Homeland Recap: Heart and Issa's Soul

This week on Showtime’s Homeland, Abu Nazir “called” on Brody for one last favor, Estes put Saul in his place and Walden’s run for the White House took a surprising turn.

So, the legendary black ops boss that Quinn rendezvoused with on the bus last week, Dar Adul? Saul knows him, and better yet knows where he likes to wolf down waffles. As such, he checks in on Dar Adul, asking why he’s meeting with Quinn on the sly. “Peter Quinn is one of mine,” Dar Adul explains. But why would Estes put a black ops guy on a straight-up intel op? “Maybe to keep his eye on you,” Adul taunts his peer. “Maybe he doesn’t trust you?”

At the Posh Safehouse 3000, Mike is all awkward “about last night,” while Jess is totally, “I loved it — it was fun… I keep waiting to feel guilty.” (And yet probably never will!) They convene a new session of necking but get interrupted by Brody, then blank-faced, homework-hating Chris and scowly, hand-wrenching Dana. Jess asks Brody when they can go home, saying that the kids are going “stir crazy… So am I.” “I noticed,” Brody responds, in a way that barely leaves off the words “…you’re shtupping my bestie again.” Just as Jess says she knows that Carrie is back in the mix, ol’ blondie herself rings Brody, saying that he needs to resign from office and give Walden the bad word that he wont be his veep.

And then Carrie’s car get broadsided, Michael Vaughn-style.

At Langley, Saul confronts Estes with what he has learned about Quinn, and suggests that the black ops vet was brought in to insure that when all is said and done with Operation Abu Nazir, Brody won’t blab about the top-secret drone strike. “F–k you, Saul,” Estes responds. Quinn then shows up to report on Carrie’s accident… and subsequent vanishing.

Back at the Posh Safehouse 3000, Brody and Jess are managing a very intense “Finn wants to visit Dana, who’s been dodging his texts” sitch when Brody gets a call from, no, not Carrie per se, but Abu Nazir, who has his estranged padawan’s honey bound and gagged. His ransom: Fetch me the serial number for Walden’s pacemaker. Rather than loop in the spooks on this communique — on the off chance they could, like, track it and such, and catch Earth’s Most Wanted — Brody agrees to go rogue and poke around Walden’s residence. Carrie meanwhile engages Nazir in a debate of ideologies, starting and ending with her labeling him a terrorist. “I’m a soldier,” he contends. He and his people “carry God in our hearts, in our souls…. To die is to join him. It may take a century… or three, but we will exterminate you,” he asserts.

Finn wants to start over with Dana, but she says the accident and cover-up “killed it” just as they killed that lady. (Is this storyline going anywhere?)

With the stealth of a twitchy meth addict hopped up on 5-Hour Energy, Brody snoops around Walden’s office, finally locating the case for his pacemaker. He phones Nazir to say he has the serial number — but Carrie must first be set free. After Brody swears on Issa’s “immortal soul” that he’ll keep up his end of the trade, Nazir lets Carrie go. As Brody texts him the number (which in turn gets forwarded to Nazir’s IT guy), Carrie flags down a trucker, liberates him of his cell and rings Saul & Co. They set out to swarm the place she was being held, but Saul gets detained downstairs after Estes makes a cryptic phone call — while Quinn forges on with the rest of the team. Carrie circles back to the warehouse, wielding a steel pipe, and is last seen wandering into a dark, scary room….

Walden walks in on Brody, who informs the VP that he can’t be part of the ticket, citing “family reasons.” “F–k your family,” Walden coldly responds. “You don’t walk away from [a VP bid]!” Witnessing that Nazir’s peeps are starting to turn Walden’s ticker against him, Brody drops every bit of veneer and vents his hatred for the politician who OK’d the drone strike. “It’s for me” that he’s bowing out. “To feel clean again.” As Walden goes into the final throes of a heart attack — and as Brody pushes the phone out of his reach — the congressman-slash-terrorist snarls, “You still don’t get it, do you? I’m killing you.” (Hey, Arrow can do more flashbacks now!)

What did you think of this week’s Homeland and its bit of “terrorism via artificial heart attack”? Could Brody have bellowed Nazir’s name any louder just down the hall from the Secret Service detail at the Posh Safehouse 3000? How does Brody not get fingered for the VP’s death? (Won’t Carrie’s story of escape have to incriminate him? And if there’s a whiff of foul play, whose mitts were fumbling all over the pacemaker case?) Does Dana own a second pair of shoes?

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