Everyone’s getting in so much trouble this week! “Imminent Risk” is basically an exhibition of every player in the Homeland game trying something super sneaky and then having it blow up in their face, except for like, Dar Adal. He’s evil and gets away with everything, but more on that later. The episode starts right where last week’s final stinger left off: Peter Quinn has been extracted from his terrifying “Saw kill-room” psych ward lock-up and is now in the custody of his main (ex) fraulein, Astrid. She, of course, lives in some weird cabin in the woods, because of course she does. Quinn is smacked to the gills on some kind of sedative, which you would think he would be pretty happy about, but he’s hell bent on getting back to New York to solve his little Hardy Boy mystery.
Carrie’s back at it with her old pal Max, Geek Squad supervisor extraordinaire. They’re now totally on board with Quinn’s theory that the man across the street is up to no good so they’re running surveillance on him but he’s apparently decided to lower his profile by not peeking suspiciously through his window anymore. No dice, Mathison. Carrie does, however, get a phone call from the Administration for Children’s Services saying that they’ve been asking Franny questions about that whole thing where she was taken hostage by Quinn’s crazy ass. Are they about to take Carrie’s child away? Either the ACS has been reading my Homeland coverage or I totally called it – Franny’s home life sucks.
Javadi arrives in New York with a fancy new name and an unlimited Metro Card and is greeted warmly by a mob of angry protesters. Meanwhile, Dar sits in one of those dive bars that airs the news with the sound on and watches Madame President-Elect Keane give an interview that provides some entirely necessary exposition about her dead son. Did you know Keane has a dead son who fought in Iraq even though she was publicly against the war, and he spoke out against her and then died in his third tour? She never talks about it. Anyways Dar receives some photos of Javadi’s New York adventure and remarks that he can’t meet Saul or everything will come unraveled.
Saul get’s called into a conference room to be debriefed about his trip to the West Bank by Rachel Croft, Deputy in counterintelligence. He plays dumb, feeding her a line about how he was there to visit his sister, which she calls immediate bullshit on. She confiscates Saul’s phone so she can track where the moved when he was there, which is apparently a thing you can do with phones, and he’s about to get totally busted before Dar bails him out. Saul’s recently seen some photos of Dar with Tovah, though, and is wisely cautious around him.
Carrie meets with Christine Lonas from the ACS and pleads her case about the whole “hostage situation” thing. She explains that she needed to visit Sekou’s family after he exploded and that Quinn was only shooting people because we wanted to protect Franny. Christine informs us that Franny said she was very scared and thought she was going to die. Later, in front of a judge, Christine drops the bomb on the courtroom that Carrie is bipolar and is exhibiting manic behavior, which elicits some classic Claire Danes freak out acting. The judge bangs his gavel around and declares Carrie an unfit mother. Losing your child because you’re too committed to your incredibly dangerous international espionage hobby? It really is impossible to be a single mom and have it all.
Astrid realizes Quinn is gone and finds him trying to walk his gimp legs back to new york through the woods. She stops him and he does what he’s doing best these days, he mutters about the guy across the street and acts irrational. He tries to get in some guy’s van and she stops the guy from picking him up by explaining that he’s not in his right mind and the whole thing kind of turns into a Maury Povich episode until Astrid explains that the only reason Quinn is out of the psych ward at all is that Dar made a deal.
Meanwhile, Javadi is soaking in a pretty sweet hotel pool somewhere when he’s kidnapped and tortured by some nice men who seem to know of his double agent proclivities. They brutally rip out one of his fingernails before an interrogator named Amir defects, kills everyone, and saves Javadi’s life, explaining that they were in the same troop in Iraq at one point and Javadi was some kind of goat hunting war hero.
Amir later meets Saul at a hockey game because, you know, spies, and connects him with Javadi. Javadi, down one or two fingernails and thoroughly over this bullshit, pulls a gun on Saul and demands to know who the hell could have known about their meeting in The West Bank. They deduce that it only could have been Dar Adal. Javadi reveals a picture of Nafisi’s dead body only for Saul to respond that he already figured out that guy was mobbed up by Mossad. Javadi is about to go jump in a river or something when Saul cuts him a deal, saying he can get him in front of the President and he can tell her personally that there’s no parallel program. Javadi calmly shoots his friend Amir in the head and obliges, citing some Saul Berenson action movie line about leaving “no loose ends.” Yikes.
Back at Astrid’s place in the woods, Dar comes and gives Quinn a fatherly talking to about his stay in the Betty Ford Log Cabin. They have a very “dark side of the force” mentor/mentee angsty fight before Dar tells Quinn that Carrie doesn’t actually care about him, and only raised him from his coma to get information from him. He says she did this at a massive risk to his cerebral cortex and we see the wheels start to turn in Quinn’s mangled and traumatized eyes. At home, Carrie’s breaking edge (falling off the wagon) and getting white wine drunk. She then does exactly what we all do when she’s in the pit and blasted on Pinot Grigio, she calls someone she shouldn’t. This person happens to be President Keane, who she tries to get to create some sort of executive order to give her Franny back before getting embarrassed and apologizing. I’ve been there, Carrie. It was about a meat lover’s pizza but it was still pretty rough.
The episode ends on a seemingly benign phone conversation where Christine from Children’s services thanks the other person for their help with the Mathison case, ie: the tip that Carrie is bipolar. Just before the credits roll, the camera informs us that the tipster on the other end of the line is none other than Dar Adal. You know those old political cartoons where there’s a giant evil black octopus with it’s tentacles spread all over the place, up in everyone else’s business? That’s Dar Adal. The man has tentacles.
