#is this a recency effect because 4.11 happened after carrie's entire season of hunting him which ashley very nicely outlined?

[hellyeahomeland]

Haqqani was part of Quinn’s story. I have no idea where the writers plan on going with this character, but they have no right to make any connection between him and Carrie. It’s insulting. They kill off a major character like Quinn, who’s so important to the story and then pretend he never existed?! Homeland is out of touch. Clearly a sign the series is coming to an end.

I’m sorry, but I need to disagree with a lot of this.

Of course there is a connection between Carrie and Haqqani — everything that happened in season four was a result of Carrie’s failed drone strike in 4.01. She honeytrapped Aayan to get to Haqqani. Tasneem targeted Carrie via her meds. Carrie attempted to take Haqqani out for the second time (along with Saul) and she was stopped by Quinn. When Quinn went off all half-cocked on a mission to kill Haqqani himself, Carrie tracked him — not because she didn’t want Haqqani dead, but because she valued Quinn more. She’d have killed Haqqani herself if Khan hadn’t stopped her.

Carrie avoided a lot of heartache in season four by not dropping the bomb on Saul, by not letting Saul commit suicide, by not letting Quinn kill himself (and a LOT of innocent people) in the process of killing Haqqani. But all of that could have been avoided if she’d just… not authorized the drone strike in the first place. But hindsight is 20/20 and it’s clear now that she just postponed the inevitable. I think season eight will see Carrie finishing what the drone queen started.

Season four is many people’s favorite and rightly so, because it is awesome. And it just happened to provide a really good vehicle for the character of Peter Quinn. Carrie Mathison was cold and disconnected and grieving, and I think Quinn’s feelings pretty accurately reflected ours. It was the beginning of a new era of the show, too, and by featuring him so prominently it’s obvious why literally everybody expected his storyline to go a little bit less terribly. But still, it’s like we forgot what show we were watching for a hot second, and by “hot second,” I of course mean “3+ years.”

I am glad they are revisiting the happenings of season four, because there were a lot of loose ends. I don’t know how many times people have complained about the way the season ended, not just because of Carrie and Quinn being complete idiots, but because they left Pakistan so defeated. They’d lost so many people, including Fara, and there was just… nothing. No payoff for an entire season of small steps forward and big steps back, watching Carrie Mathison — whom most of y’all still liked back then — seduce a teenager whose life she’d already decimated, and treat Fara like shit, and almost kill her mentor, and just generally make Quinn miserable. 

All that and the bad guys still won. 

The show is coming to an end, but from what we know so far, they’re finishing it the way this iteration of it began. Quinn was a big part of it, but ultimately so much of what has happened over the past four seasons can be attributed to Carrie’s drone strike on (she thought) Haqqani. It makes sense to see that through. Or to try to, of course, because this is Homeland. 

As I said in an earlier ask, neither Quinn nor the Quinnspiracy has been on my mind a whole lot as of late. But whether or not Quinn comes back, which I firmly believe could still happen, he will be present. Because whatever comes next, Quinn was important to this particular story… but the story has always been Carrie’s.