In the eighth and final season of “Homeland,” the C.I.A. officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) returns to Afghanistan and comes across the child of a contact she dealt with years ago. He’s growing tall now. When she last saw him, he barely came up to her knee.“Homeland,” which returns Sunday night on Showtime, is about a lot of things, personal and geopolitical. But at its most powerful, the new season conjures that simple, sad feeling: My God, it’s been so long. All of this — the war, the fear, the vengeance — has been with us for so many years, it’s hard to remember a time without it.That feeling was built into “Homeland.” It began, in 2011, a full decade since the Sept. 11 attacks. “24” — the show’s precursor, with which “Homeland” shares creative talent — had by then aired eight seasons.Where “24” flourished in the fight-or-flight rush of 9/11’s aftermath, spinning out cathartic fantasies of ever-bigger terrorist attacks on the United States, “Homeland” looked at the psychic cost of all those years of fighting and catastrophizing.Jack Bauer, the tortured torturer of “24,” took on the physical burden of the war on terror. He was a hard-boiled St. Sebastian, pin-cushioned with all the arrows he took for us over the years. “Homeland,” created by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa of “24” and based on an Israeli series, focused on the war’s internal wounds through Carrie, an officer living with bipolar disorder as well as lingering horror at the intelligence failures before 9/11.As dicey as it can be to use actual mental illness as a symbol for national trauma, Carrie was a kind of synecdoche for a rattled America. She both fought the shadow war for us and felt it — more intensely so when she took the case of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), an American prisoner of war turned by his captors into a sleeper agent, who became her target and her lover.There could have been a version of “Homeland” that ran as a single, devastating limited series and went out a legend. This version did not. As it spun Brody’s story into a second season, then killed him off in a third, it began to suffer from implausibility and plot one-upmanship.And though it had a greater political sophistication than “24” and its like, “Homeland” still tended to see its non-American characters more as objects than subjects. This blind spot was manifest in Season 5 when artists hired to tag a refugee-camp set with Arabic graffiti painted “‘Homeland’ is racist” into their work without anyone on the production noticing.But even in its weaker seasons, “Homeland” was bolstered by a commitment to nuance, in its politics and its characters. Danes’s raw-nerve performance has been stunning throughout. And Carrie’s partnership with Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) has been one of TV’s most complicated pairings: They’ve been mentor and pupil, peers, surrogate family, adversaries and uneasy allies, their interactions charged simultaneously with warmth and with a necessary professional chill.Over the years, the thriller evolved to focus not just on America and the Islamic world but on crises within the West as well. In the most recent season, in 2018, Russian operatives launched a disinformation campaign that precipitated a constitutional crisis in the United States and ultimately led to the resignation of the president — as well as Carrie’s capture by the Russians, who withheld the medication that had kept her stable.It was a powerful treatment of a current-day America where the horror had moved from sleeper cells to troll farms, where enemies attacked us not with our own aircraft but with our own animus. All these years, anxious and angry, we had been whetting sharper and sharper blades, the better to cut ourselves with.In the new season, Saul, now the national security adviser to the new president, Ralph Warner (Beau Bridges), is conducting negotiations to end the war in Afghanistan at last. When the peace process is undermined, he recruits Carrie, still recovering from spending months in a psychotic state as a captive — though the C.I.A. is concerned that she revealed information during the long stretch of her imprisonment that she can’t recall.This setup brings “Homeland” full circle. Carrie, having sacrificed her sanity and even custody of her daughter by Brody in the service of her mission, has to readjust to fieldwork while wondering, herself, what she might have said while the Russians had broken her. She may, in a way, be Brody now, and one of her own adversaries is herself — at least, the mysterious, unmedicated version of herself lost to her own memory.The first four episodes of the season have their wild plot lurches but also the gimlet eye for human nature of “Homeland” at its best. Danes gives us a Carrie who’s older and wiser (“I’m not as fun as I used to be,” she deadpans, ordering a nonalcoholic drink) but also wrenchingly aware of her own precariousness. And the show is conscious of the collateral damage of the great game, as with the story of Samira Noori (Sitara Attaie), an Afghan woman whose husband was killed by a car bomb after she spoke out against government corruption.There’s an elegiac feeling to “Homeland” returning to the site of a war a generation old. The season returns a number of characters from past seasons, but the long war, in a way, is the ultimate enemy — formless, multiheaded and endlessly able to reconstitute itself and survive.There are glimmers of hope that this time might finally be different. But the show’s realpolitik worldview suggests that you not bet on it, as it demonstrates in a scene that captures the mind-set of endless war in miniature. Bunny Latif (Art Malik), a retired Pakistani general who figured into Season 4, is sitting with a revolver in his garden, where to the consternation of his neighbors he’s been shooting the squirrels who steal from his bird feeders.Asked why he doesn’t simply stop filling the feeders rather than spend his free hours turning his backyard into a war zone, he answers as if the question were insane: “That wouldn’t be fair on the birds, would it?” In big wars and small ones, “Homeland” tells us, people can always find reasons to stick to their guns. More
