[Spoilers for Homeland's latest season ahead.]

Homeland's fourth season, which ended last night, started with a quiet bang and ended with an anticlimactic whimper. The adrenaline and bullets that shot their way through Islamabad into last week's cliffhanger suggested that the show had recaptured its early magic. In fact, it would have been easy, even practical, to have ended the finale right there, with shadowy Dar Adal in the back of terrorist-at-large Haissam Haqqani's escaping vehicle. That surprise would have fueled debate and endless disagreement until the next season. Instead, in "Long Time Coming," we got The Graduate. We got the domestic crash after the international sugar high. The "What comes next?" after it all ends. It sacrificed its entertainment with a shocked stare-down and funereal fallout.

Homeland has thrived in that dichotomous context, though, pivoting from war to peace, chaos to calm. So if it was strange to subdue the show's momentum back in the Washington suburbs, it was also completely understandable. Carrie's battle with bipolar disorder—given more background by her first meeting with her mother—has made compartmentalizing between work and home harder than swallowing her pills. But those two poles were never very distant to begin with. That was clear when, to start the season, Carrie cosigned a drone strike that mistakenly wiped out an innocent wedding party; moments later, employees brought her a birthday cake, singing, "For she's a jolly good fellow." Their timing was the ironic reality of their detachment.

The consequences from that opening bombing continued to ripple through the morally murky waters of season four, which began familiarly and frustratingly muddled. It was in this season that Carrie nearly did something unspeakable by a bathtub. It was in this season that Peter Quinn began an isolated attachment to his landlady. It was in this season that Carrie turned a teenager, her only asset, Aayan, into a hopeless romantic and then a murdered statistic. For a show that had essentially rebooted, it seemed like it already needed to do so again. Soon, it began to utilize a talented cast—using Laila Robbins, Mark Moses, and Michael O'Keefe. After a hallucination and prisoner tradeoff, in some ways it had already hit refresh.

The explosive start to the episode "13 Hours in Islamabad" contained some of the most thrilling minutes of television this year. Carrie, bloodied and beaten, was sniping targets from behind a jeep. Quinn was commanding briskly in the control room. Terrorists were breaching the U.S. embassy. It didn't matter if it was illogical. Homeland was back to what it did best. It got fun again. Part of that was its return to action—militants opening fire, explosions, hostage negotiations—but also its sense of in-the-moment mystery. There was real-time decision-making, some if it levelheaded, some of it emotionally burdened. The show had taken on the characteristics of the jazz filtering through the opening credits and Carrie's workout ear buds. It was loud and improvisational.

More importantly, it had given Carrie back the attractive quality of competence. Ever since the U.S. ambassador's husband switched out her prescriptions, Carrie remained alert, focused, and rational. It was rewarding watching the show mimic its protagonist, even if that meant witnessing 36 Americans, including Fara, brutally die as another governmental property was compromised. I had forgotten what that Carrie looked like. The one who talked Saul down from the ledge in the middle of the prisoner swap; the one chasing around men, not to court, but to interrogate. Consequently it was Quinn sprinting down the Haqqani rabbit hole, shedding his controlled aggression and starting to wire up a bomb.

Sunday's finale was a chance to process all of that, an episode to scrape up some of the mess (Carrie found comfort in her daughter while eulogizing her father and learning about a brother). The show's broad sweep, however, left a few damaging crumbs. Saul took a back-alley deal from Adal (and Haqqani), a power grab for his old job. Quinn returned home and went all in. Kissing Carrie wasn't just bottled-up lust, it was testing a new life. Since the beginning of last season, he has existed as the show's moral compass while teetering upon an existential crisis. In Robert Ludlum's alternate universe, Quinn was Jason Bourne saying, "Look at us, look at what they make you give," convincing Carrie how screwed up their jobs were and still are. For a moment, their affection was real. But Carrie knew herself too well. Look where Brody and Aayan ended up.

That whiff of romance doesn't seem likely now given Quinn's plunge back into an "open-ended" black ops mission. But it does make you reconsider the difficulty in transitioning out of that job, the same kind it takes to transition a country out of war. Even at its worst, Homeland has found itself reliably close to the current foreign political climate. The question of the morality of drone warfare that amplified this season has coincided with an Obama administration criticized for its hovering aircraft trigger finger. Last week's tragic Peshawar school shooting rampage chillingly followed the one Haqqani executed at the embassy underneath Lockhart's nose. It's a grim reminder that this show isn't always exaggerating bloodshed or hiding the emotional craters that are left in its wake.

So I felt for Carrie when she saw Saul, the show's soul, sitting on Dar Adal's deck, already sold out. They were no better than Haqqani. "Not every choice we make is blessed with moral clarity," Adal says earlier. It reads like the tagline for this season, a tested motto for the entire run of Homeland, which turned the CIA control room just as barbaric and fearful as the caves the terrorists they pursue hide in. Carrie had just mourned her buried father. Now, she was mourning her father figure. For they're jolly good fellows, until they're not.

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