Violet recaps Season 3 Episode 9 of Homeland, titled One Last Time, where we see Carrie’s condition after being shot, and Brody goes through withdrawals, as Saul tries to help him recover so he can carry out Saul’s plan before time runs out! Following the recap, both Violet and Josh share their thoughts on One Last Time.
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Homeland, Season 3 Episode 9: One Last Time Recap Overview
Need a quick Homeland episode recap of Season 3 Episode 9, titled One Last Time? Here is a summary of events for the episode. Each event is linked to the more detailed Homeland episode recap for One Last Time if you need more information!
- Carrie recovers in the hospital from her gunshot, and Lockhart pays her a visit to find out why Saul was in Caracas. Meanwhile, Brody is going through withdrawals under Saul‘s watch. Saul doesn’t know how Lockhart found out about Caracas, and orders his and Adal‘s homes swept for bugs.
- Virgil and Max find a bug in Saul‘s house, and track the source to Mira‘s ex-boyfriend, Alan Bernard. Brody is given a drug to speed up the withdrawal process, which causes hallucinations, and he stabs himself in the arm. Brody loses the will to live.
- Saul visits a bitter Carrie in the hospital, and talks her into convincing Brody to go along with his plan. Brody seems non-responsive until Carrie shows him Dana, who is working at a motel. Virgil shows Saul the pictures of Alan, who is an Israeli intelligence officer, including one of him with Lockhart.
- Saul uses the pictures to blackmail Lockhart into giving him a few more weeks before his confirmation. Carrie convinces Brody to go along with Saul’s plan. He trains and gets in shape.
- Ryan gives a briefing on the plan to get Brody in to take out the General, and goes over the extraction plan.
- Brody says he’s not leaving until he gets to see Dana, so Carrie takes him to see her. However, Dana isn’t very receptive, and says she never wants to see him again. Saul and Carrie have a fight. Brody leaves with the Special Ops team in a helicopter.
Homeland Episode Recap: One Last Time, the Details
Carrie Recovers, Brody Goes Through Withdrawals
Season 3 Episode 9 of Homeland, titled One Last Time, begins with Carrie waking up in the hospital. The doctor tells her that the shot had no nerve involvement and that she’s lucky. He also informs her that the baby should be fine.
Meanwhile, Brody is going through withdrawals, as men try to hold him down. Saul and Dar Adal watch from a monitor. Dar points out that Saul has 7 days until Lockhart is confirmed, but Saul says he’s all they’ve got, if he agrees to do it. The doctor says he can keep Brody stable, but he’s a mess. Saul says no hospitals. The doctor suggests methadone to help him, but Saul says it has to be cold turkey because they need him functional. Brody continues to suffer from withdrawals, begging, saying he needs it.
Lockhart visits Carrie in the hospital, and tells her there are 2 armed guards outside her door. He doesn’t understand why he’s the enemy after what just happened to her, and says she needs someone she can trust. He asks her what Saul was doing in Caracas, then realizes she didn’t even know he was there.
Saul gets a message from Carrie about Lockhart visiting, and tells Dar Adal that somehow Lockhart knows about Caracas, but he doesn’t think Lockhart has a clue why. But now Carrie does. Saul tells Adal to keep Carrie under guard at the hospital, and away from Brody. Saul doesn’t know how Lockhart found out about Caracas, since he and Adal were the only ones that knew about it. He tells Adal to have their homes and offices swept from top to bottom.
Brody Wants to Die
Brody’s withdrawal symptoms get worse, and the doctor says it’ll be about 10 days before he recovers. They only have 6 days now. Adal suggests a drug called Ibogaine that speeds up the withdrawal process, which is illegal in the US because of its side effects, including violent hallucinations, but it works.
Virgil and Max sweep Saul’s house for bugs, and find a chip in Saul’s mouse, which was left by Mira’s ex-boyfriend.
Back in Brody’s cell, he is apparently on Ibogaine, as he is having a hallucination of a soldier standing in front of him singing the US Marines song. Frustrated, he picks up his wooden chair and breaks it, then takes a piece of the chair leg and stabs it into his arm repeatedly. Saul comes in to stop him, but Brody hallucinates that Saul is Abu Nazir attacking him, and seems to have a flashback. Later, the doctor bandages Brody’s arm, and tells Saul that Brody will sleep for awhile now.
Virgil and Max stake out a house from their van, which is leased to a shipping consortium out of Tel Aviv. Mira’s ex-boyfriend walks out of the house, and they take pictures of him.
That night, when Brody wakes up, Saul is sitting at his bedside. Brody asks why couldn’t Saul have just left him there to die, but Saul says he knows that wasn’t really an option. Saul offers him a chance to be a Marine again, the man he was before they broke him. But Brody says he’s done, and asks Saul to kill him. Saul says, “You wanna die, huh? We’ll see about that.”
