I’ve joined the chorus of complaints about season three of Homeland since September, which is in large part a reaction to how amazing the first season was, but also how far the show has shifted not just in direction but in theme since that point. Tonight’s season-ender had more of the usual nonsense – absurd plotting and convenient coincidences that required more suspension of disbelief than a Uri Geller show – about which you should all feel free to rant in the comments.

I have one specific thought that made me want to weigh in after watching tonight’s show. For me, Homeland didn’t go off the rails this year, neither at the beginning nor in episode four when the first Big Reveal took place. I think the fundamental shift in the show took place in the middle of season two, when the writers chose to go from a show about facing an ill-defined, largely unknown, inbound threat to U.S. security to a show about outbound activities like attempting an internal coup d’état inside one of our strongest enemies. That sea change necessitated two adjustments in the direction of the show, both of worked very strongly against its success and defied what made the first season so compelling:

• It altered the tenor of the tension of each episode, reducing it while also narrowing its scope. In season one, the threat was global: The U.S. is going to be attacked, at some point, by unknown persons, and it could be massive in scale. During season two, the threat to the U.S. was diminished – nearly all of the season was devoted to smaller matters like chasing down individual suspects, with the eventual attack coming more or less out of nowhere. Season three was entirely about individual tension – first with Carrie appearing to be a prisoner of the CIA, then later with the attempt to engineer that internal coup within Iran’s security apparatus. Characters we know were placed in physical jeopardy, or saw their careers placed on the line, but the country was never at risk.

• When the protagonists were facing an inbound threat, we the audience were kept in the dark because the protagonists were in the dark themselves. In season three, with no inbound threat and only the outbound effort to bait, catch, and recruit a critical asset from Iran, the protagonists knew more than the writers could tell the audience, resulting in the massive unreliable-narrator arc at the start of the season but continuing through the next nine episodes. It got to the point where I trusted nothing that I saw; if Brody had done a double twist off that crane and stuck the landing in the season finale it wouldn’t have surprised me. The only way to create the tension the writers wanted was to hide, mislead, and lie. I was okay with it once. I was not okay with a full season of it.

The other fundamental problem with season three, for me, dated back to a problem I had in season one, something that I doubt is universal but started to detract seriously from the viewing experience in season two: I never cared about the relationship between Brody and Carrie. It seemed improbable and forced at the start, and eventually devolved into farce. Carrie becoming pregnant with his baby – really, neither of them thought about birth control? – read like a desperate attempt to infuse life and interest into a relationship that, for me, was nothing but a distraction from the cloak and dagger stuff that made season one click.

I won’t go into all of the plot holes and inconsistencies, as Alan Sepinwall has done that already. I don’t entirely agree with Alan’s sentiment that there shouldn’t have been a second season, but I agree that the way it was handled was less than ideal, and a once-great show has lost its way, to the point where season four is going to have to entice a lot of viewers, myself included, back.

This is pretty much always true, but just in case: Anything is fair game in the comments below, including spoilers and comments on stuff I didn’t mention. I’m curious to hear what others thought about tonight’s episode and the season as a whole.

If you missed it, my analysis of the R.A. Dickey trade is up for Insiders. There will be a podcast on Thursday and I’ll chat that afternoon at 3 pm Eastern.

Season two of Homeland turned out to be very different from season one in plot, tone, and pacing, to the point where it felt for much of the middle of the year like a different show featuring the same characters. (Perhaps not quite to this extent, but you get the idea.) I tend to agree with Alan Sepinwall’s* take that Homeland redeemed itself with a strong finale that got at least most of the way back to the domestic-terrorism angle of the first season, but I think it didn’t move far enough away from the doomed-romance storyline that threatened to take over so much of the season and even occupied too much of the first half of the finale.

* I should mention that Alan’s got a new book out, The Revolution Was Televised, on twelve TV dramas that changed the genre. I haven’t read it, because I’ve only watched one complete series (The Wire) he discussed, but I love Alan’s work and will recommend the book on that basis alone.

