You can read my recap of Season 3, Episode 9, Homeland — One Last Time  over at Happy Time Nice People, Wonkette’s smarter, snarkier, sluttier little sister. You could do me a great favor and comment. Would be awesome to get a discussion going.

Here are some additional thoughts:

Heard a very loud shoe drop Sunday night. Since the season started exactly 58 days after the Langley bombing, and since we weren’t privy to all of Carrie and Saul’s conversations during the interim, I was wondering what Saul knew about Carrie’s missing hours. Had she told him the truth – that she “knew” Brody was innocent and helped get him out of the country? That seemed unlikely, but it could have given Saul the leverage to get her complete cooperation for his larger scheme. It was impossible, not just implausible that he could accept her story – especially with Brody missing, and both of them having been at the memorial. It was a relief for them to have a conversation about who is lying to whom and for Saul to throw this one at Carrie.

I’m still waiting for the crash of one giant boot that’s been dangling even longer. We don’t know exactly what happened when Brody and Nazir had their last meeting, but we do know they parted on friendly terms, with Brody saying something along the lines of “if this works we’ll never see each other again.” Then Carrie got “kidnapped” by Nazir, and Brody was “forced” to fiddle with the VP’s defibrillator and kill him. We know that killing the VP was a mission that Brody took great pleasure in completing. He didn’t seem like a man who was being forced to do anything. He also mourned Nazir’s death. Common sense says Carrie’s kidnapping was something Nazir and Brody cooked up, so she would be compromised, complicit in the VP’s death, and see Brody as her savior. It seems bizarre that in the aftermath of the Langley bombing, and Brody’s suspected involvement, no one has taken a closer look at the VP’s death, especially given that Brody, of all people, was with him when it occurred. But does Saul suspect something? Carrie certainly doesn’t. Might Brody slip up somehow leading Carrie to figure it out? How’s this for an ending – Brody completes his mission for Saul. He and Carrie go back to the cabin to plan the rest of their lives. He says or does something that leads Carrie to have an insight into what happened. She winds up killing him, and then because she can’t really tell Saul she covered up the Vice President’s murder all this time, she makes it look like an accident and keeps it to herself. Or maybe Saul sends Quinn to do it.

Regarding last night’s Ibogaine shout out. Wouldn’t it be great if there really was a magical cure for addiction? Newsflash – There’s not. And the government really isn’t conspiring with Big Pharma to keep us from curing cancer either. Oh yeah, HIV, is the virus that causes AIDS. But wouldn’t it be interesting to live in a non-reality based world where these things were true? Ibogaine has been around a good long while. The reason it’s not more widely used is because the miraculous effects can’t be replicated in clinical trials. It may help some people. But a lot of stuff out there may help some people. The idea of Ibogaine, a “natural” cure, a drug trip to end all drug trips, an outlawed medication for outlaws, the thing “they” don’t want “the people” to have access to, the DIY-rehab lives on as myth. Occasionally, it’s trotted out on TV. After having made Brody a stone-addict, Homeland offiered it up as an instant cure to get him ready for his mission. The truth is recovery is a difficult lifelong process.

On a personal note, Ibogaine is mentioned twice in my fiction, including in Loisaida, which I actually started writing in the mid-nineties, so I always get this “I was there first,” giddiness when it’s on television. In Loisaida, it’s a junkie-legend. In The Death Trip, it’s part of an hallucinogenic formula designed to ease the transition between life and death.