Hallelujah! “All In” Is Vintage Homeland

His countdown of post-1991 malfeasance on the part of the U.S., at least as seen through Russian eyes, assumes the rat-a-tat rhythm of approaching gunfire (“Five, Libya. Six, Syria. War, war, war, war.”), which erupts shortly thereafter at the aforementioned dacha. Of all the treatments of the new Cold War to appear of television of late, Homeland’s is the most explicit, and the most exciting; “All In” is, among other qualities, an invigorating adventure on the border between “diplomatic mission” and “covert operation.”

With the exception of the Keane business, which has become the (annoying, paranoiac) ticking-clock backdrop to Carrie and Saul’s arc, the episode possesses the crackle of Homeland at its most efficient. The raid fails? Concoct a new plan. There’s no ideological leverage over the Russian they decide to target? Go for his money. The only way to the secure suite at the GRU where Simone Martin (Sandrine Holt) is hidden away is around the outside of the building, five floors up? Scuttle along the ledge like Spiderwoman because you haven’t come all this way—geographically, chronologically, personally, professionally—to let your adversary slip through you grasp. That adversary is armed, and understandably reluctant? Turn on the afterburners of your most important asset, which is the ability to convince almost anyone to do almost anything through the sheer urgency of your plaints. (Carrie Mathison doesn’t just have a bridge to sell you. She could get you to jump off it, too.)

And yet, of course, because this is Homeland—a series that has lost and found itself more times in seven seasons than I can count—this is all, also, of a piece with all that’s come before, with the surveillance of Brody, his capture and escape, his execution; with Kabul and Islamabad and Berlin and New York; with being both Gromov’s “useful idiot” and, as he says in Carrie’s defense, almost sweetly, to a colleague, “not an idiot” at all. Remember, this persistence has been Carrie’s modus operandi from beginning, bouncing off Saul’s shifting understanding of his mentee as just crazy, or crazy like a fox. “I missed something once before,” she says in the pilot episode. “I won’t—I can’t—let that happen again.”

For seven years, that, above all else, has been the motor of Carrie’s brilliance. Not her manic episodes. Not her mood swings. Not her crying jags. Not her fragile relationships. Her complete and unwavering tenacity, her fearlessness, as Maggie noted in “Clarity.” In my recap of “Useful Idiot,” I suggested that Carrie had become the villain of her own story, but, like Homeland itself, she has a way of winning me back, of becoming the heroine again. And so it is in that glorious final sequence, with the flash of the red dress in the breeze, the black and blonde wigs, the fearless feint. I am, once again, all in.