, “May 1”. The code is received by Nazir’s people who interpret it to mean that he must be under attack. Within seconds, the mission falls apart and Nazir escapes with only two of his men being taken down.

At the end of the day, both Brody and Carrie were correct with their actions with only a few consequences suffered. The CIA now have an asset in Carrie, although they continue to be unsure of her stability. They know she may be the best agent they have, but the risks seem to outweigh the rewards. The last scene of this episode, however, seems to confirm her value. As her last task in Beirut, Carrie disobeys Saul’s orders and runs into Fatima’s apartment so she can try and find any evidence that might lead to more information on Abu Nazir. She leaves the evidence with Saul, assuming that most of the papers she picked up were just junk. As he’s searching through the last few items, however, he finds Brody’s suicide bomb tape. And so it begins.

diversions@umdbk.com