SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of tonight’s Season 6 finale of Homeland.
Homeland killed off one of its own tonight, a major character – and stop reading here if you don’t want to know more.
While a death was expected on tonight’s episode, longtime watchers might have seen a target on F. Murray Abraham’s Dar Adal, the poisonous Deep State leader who’s been orchestrating fake news and anything else handy to oppose the president-elect.
Instead, the victim was Rupert Friend’s Peter Quinn, a soul-mate of sorts to Claire Danes‘ Carrie Mathison, who was shot and killed by police as he attempted to drive Carrie and President-elect Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel) away from assassins.
The killing, which came halfway through the episode, was bloody and shocking, a self-sacrifice by the troubled agent who’d been framed to take the fall for Keane’s planned assassination.
As for Dar Adal, who was not the string-puller everyone thought – that would be General Jamie McClendon (Robert Knepper) – he ended up in prison. “I never intended things to end up so dark,” he told a visiting Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), explaining his long opposition to Keane, who he still maintains is “distinctly un-American.”
The set-up for next year – the first of the show’s two final seasons – seems clear: Keane is in the White House, Carrie has been offered a job as her senior adviser, and Dar, the man who proved just a little more trustworthy than we might have thought, is convinced the new president is evil.
As the episode nears its end, Keane has ordered a mass arrest of officials from all branches of government, including Saul, on apparently trumped-up charges of complicity in her assassination attempt.
So Dar didn’t die, and he might be right. As Carrie tells Keane’s new hatchet man (Linus Roache), Madame President has gone “full-on Joe Stalin.”
The Season 6 finale “America’s First” was written by Alex Gansa and Ron Nyswaner, and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter.
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