The following contains major spoilers for the series finale of Homeland
Carrie Mathison fans can finally take down their walls of notes. Homeland came to an end on Sunday night after eight seasons of double-crosses, just-averted global catastrophes, and last-second twists by embracing all three of its narrative hallmarks. Carrie (Claire Danes) stopped a nuclear war in the Middle East after betraying and nearly killing Saul (Mandy Patinkin) and burning his top Russian asset. But in the final moments, a time jump revealed the story of Carrie and Saul didn’t end there: after writing a book critical of the CIA, a la Edward Snowden, Carrie now lives in Russia with a Russian intelligence officer. Yet she also secretly sends Saul information from abroad, thus replacing the mole she betrayed.
While the ending provided symmetry with the show’s acclaimed initial seasons, when Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis, who briefly appeared via flashback in the finale) was put in the position of becoming a double-double agent, according to the show’s creative team it wasn’t something planned out very far in advance.
“We started talking about the finale as we got episodes nine and 10 as we were breaking the season,” co-creator Alex Gansa told Entertainment Weekly. “Like, ‘If we make this decision here, where is it going to lead? How are we going to get to an ending that we like?’ We knew we wanted Carrie to wind up in Russia. We had that as a landmark ahead of us. But how she got there and what happened when got there was very much up for debate. One way to end would be to have Carrie exiled in Russia and living in some Soviet-like apartment block in an incredibly grim situation, isolated from the world like Ed Snowden. But we wanted more for her than that. So we gave her a companion and gave her a duplicitous relationship with him, yet a genuine one at the same time. And also a mission. She takes the asset’s place. So I felt like it worked.”
In a separate interview with Variety, Gansa revealed that the specifics of Carrie becoming an author forever blacklisted by her home country didn’t get written into the story until 24 hours before the ending was shot.
“It’s so intense, ending a series,” said Lesli Linka Glatter, who directed the finale and many other acclaimed episodes during the show’s eight seasons. “There’s so much pressure on it from the outside and there’s internal pressure. There were many, many drafts of the last 15-20 pages. There was so much discussion about the ending. When Alex finally hit on it, it was like ‘Oh my god, that’s the ending.’ It took all the permutations and rewrites to get there.”
While Homeland toyed with the notion that either Carrie or Saul could wind up dead, both survived the finale, leaving open the possibility of the show returning in some form again in the future. Asked specifically about what would happen if Netflix came to the producers with the pitch of doing a standalone movie, as the streaming platform did with Breaking Bad last year, Gansa didn’t shut the door on making more Homeland.
“All of us are happy with where we ended the show and the series,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “Another chapter doesn’t feel necessary at the moment. But who knows what’s going to happen. Who knows what Claire and Mandy want to do. Who knows what Howard wants to do. We don’t know what that looks like. For now, it feels like closure.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Behold Dune: An Exclusive Look at Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, and More
— How to Watch Every Marvel Movie in Order
— David Simon on The Wire and His Equally Pissed-Off New Show, The Plot Against America
— Beyond Tiger King: 8 True-Crime Documentaries That Sparked a Second Look From the Law
— Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes on His New Series and the Beauty of a Scheming Woman
— All the New 2020 Movies Streaming Early Because of Coronavirus
— From the Archive: The Notorious Rivalry of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, Hollywood’s Dueling Gossip Columnists
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story.