This should come as a relief: “Homeland” is safe without Sgt. Nicholas Brody.
Season 4 of “Homeland” begins Sunday night on Showtime on a new and better course, namely back to where it started. This sophisticated espionage thriller is once again woven around the jagged complexities of its heroine, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a bipolar C.I.A. officer whose chief asset is that she is so maladjusted and blindly determined that she detects dangers that nobody else can see.
There was every reason to fear that a fourth season of “Homeland” would be too much: The third was more baroque and much less compelling than the first two. But Carrie’s lover, Brody, the P.O.W. turned traitor played by Damian Lewis, was hanged in Tehran at the end of Season 3, killing off a doomed love affair that lasted too long.
That freed the show’s writers to put Carrie back in the field, running intelligence operations in Kabul and Islamabad, alert and in command, but also still heeding some offbeat, jangly jazz racing through her head and heart. Her subordinates call her the Drone Queen.
Interactive Feature: Fall Arts Preview - Times 100
And while we know Carrie by now — she’s fearless and unbounded at work and skittish in personal relationships — her character is so well imagined and so skillfully performed by Ms. Danes that even after three years, there is still some ambiguity left.
Her bipolar condition, which she kept secret for most of Season 1, isn’t her real problem, though it explains a lot. Too often, television shows split personalities along the same lines as their bipolar disorder, painting characters Manichaean dark when symptomatic, light when even-keeled. But even when medicated and fully functioning, Carrie is conflicted and uneven, insightful and compassionate when it suits her, obtuse and unfeeling when that suits her better.
In Sunday’s two-episode premiere, the first hour is truly thrilling: a bomb attack on a high-value terrorist that inadvertently killed dozens of civilians could have been based on disinformation.
That episode alone neatly highlights an all-too-real paradox of 21st-century warfare. The government can put a camera or drone anywhere on the planet, but any misstep will almost certainly be caught and recorded and splashed across the Internet. It’s the information age version of the Cold War pact of mutually assured destruction: There is no privacy even for the best-hidden government secrets.
At its core, the narrative is propelled by the oldest plot in the spy book: There may be a leak at the heart of the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism operation.
Some of the main characters return, notably Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), Carrie’s mentor and former boss. Saul is no longer at the C.I.A., but he hasn’t gone far, working instead for a private security firm with Defense Department contracts in Afghanistan and other hot spots.
Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend), the black-ops assassin with a conscience, is still nursing remorse and an attraction to Carrie, even though she feels little guilt and has not yet acknowledged their sexual tension. Peter wants out of the agency, but Carrie wants him working with her in the field, and it’s been clear for a while that her will is stronger than his.
There are some new faces, notably Suraj Sharma as a Pakistani medical student named Aayan Ibrahim, who survives an attack, and Laila Robins as Martha Boyd, the United States ambassador to Pakistan, an experienced diplomat who has to finesse the contradictions between Pakistan’s public postures and its private maneuvers.
Carrie feels that she alone is equipped to lead the investigation into the security breach, but she also just prefers to be alone. Some of the most harrowing scenes are not bomb raids or mob killings, but Carrie at home in America, avoiding contact with the baby she conceived during her romance with Brody.
At the end of last season, Carrie was so panicked about the responsibility of motherhood that she had to be dissuaded from giving up the baby for adoption. Turns out, she more or less did anyway, picking assignments where families are not allowed and leaving her child in the care of her sister and a nanny.
There is a lot going on this season, but the focus is back on Carrie, from the opening scene that shows her looking through a car window at the near-empty streets of Kabul at night to the close of the second episode, when Carrie is back at a window, this one on an airplane headed for Islamabad, again looking intently yet sightlessly into darkness.
When a military officer asks her how she can bear the senseless loss of civilian life that comes with her job, Carrie has an answer: “I try to see the big picture.”
Sunday’s premiere is an invitation to take another look at all the small pieces in the puzzle that is Carrie.