Homeland Heard You Like Training Montages

Am I crazy or was this Season 3 episode of Homeland featuring more than one Brody kind of great? Like, even maybe almost a return to Season 1 form? I SAID "AM I CRAZY" BUT I GUESS I DON'T WANT YOU TO ANSWER!!!

Let's review. Carrie (still pregnant, and thirteen weeks along, apparently) wakes up in the hospital. She's being kept under armed guard. Saul's keeping his distance. Lockhart shows up to try to get her to tattle on him. When Saul finally does show up for her, he and Carrie are still deeply suspicious of each other. But Saul's hatched a plan so daring — getting Brody to take (fraudulent) credit for the Langley bombing, seek asylum in Iran, get close to the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard (Javadi's boss), and then assassinate him — that she can't resist getting on board for the purpose of talking Brody into it. Does she really think it's a good idea, or is she just making this the first phase of her own secret op?

Speaking of Brody, he is really in a bad way. He's coming down hard from his heroin addiction, and his minders can't let him have methadone because he needs to be sharp for Saul's plan to work. This current version of Brody has nothing to live for but his next fix — not even Carrie's appearance at his sodden bedside can change his mood. So Carrie drives him to some roadside motel in the middle of nowhere, where they wait until the maid comes out of a room and Brody sees that she's Dana and goes crazy. Hello, leverage!

With Brody thus prepared, Carrie can return to Brody later and lay the situation out for him: what they want him to do, and why he should do it. She catches him up on the parts of Dana's life that he missed — her suicide attempt, her hospitalization, her name change, her having left home — and points out that if he doesn't co-operate with the Iran plan, then "telling [Dana he's] innocent is just one more lie."

This is another thing the episode gets VERY right: all the emphasis this season on proving that Brody's not the Langley bomber kind of glosses over all the other people he definitely has killed, on orders from enemies of the United States. But Saul reminds Carrie, and Carrie reminds Brody, and Brody kind of has no response to that.

Speaking of no response: once Brody's agreed to co-operate, gone through weeks of training, and is back to his old Marine self (I guess), he and Carrie return to being on good terms with each other — a little flirtier than I personally prefer, but whatever — and he tells her that he's not leaving for Iran until she takes him to see Dana. And her reaction feels right to me too, in that she is still furious, is totally unimpressed with his protestations of Langley-bombing innocence, and calls out his selfishness for imposing himself on her when a few seconds of thought might have told him that she's taken a lot of steps to avoid even the possibility of seeing him. It's about time someone told Brody that, like, he's not a great dad?

Anyway: Brody has to choke on Dana's rejection, but he does get on the transport to Iran, telling Carrie before he leaves, "I will come back from Tehran....Not just for her." But is he just keeping up appearances so that Carrie doesn't narc on him to Saul? Is he running his own secret op to seek asylum for real? Who is actually on whose side?!

This episode left just enough doubt about everyone's motivations to be suspensefully fun, but how Homeland-y was it?