“There are only wrong choices,” Carrie realizes at the end of “Halfway to a Donut,” the eighth episode in “Homeland’s” fourth season. “How can saving someone’s life be the wrong choice?”
Wrong choices are the name of the game as the tension surrounding Saul’s captivity in Pakistan continues to escalate. Haqqani plans to use Saul as a bargaining chip in a prisoner exchange with the Americans, but the prisoners Haqqani is asking for — several key men from his troop — give the Americans, including CIA head Lockhart, serious pause.
Saul refuses to be a pawn in Haqqani’s strategy, imploring the Americans to not give the Taliban anything they ask for in exchange for his life. For Saul, death is a better option than aiding Haqqani in any way.
Carrie, still reeling from her horrific night of hallucinations in the previous episode, still possesses her unparalleled intuition, one that makes her such a valuable CIA operative. She immediately gathers that someone has tampered with her pills, meaning there has been a breach in the CIA’s Islamabad station. Carrie must figure out: Who can she trust?
Since the earliest episodes of “Homeland,” the answer to that question has been Saul.
Despite Saul’s movement into private sector and tumultuous relationship with Carrie, he and Carrie still have an unspoken bond as confidants. When Saul manages a harrowing escape from his Taliban holding cell, he callse Carrie and asks to speak with her privately. While trekking through the wilderness, he tells Carrie there are only two options for him: complete his escape, or die. He refuses to be imprisoned by Haqqani again, and forces Carrie to promise him that should that happen, she will take him out with a drone strike. Carrie, who has already almost had Saul killed in order to take out Haqqani, agrees.
The mission to rescue Saul from a small town, however, quickly goes awry when Carrie (once again working off strong intuition during a meeting with the Pakistanis) realizes the Taliban have been tipped off to where Saul is. As the Taliban rapidly move in to fetch and imprison Saul again, Carrie leads a mission with her task force, trying to guide Saul through a maze of Taliban with the help of drone feeds of the town. But Saul, realizing there is no escape from the men hunting him, pulls out a gun and tells Carrie he is ending it now.
Carrie, distraught that Saul is about to take his own life, tries to talk him off the ledge. She tells him that the rescue team is waiting for him nearby, and that he simply has to navigate another section of buildings and will then be free. Saul trusts Carrie and lowers the gun from his head, following her directions through the town — only to be ambushed by Taliban, Taliban that Carrie, with eyes overhead, knew were awaiting him.
As Saul is dragged away, he screams at Carrie, “You fucking lied! You fucking lied!” Carrie knows that this was the only way to save Saul’s life, as Haqqani won't kill such a valuable asset. And yet, saving Saul (from a self-inflicted gunshot wound) also meant aiding an enemy, and betraying one of her only confidents. In a world of wrong choices, Carrie this time chose the one that saved Saul's life.
Carrie later learns through ISI agent Aasar Khan (who seems to have a certain emotional investment in Carrie following her mental breakdown in his home) that it was Boyd, husband to Islamabad’s American ambassador, that tampered with her medication. The pieces begin to come together on the internal breach, and Carrie has saved Saul from himself — though, as she discovers, it’s all simply a part of the “fucked up world” that they’ve brought upon themselves.
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