I’ve never really bought the Carrie/Brody romance as a deep emotional connection. I get how two very broken people might find solace in each other, and I suppose we’re supposed to infer there’s physical chemistry between these two (I don’t see it – Jess and Mike look like they want to jump each others’ bones when they’re in the same room, but Carrie and Brody’s intimacy seems forced). What I don’t get is how these two broken people are really in love, unless they’re pretending they are, including deluding themselves right down to their comments at the end of the show that they were “so close.” They really should never be that close again, not if the show wants to regain the realism that characterized the first season but was all too absent from the second. And if, as Sepinwall suggests, Brody is largely absent from season three while the focus shifts to the rebuilding of the CIA with Carrie working on the side to clear Brody’s name, I don’t think that’s a bad thing for the show at all.

The loss of realism in season two was coupled with a massive uptick in its pacing. Where season one was slow and methodical, with the CIA team often a step behind the terrorists and making (by TV standards) painstaking progress in their investigations, season two absolutely flew by, with Bigger Moments and faster plot twists. We’re not in network procedural territory here, but the tension from the first season’s lack of story churning was a great part of its appeal to me, reminiscent of British series that aren’t afraid to make the viewer wait for a big payoff. I think season two was far less realistic right up to the finale’s biggest twist, where no one seems to notice that an SUV is parked in the middle of the Langley campus, something that would have likely spurred an evacuation of adjacent buildings and an immediate assumption that the vehicle was rigged. (As for who moved the car, assuming it’s a character we’ve already seen, my money remains on Galvez, whom the writers seem to have been setting up since the middle of the first season as the mole, including his presence at and survival of the Gettysburg assault.)

You can also count me among the fans who didn’t care for the Dana/Finn hit-and-run storyline, which became largely an excuse for Morgan Saylor to do that thing with her sleeves more often than before. Sepinwall’s post mortem with the show’s producers indicates that this subplot was going somewhere else but never got there, which showed in the finished product. It played out like an afterthought, with its only value a modest addition to the venality we’d already seen from Walden.

Aside from three very strong season-long performances from Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin – the latter probably getting better material for Emmy submission time this year – season two’s other main strength was in exploring the complicated entanglement between Brody and Abu Nazir, from the former’s inability to fully sever his ties to the terrorist mastermind to the latter’s presumed willingness to die to set up the cataclysmic attack of the season finale. I also credit the producers for turning the page on Nazir after two seasons, yet doing so in a way that doesn’t leave the viewers with much closure. He’s dead, but his organization seems to be living on, and his spectre will inhabit the grounds of the decimated CIA for years. Simply catching the bad guy can’t end the threat, because that’s not how the world works, and setting off the emotional catharsis of watching Abu Nazir die against the reality that the threat against us survives the death of one man was one of the best-plotted elements of the season.

What I’d like to see from season three is a devolution from the romantic elements, including the Carrie/Brody relationship and the Brody/Jess/Mike triangle, back towards the tense spy-story themes of season one. That first season was constantly infused with doubt about Brody’s actual intentions and how far he’d get with the plans handed to him, along side his difficulty in readjusting to civilian life. His character has been poisoned by the events of the finale for the time being, to the point where, if he appears anywhere on the show again, he’ll have to be arrested and thrown in that same prison where Eileen Morgan was held. I can’t see him becoming a central character again unless his name is cleared, and that process should take a full season or more. If the show turned away from him entirely, I’d certainly miss Lewis’ outstanding performances, but it might be better for the show in the long run, much as The Wire turned away from Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell to introduce new antagonists for the investigators to chase. If the star-crossed lovers story takes over more of the next season, however, there’s a good chance I’ll tune out of the show entirely, because that’s so far removed from the reasons Homeland hooked me in the first place.

If you haven’t gotten into Homeland at all, I strongly recommend season one, even if my review here sort of turned you off on season two. That first twelve-episode arc ranks among the best single seasons I’ve seen of any show, in large part because it eschews the rapid-fire pacing of most American dramas and builds tension through more organic means.