Saul’s guys and the doctor take Brody out on a boat, then dump him in the water. He doesn’t come back up. The doctor wants to go in after him, but the other guys stop him. They wait a little while longer, then a couple of guys jump in and retrieve him. They report back to Saul that Brody sank like a stone and made no attempt to save himself. They tell Saul he’s refusing to eat, and Saul orders them to force feed him. Dar Adal tells Saul their window is closing fast, and it’s now or never.
Saul’s Play
Saul visits Carrie at the hospital. She blames him for the bullet in her arm when she was trying to clear Brody’s name. He tells her he has Brody in Virginia, with a Special Ops team trying to get him back in shape. He asks Carrie’s help in convincing Brody to participate in his plan. He explains the play: Brody will seek political asylum in Iran, and meet with the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, then take him out. Javadi, the heir apparent, will ascend the throne, and become one of the 3 most important people in Iran — but he’ll be working for the CIA. Javadi will be in control of the entire Iranian security apparatus, and he can do something to change things so that the US and Iran will finally be able to sit down and talk.
Carrie goes to visit Brody, but when he wakes up and sees her, he turns away and ignores her. She leaves the room. Saul tells her all that Brody has been through. Carrie asks for a vehicle. She goes for a drive with the Special Ops team and Brody. They go to a motel and wait in the parking lot.
Virgil shows Saul the pictures they took. He tells them he’s a friend of his wife’s named Alan Bernard. She met him in Mumbai, and they struck up a relationship that may or may not be ongoing. However, he doesn’t think Mira is aware that he is an Israeli intelligence officer. He tells Quinn to pick him up and put him in a dark hole. Virgil then shows them a picture of Alan meeting with Lockhart at a diner.
Back at the motel, eventually they see Dana working as a cleaning lady. When Brody sees her, he freaks out, trying to get to her, but the Special Ops guys hold him back.
Saul Blackmails Lockhart
Saul visits Lockhart and shows him the pictures of Alan. Lockhart claims that Alan is writing a profile on him for Le Monde. However, Saul informs Lockhart that 20 minutes ago, Alan admitted to being an asset of Israeli intelligence, and that he claims he passed Lockhart information obtained from a listening device planted in Saul’s home. Lockhart denies it, but Saul blackmails him, saying that if Lockhart postpones his confirmation until the middle of next month, the pictures will never see the light of day. Lockhart wonders why Saul is letting him off the hook when he could easily destroy him, and Saul says because it would humiliate his wife and destroy the agency. Lockhart says they have a deal.
Carrie fills Brody in on Dana, and he seems to be lucid now. He begs to go back to the motel to see her, but she says he can’t. Carrie talks to Brody about getting redemption for the deaths he caused, and asks him to do what Saul wants, if not for his own sake, then for Dana’s. Carrie says they’ll get him ready, he just has to be willing.
The next day, Brody goes to train with the Special Ops guys. He barely begins to jog, when he falls over. They make him get up on his own, and continue. 16 days later, he seems to be in good shape, both physically and mentally, as he continues to train.
The Briefing
Later, the doctor plays a board game with Brody, and asks about Carrie, but he says there’s nothing going on. The doctor asks if Brody minds if he goes after Carrie, and Brody just stares at him, then says go ahead. But the doctor says he’s just messing with him, because he actually is married and he and his wife just had their first kid, a son. But he’s superstitious, so he doesn’t like to talk about them.
They’re called to the briefing room, where Ryan explains the plan to the team. The guys will get Brody to the border, where he will surrender himself in a spot where several Al-Qaeda commanders have asked for political asylum. They expect he will be flown to Tehran after a period of vetting. Saul says Brody will be treated as a hero of the Revolution, plus Javadi will be able to facilitate a meeting between Brody and the General, and that’s how he will get close enough to the General to take him out. However, Brody has concerns about the extraction plan, so Ryan explains that 4 team members will go south and travel over the mountains to a safe house just outside Tehran.
Brody Visits Dana Before He Leaves
Carrie goes outside and smokes. Brody catches her, and she puts out the cigarette. Brody says he’s not leaving until he can see Dana again, because he knows it’s a long shot that he’ll be coming back after the mission. Carrie brings Brody to the motel. Before she lets him out of the car, she tells him Dana was hospitalized for trying to kill herself.
Brody knocks on the door. When Dana asks who it is, and he replies, “It’s me. It’s your dad,” she looks outside the window to make sure. Then she slowly opens the door. But when he approaches her, she backs up. She reluctantly agrees to let him in. He apologizes and tries to hug her, but she won’t let him. He tells her that it wasn’t him that killed all those people, he didn’t do it. He says he has to leave in a few hours, but he wanted to see her first. She is upset that he didn’t think about whether she would want to see him, and doesn’t know what he wants her to say. She tells him to write it down, and she will say it, as long as she never has to see him again — or Carrie, who has just shown up in the doorway. Brody and Carrie leave, as Dana watches them go from the doorway.
