<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Season 3, Episode 6: &amp;quot;Still Positive&amp;quot; If Carrie Mathison had a burner phone for every time she&amp;#039;s peed on a pregnancy test, seen that it was positive, and then stuck it in a drawer, she and Saul would probably still have managed to screw their plan up. That&amp;#039;s a convoluted way of saying something fairly straightforward (i.e., the show&amp;#039;s new M.O.) which is: Everything tragic that happened in this episode could&amp;#039;ve been prevented if Homeland just allowed its expert spies to be actually good at their jobs. So much of this season has been spent justifying why certain plot decisions are being made instead of generating drama compelling enough to exist without question. It happened again this week, when Carrie and Javadi&amp;#039;s dramatic face-to-face started off with the tense promise of a lie detector test before culminating in a tepid brainstorming session. It turns out that Saul and Carrie&amp;#039;s plan wasn&amp;#039;t to have Carrie continue to be a double agent for very long. Almost immediately after meeting Javadi, she lets him in on the truth. An entire season&amp;#039;s groundwork unraveled without much fanfare. She bluffs him into believing that he&amp;#039;s surrounded, which is the only indication in the entire episode that he doesn&amp;#039;t know every one of America&amp;#039;s secrets. If he did, he&amp;#039;d know that the CIA consists of six people and that&amp;#039;s not nearly enough to cover that much golf course acreage. I have so many questions about how Javadi managed to get into the country so effortlessly and obtain information about the whereabouts of someone under witness protection that even Saul doesn&amp;#039;t know. If he&amp;#039;s stealthy enough that the CIA has to launch an operation as inefficient as an agent being committed to a mental hospital just to find him, why does it seem like he&amp;#039;s moving through the city so breezily? Maybe this will be all answered next week, so for now my main beef is that conversation he had with Carrie, out on his veranda, where it felt like they were both working their hardest to convince not each other but us the viewers of their case. She wants to take him to Saul, but he says his men would be too suspicious. She points out that he&amp;#039;s the boss and all he has to do is tell them that he&amp;#039;s got this, but he insists they won&amp;#039;t believe him. Being, again, their boss, he&amp;#039;s trained them too well to listen to his direct orders. So instead they concoct a plan where they split up and then reconvene in a coffee shop in a couple hours. It&amp;#039;s all very Seinfeld. She&amp;#039;s shoved in a car, un-blindfolded, and dropped off at some random spot from where she makes her way to Saul. Even once she finds him, though, and tells him the address of exactly where Javadi is, he refuses to move in. By this point, the show must have assumed that if we bought a half-baked excuse from Javadi, a guy we just met, we&amp;#039;ll buy a nearly raw one from Saul whom we once loved. When asked why he&amp;#039;s sure it&amp;#039;s a smart move to let Javadi move around freely for a couple hours after being tipped off instead of just showing up to his house and hauling him in, Saul answers, &amp;quot;I know this man.&amp;quot; He assures Carrie that Javadi will keep their appointment because &amp;quot;survival is the only thing on his mind.&amp;quot; This is followed by Carrie showing up to an empty coffee shop while Javadi murders his daughter-in-law and ex-wife. After all that effort spent trying to bring Dana home safely, Jessica is now willing to relinquish her daughter into the care and car of a girl who Dana definitely met that morning while standing in line at the bank. Jessica doesn&amp;#039;t ask what Dana&amp;#039;s new address is or even if it will be in the same country, just hands her a credit card which Dana makes a bit of a show about refusing, but who does she think she&amp;#039;s kidding? By my calculation, she had about thirty dollars to her name by the end of last week. I&amp;#039;m assuming her new roommate is who lent her the money for her name change, but is that girl going to be cool with paying all the rent as well? She doesn&amp;#039;t even know about Dana&amp;#039;s bottled water addiction yet. But hopefully this means Dana is her problem now and not ours, at least for a little while. And yes, Carrie is pregnant, a twist that is a bummer for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it requires us to forget moments that we&amp;#039;ve been shown. It looks like Carrie knew about the pregnancy for a couple months before she was even committed, which means she was knowingly endangering her baby by drinking and, oh, I don&amp;#039;t know, allowing herself to be institutionalized (by a hospital that apparently doesn&amp;#039;t do physicals before admitting its patients) and stuffed full of meds. More importantly, though, the last thing we need is more scenes of Carrie crying. READ MORE HOMELAND RECAPS &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a25588/homeland-recap-season-3-episode-6/>