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 ...
