Her eyes are not smiling. On the cover of Carrie Mathison’s book, her tell-all about the apparent wickedness of the United States government, she is not smiling. In fact, she looks downright despondent in the black and white photograph above the title, Tyranny of Secrets, and in the first image “Professor Rabinow” has seen of his protégé in years. Is this what Carrie has been reduced to, the poster child of Russian propaganda against the country she sacrificed everything to serve?
Of course this is a deception. Two years after she utterly and thoroughly betrayed her mentor and last living friend, Saul Berenson, Carrie has taken on the responsibility of the Russian asset she burned. Anna Pomerantseva, apparently the CIA’s last active asset inside the Kremlin, was so thoroughly betrayed by Carrie in an attempt to prevent nuclear war that the best case scenario for Anna became committing suicide rather than a tortuous death at the hands of the Russian GRU. As Saul explained in his video message to Carrie from even further years back, other than Carrie, Anna was the most important professional relationship of his career, and the bravest woman he’d ever known.
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She’s a patriot who is psychically scarred by the events of a fateful morning in September 2001, which has indeed caused her to have innocent blood on her hands, and more than just Anna Pomerantseva’s. In season 4, which the final season also revisits the wounds of, Carrie became the “Drone Queen” of the CIA Kabul station. She surely sanctioned the killings of hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters and prevented attacks on American soldiers and Afghan civilians, but she also sanctioned the killings of civilians herself—more than a hundred of them at a wedding. This was obviously based on foreign policy that outlived the Bush administration and occurred after Obama attempted to turn a page on the post-9/11 world.
In that sense, Carrie, and now Saul as her suddenly unretired handler, is still as much a prisoner of the War on Terror as Brody was until the day he died. There was no figurative coming home for Brody, and there will likely be no literal homecoming for Carrie or Saul. No retirement under their own fig tree.
In the end, it’s actually a very optimistic and patriotic ending, allowing viewers to imagine Carrie giving her last full measure for decades, one mailed book at a time. She’s the spy who never came in from the cold. One we should be glad someone is still staying tuned to.
