Yesterday we discussed how HOMELAND ended. Today I want to comment on the philosophical implications of it.
I hereby repeat my SPOILER ALERT. Although the spoilers will be less blatant in this discussion than they were in yesterday's, I'M NOT GOING TO TRY TO DANCE AROUND THE ENDING.
The writers characteristically make the stakes very high, so that we can be routing for Carrie even as we recoil at the awfulness of some of the things she has to do. For a moment, we may even suspect that she has killed Saul. (She hasn't, but she lies both to his sister and in effect to us about this.)
The Evil of Two Lessers
The implicit ethical point is that if one is trying to prevent something as awful as a nuclear exchange, anything less awful than that is permitted.
But of course this raises the issue of whether such consequentialist thinking is what got the world into such a state. Carrie and Saul had a good deal to do, in the world of the series, with shaping the relations of the United States and several mostly-Islamic nations in the years leading up to this final conundrum.
In the world of the series, those two have always been, in good conscience, opting for the lesser of two evils, doing awful things to prevent more awful things. Has any of it made for a less awful world?
That last message from Carrie to Saul suggests continued nuclear showdowns are in the offing. So nothing about this dynamic makes for a better world, one in which the threat of nuclear exchanges would cease to be a fact of life.
Another Point Entirely
One positive take-away from the ending: Carrie is no longer surrounded by bureaucracy. Her situation seems now to be that of a trophy wife/notorious author. Her messages to Saul, so far as we know, will be freelance writing so to speak, not those of a spy, or a writer, on a deadline. She is more her own agent (excuse the pun) than she has ever been before.
It isn't clear whether Saul will even be able to write her back. Is he to be the passive recipient of her messages when they come, or is there to be a two way correspondence where she will be on the receiving end of some purse exchanges in Moscow ladies rooms?
It hardly matters. The whole series was a testament to the US pop cultural trope of the outstanding individual versus the institution which cannot properly contain her/him. Think of Hawkeye Pierce in the US military, committed to being both a healer and a wise ass. Carrie was a bit like that -- not a wiseass, but an uncontained nonconformist within an institution that demands conformity.
It is fitting that the final episode both kept her in the spy game and freed her from the constraints of that institution.
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