SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t watched the season finale of Homeland, but shit finally got real. This season was as slow as molasses throughout, and while I get they were going for a slow burn, it was a bit too slow, if you ask me. In any case, they did finally throw a twist in at the end: Brody, after “redeeming himself” by killing someone high up in the Iranian government, is captured and hanged in a public execution as Carrie watched. Ouch! But also, hell yeah. That kinda needed to happen.
Damian Lewis isn’t holding any grudges about his character’s death – after all, Brody had nowhere else to go. The character had reached his end. In fact, I can’t even imagine where the show at large is going, but rumours are that Claire Danes is only back for a few episodes, herself, so who knows what’s going to happen.
From The Hollywood Reporter:
Always knowing you had a shelf life on the show, did you spend much time thinking about when it might come?
It was always intonated to me very strongly that my life expectancy was short. I came in knowing that I would be there for two seasons and not knowing anything beyond that. TV writing turns out to be quite a spontaneous discipline. These guys had to really be on their toes and change things up a little. I don’t think they knew quite how Brody was played. He was a hard character to write, and I don’t think they always knew how he would come off in the story. It just turned out that the Brody-Carrie story went gangbusters and people fell in love with it. It was a surprise, and we enjoyed it, but there was always this sense that Brody was a very unbalancing character. He’s a divisive character.Which is why we’re seeing very different reactions to his death.
For some, he was one of the main reasons to tune in to the show, but for other people, he was the reason the show couldn’t grow. He was in some way limiting to the show. In the end, Alex stuck to his guns. They gave Brody an extra season because the audience loved him, but they weren’t going to go so far to find a way to write Brody into the show that will compromise the show just so we can write for this character. I feel happy with the way it played out, to have three seasons with a show I didn’t expect to be on for this long.
Fair enough. Seriously, there was nothing else Brody could have done. He’d been through so much and they couldn’t keep using him as some tool in bigger master plans to take over other governments. There was no way he could ever come back to the US and just settle down with Carrie and their kid or anything. The only solution was for him to die, and even Brody himself was okay with that.
What did you think of the Homeland finale? What do you want to see happen next season?