As they drive back, Brody tells Carrie he will come back from Tehran, and not just for Dana. When they get back, Saul is waiting for them, as Brody only has 45 minutes before he ships out. Saul is upset with Carrie for taking Brody off base, but Carrie is just as upset with Saul for not trusting her, considering that she is the only reason that there is an operation.
As Carrie watches Brody and the other guys load up in the helicopter, she and Brody exchange a long stare, then she tells him, “See you on the other side.”
Violet’s Thoughts on Season 3 Episode 9 of Homeland: One Last Time
This episode of Homeland was a pretty good one that I enjoyed, despite it having many depressing moments. It was really hard to watch Brody go through his withdrawals, even though I’m sure we didn’t see the half of all that he went through. Then seeing Brody lose the will to live, then regaining it, just to have his daughter reject him, was all heartbreaking — yet, understandable, on Dana’s part. It was also sad how Brody and Carrie showed no affection toward each other, either physically or verbally. The only indication was when Brody said he would come back from Tehran, and not just for Dana, implying that he was coming back because of Carrie. This statement was promising, because it showed that he had regained the will to live, and would actually try to survive this operation, rather than accept it as a suicide mission.
So, apparently Carrie doesn’t care about her baby at all. She didn’t even ask if it was okay, and the doctor had to check to see if she even knew she was pregnant. She seemed almost disappointed to hear that it was just fine. Then she was smoking later on during the episode… even though she never smokes. Is she just hoping she can cause a miscarriage so she doesn’t have to make the actual decision to have an abortion? She didn’t tell Brody about the baby before he left, which I didn’t expect her to. That would put too much pressure on him, and could possibly have changed his mind. Not to mention he might have put too much pressure on her to go through with the pregnancy, which it doesn’t look like she really wants to. Maybe it’ll all come down to how Brody’s mission goes as to what her decision about the baby will be.
Will Saul ever tell Mira about Alan’s true identity? I would guess that he can’t, because that is probably classified, plus he probably doesn’t want to make her feel bad about discovering that Alan was just using her to get to Saul. I wonder at what point Lockhart sought out Alan’s help.
One part in the episode that I really liked was when Saul was telling Carrie about his play. There was so much sincerity, so much hope, in the way that he described it, and all of that was reflected in voice, in his eyes, in his facial expressions, so much that I actually believed this plan could work, and could make a real difference in international relations between the US and Iran. Even though I’ve never been interested in international relations. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all plays out.
Oh, and bravo Saul for outsmarting Lockhart again! I’m pretty sure they didn’t even have Alan in custody when Saul visited Lockhart and told him that they did.
Josh’s Thoughts: Homeland, Season 3 Episode 9: One Last Time
This week’s episode of Homeland was really good. It was very depressing at the same time though, watching Brody go through his withdrawals. How could anyone ever want to get hooked on heroin? Just seeing that I can see why once you start, it’s nearly impossible to stop. It was also sad how Brody “proved” he wanted to die–not swimming when they dropped him in the ocean.
We finally get to learn a lot more of Saul’s plan, and specifically what Brody is to be used for. We also learn who Mira’s boyfriend is. I guess the biggest thing that jumped out at me this episode, is the idea of looking at “the big picture” and the “long game”, which seems to consistently be running themes for the show. On the surface, using Brody to send on a suicide mission, keeping Carrie locked up to prevent her from interfering, and various other “tactics” used by the CIA on the surface seem evil, yet the show seems to ask, “where would we be without these actions?”
My favorite scene this episode is when Saul confronts Lockhart about the meeting with the Israeli intelligence officer. Saul has finally sought his retribution, and won. What was even greater is how Saul handled the situation. Rather than burn Lockhart to the ground, he would rather save his wife’s reputation, and the CIA from another scandal. Truly a selfless act on his part. I also wonder, how much does he want the lead job anyway? I almost think he is content where he is.
As for Brody–his final goodbye with Dana was very sad, as she completely shuts him down. He does seem resolved though, and wants to make right what he has done wrong. Carrie interestingly doesn’t tell him about the baby. I thought that was actually a little odd. I thought that could possibly be the trigger which makes him truly begin his training.
So does Brody make it home alive? Hard to say. I guess if I were to make a prediction, I would say no. This comes mainly from the fact that I think the actor, Damian Lewis, already seemed to be wanting to leave the show. I guess we will see as the season plays out!
Scenes from Homeland, Season 3 Episode 10: Good Night
Here are scenes from the next Homeland episode, titled Good Night:
What did you think of Season 3 Episode 9 of Homeland, titled One Last Time? Let us know in the comments below!
