HOMELAND SEASON 4 EPISODE 9 – THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE GOING ON

After last week's dramatic and chair-gripping episode that almost killed Saul, we see a more submissive CIA giving in to Haqqani's demands for a prison trade. Five imprisoned commanders of Haqqani's team are being given over in exchange for Saul and Carrie believes that this is just a bonus since Haqqani had something else planned. But, Lockhart highly doubts the veracity of Carrie’s theories as well as Aasar Khan's claims that Dennis Boyd is the embassy leak. Redmond invites Dennis to his office and talks to him about Sandy – how he passed on illegal information and how the information was traced back to Martha's computer. He asks Dennis gently to come clean with it, but Dennis refuses to take the bait. I guess he knew their evidence is weak so he doesn’t admit to it but Carrie is determined to take things to the next level and make Dennis sweat.

Saul is shown badly bruised after a pretty bad beating from his escape attempt. Then a young woman comes in to clean Saul up and take him somewhere in the back of a van. Meanwhile, the prisoners too are being readied for the prison exchange. Carrie ‘invites’ Dennis once again for another ‘interrogation’ and this time she does not go all soft on him but demands from him the ISI counterpart who ran him and Sandy. Carrie also told him that she almost died when he switched her meds but it seems Dennis doesn’t care about what he had done. Carrie decided to lock him in the interrogation room overnight. Saul is then dragged into a room equipped with bright lights and a camera, then while he is bound and gagged, Haqqani makes a video message about his plans when he's reunited with his once-imprisoned comrades. He talks about "taking back" Kabul and his men all cheer behind him.

Carrie then gets a call from Saul's wife, Mira asking Carrie not to let Saul die, to bring him home safe and Carrie advised her not to worry as she would be running the exchange. Before she left, Carrie shows Dennis the video of Sandy being beaten, to make him break. Dennis looks tired but insists that he can't say what he doesn't know. Carrie threatened to torture or even kill him if he continues to refuse to talk when suddenly the ambassador enters, questions the fact that Carrie is questioning her husband and tells her that she is ‘finished’. Inside the ambassador's office, Martha and Dennis discuss what happened. Martha is fuming at Carrie and asks Dennis what it was about and he admitted being accused of spying but denied it. Then, she leaves Dennis and surprisingly enters a room with Carrie and Lockhart, sits down and very calmly tells them that Dennis didn't say anything. It seems she'd been working with them the whole time and the whole explosion in the interrogation room was part of their plan...way to go Martha! At least you have seen thru Dennis and do not condone his antics anymore.

Carrie leaves for the exchange with Saul and insist on Quinn staying on at the embassy since she feels that "there's something else going on." Clearly, Carrie’s sixth sense is tingling. She wants Quinn as her extra ‘eye up above’ in case they decide to kill Saul. Dennis tries to leave the ambassador’s house and was prevented by the embassy guards. Martha arrives and asks that she be presented with his bag and sees clothes, passport and money, obviously jumping ship. Martha asks him to stop lying and commands that he be locked up. Carrie and Redmond meet with the ISI to discuss the exchange with Saul, and Tasneem asks where Lockhart was. Mid-briefing, Carrie feigns a call from Lockhart but instead calls Aasar Khan from across the room. Carrie asks Aasar Khan what's going to happen during the exchange and it seems he wasn’t in on the planning, only Tasneem. Saul boards a van with a young boy with a bomb vest and the van heads to the exchange.

The exchange begins with Redmond and Carrie running everything on the embassy's side while in the ISI corner, Tasneem has taken the reigns. Quinn reports to Carrie that everything is clear. The ISI verifies the prisoners and Saul is then removed from the van to be shown to Carrie and Redmond. Carrie insists that the van leave before they start walking the prisoners toward the ISI members. The van drives away but leaves the boy and Carrie flips out when she sees the vest and stops the prisoners from leaving. But Saul, exasperated and exhausted, just sits down and refuses to move. He wants to die so that the Taliban doesn't reclaim the prisoners so Carrie offers to approach Saul to talk sense into him. Carrie and Saul share an emotional moment and eventually, Saul relents and they walk off together. The prisoners are released to ISI and the exchange is complete.

The ambassador goes to visit Dennis and tells him that the prisoner swap for Saul was successful. Then she rhetorically asked Dennis how their marriage fully deteriorated and it infuriates Martha most that even now, when everything is past the point of being up in flames, Dennis can still not take responsibility for his actions. Meanwhile, Redmond, Carrie and Saul sit silently in the car and gets a call from Mira but as he was about to get the phone, there's a massive explosion. Their convoy had been hit and several seconds later, there is another explosion. Lockhart deploys all the Marines to the explosion site and one Marine goes down to the cell to tell Martha what has happened. As she goes to leave, Dennis asks if all the Marines have been deployed and, FINALLY, reveals to her that Tasneem is his ISI connection and that he told her about the hidden passageway under the embassy. Before the credits roll, Haqqani and his fully armed men is seen breaking into the passageway underneath the embassy as his full-fledged attack on the embassy is about to begin.

*** photo credits from Showtime ***