Homeland‘s season four finale “Long Time Coming” picked up following Carrie (Claire Danes) stopping Quinn (Rupert Friend) just in time before he blew up Haqqani’s (Numan Acar) caravan – and then Aasar Khan (Raza Jaffrey) stopping Carrie  just before she tried to shoot Haqqani dead, as Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) was is in the truck with him.

Homeland Finale Recap

Carrie is now back at home cleaning out her late father’s room with her sister when the doorbell rings. Outside, is Dar Adal. He tells her that he’s looking for Peter Quinn, but hasn’t been able to locate him. Carrie tells him that Quinn is still searching for Haqqani, which Dar Adal thinks is a lost cause. He wants them to get through the congressional hearings before anything formally moves forward with killing Haqqani.

While Carrie is at the park with Frannie, an older gentleman named Billy recognizes the child, as he was park friends with Frank (James Rebhorn). When she gets back to the home, her estranged mother (Victoria Clark) is inside. “You know what this is called: too little, too late,” Carrie spits at her mother, who split from the family 15 years ago.  Maggie (Amy Hargreaves) is upset that Carrie pushed her mom right back out the door, but Carrie maintains that between losing their father and everything that went down in Islamabad, she can’t handle dealing with her.

In a hotel room, Saul (Mandy Patinkin) watches the news, seeing Tasneem (Nimrat Kaur) talk about Pakastan cutting all diplomatic ties with the U.S. He wants back in with the CIA and hopes to be able to make things right. Later in the day, Saul heads to the White House to talk about getting back in the agency. One thing holding him back is a video Haqqani has of Saul that, once it gets out, would make him persona non grata number one.

At Frank’s funeral, Carrie delivered a touching eulogy that mentioned, among many other things, how her father took care of her daughter while she was away. Following the mass, Carrie sees that Quinn showed up and is relieved that he’s still alive. He reveals that German intelligence helped him get out, and Carrie reveals she had a chance on Haqqani, but didn’t take it – yet she doesn’t mention seeing Dar Adal in the car.

At the repast, while Quinn plays with Frannie, Carrie takes Saul outside for a chat. He insists that she keep the info about Dar Adal between the two of them. Lockhart (Tracy Letts) shows up later bringing a lasagna. Carrie insists that the embattled CIA director sit down for a drink. Quinn’s the last person to leave the repast. When she’s walking him out to the car, he tells her how great it is to be home and feel normal. When Quinn kisses her, Carrie kisses him back – but Carrie tells him she fears she’ll mess it up. He wants them both to get out and stay out of the agency and make a go for it together. He asks her to seriously think about it and then pulls away.

At 3:00 a.m., a restless Carrie goes into her father’s room and looks at pictures of him with her mother. The next day, she decides to take a road trip to see her mom and find out why she left them so long ago. When she gets to the home, there’s a boy inside, who tells her that Helen is at work at a local school. At the school, Helen tells her that the boy is Tim, her half-brother.

Quinn gets a visit from a guy from “the group,” who says they have a lead on three high-profile targets. Quinn tells him he’s out and not going out there, even when the guy says there’s a 20% better chance  of pulling off the mission if he’s involved, and a 20% better chance of losing men if he isn’t. Meanwhile, Saul sits down for a lunch meeting with Dar Adal, who says he can get Saul’s name on the shortlist to be the new CIA director – and slides across the tape of Saul and Haqqani, assuring him it’ll never get out. As it turns out, Dar Adal made a deal with Haqqani to take him off the kill list if he stays out of Pakistan. Saul says it’s sedition; it’s wrong.

Carrie gets a call from Quinn, who offers to join her out in Missouri. She turns him down, but promises to talk to him when she’s back in a few days. When she finally gets a chance to talk to her mother, Helen says that Tim is 15 and that Tim’s father left before he was born. Helen reveals that she was bad at being married and had a number of affairs, which Frank knew about. She admits she couldn’t face up to her mistake when she got pregnant and that leaving had nothing to do with Frank’s mental illness. Carrie reveals that she’s long thought that it did, which has crippled her relationships, making her think it was impossible to have a real shot at a family. As soon as she gets back to her hotel room, she tries to contact Quinn, but his phone has been deactivated.

Quinn apparently convinced himself that Carrie would always be too afraid of being with him and decided to go on the mission. Carrie called Dar Adal and then showed up at his house. Dar Adal lets her know that Quinn is going in to Syria and that they went dark on communications. It’s an open-ended operation in which they’re responsible for their own extraction. She threatens to tell the papers that he met with Haqqani and tells him that Saul would spit in his face. Saul, however, is in Dar Adal’s backyard.