The fourth season of Homeland is a masterpiece of political intrigue, ambivalence, and naked emotional passion. Carrie Mathison, the chief of CIA station in Kabul, finds herself in an intricate tangle of lies and fallouts after a botched airstrike that ends up in civilian casualty among them the family of a young medical student, Aayan. The season masterfully deals with the disastrous consequences of military miscalculations and the consequence of secrets not told to allies, which forms an atmosphere of trust and betrayal. The ethical challenges faced by Carrie in the show and the excruciating effects of her choices made me nervous and sympathetic at the same time as she has to make her way through a world full of lies.
The story moves at a frantic pace, and its twists and turns together with the stakes ever-changing keep the audience glued to the screen. The conflict is fuelled by the superimposing personalities of Carrie and the crashing desperation of Quinn, and the machinations of Dar Adal and Tasneem Qureishi. The politics of Islamabad as displayed in the series, its malevolent informants and dark schemes, bring the viewers to a place where nobody can trust anybody and everyone is hiding danger behind their backs. The season visually embraces the tension and the tumult in a realistic manner, and the soundtrack bolsters the rising tension, and each episode is emotionally gut-wrenching.
The thing that struck me the most was that the theme of the season is loyalty, personal and national, and how compromises in morals turn out to have disastrous effects. The questions of guilt, love, and betrayal as the characters tried to work through they made me ponder over whether the cost of such decisions was real. Homeland Season 4 is an emotionally moving, captivating adventure which shows the ugly side of spying and the personal cost it makes. It is an impressive thought on how thin the boundary between heroism and moral failure is and the impression is strong even after the final episode was watched.
