Homeland\'s Season Finale, With a Twist

The season finale of “Homeland” on Sunday had a surprise ending, all right.

It was surprisingly good.

The pace wasn't frantic, the plot didn't turn preposterously farfetched, and the rekindled love affair between the C.I.A. analyst and the P.O.W.-turned-terrorist was sundered not by treachery or boredom, but by a calamitous terrorist attack that made it impossible for them to stay together.

The ending brought closure and still managed to stay open-ended.

Carrie (Claire Danes) helped Brody (Damian Lewis) go on the lam because he convinced her that he was framed for the bombing of C.I.A. headquarters. He could be telling the truth, or perhaps only half of it. A mole in the intelligence community must have helped the terrorists pull it off, or maybe not. But Carrie is back in the spying business with a new terrorist mastermind to hunt down. Better yet, some of the more tiresome characters and subplots - including the hawkish vice president an d the angst of the vice president's son over a woman he killed with reckless driving - are gone.

The blast brought the narrative closer to what Carrie wasn't sure she really wanted: a clean slate.

And that's perhaps the most unpredictable element of all. After so many detours to the implausible, there was every reason to expect the season finale to be a letdown, and even downright silly. The Showtime series that became an overnight hit in 2011 because it was so different from most television espionage shows lost some of that novelty in the second season, listing too often towards the kind of preposterous twists of “24” and still more ordinary television shows, from the medical miracles that allowed Brody to recover after having a knife plunged straight through his hand to killing off the vice president by tinkering with his pacemaker by remote control.

The first season offered a perfectly balanced set of contradictions. The second was more uneven. Even the show's most creative step, the twisted psyche of its heroine, lost some ground in season two. Carrie's bipolar affliction was fascinating last season, because it was both her greatest weakness and her strength. Her mind worked differently from everyone else's; she detected buried patterns where everyone else saw only fog.

This season, Carrie emerged from electroshock reasonably sane, and that was in some ways diminishing. She went from being a fascinating head case to just another headstrong heroine, the kind who on a series like “Rizzoli and Isles” goes into an abandoned building alone, armed with a crowbar, to capture the terrorist who almost killed her while she was tied to a pipe, “Perils o f Pauline” style.

Until the finale, that is. Carrie wasn't bipolar this time round, but she was definitely of two minds, torn between having Brody and her C.I.A. career until, a little like Rick in “Casablanca,” she realized that she had to trick him into leaving so she can stay behind and fight the good fight. The last frame showed her mentor, Saul, (Mandy Patinkin) seemingly stunned with relief and joy that Carrie was actually alive - the continuation of a beautiful friendship.

The secret of the finale's success was that it didn't borrow from “24,” it paid homage to classic movie thrillers. The scene where Estes, (David Harewood) the slimy director of counterintelligence, returns home and is shocked to find the agency's black ops hit man Quinn (Rupert Friend) waiting for him quietly in a corner arm chair was remarkably like the denouement of “Three Days of the Condor.” Quinn's decision to disobey Estes' order to kill Brody â€" call it a mome nt of clarity â€" was reminiscent of “The Bourne Identity.”

And Brody's desperation when he sees that he is being set up to take the fall for the bombing attack with his own confession tape, the one he made before aborting his suicide mission in season one, had more than a trace of the panic felt by the Soviet sleeper mole in “No Way Out.”

Sunday's episode opened with a warning to viewers that in light of the Sandy Hook school massacre, some scenes in the last episode might be disturbing. It wasn't the bombing, however, that brought the Connecticut tragedy to mind. That looked too much like Sept 11. It was the scene where Brody's family, holed up at home, under surveillance by camera crews and government agents, watch television and realize that Brody is being held responsible for the death of so many innocent people - a sin of their father's that will stain the children forever.

The fact that Brody may be innocent this time round isn't the only unexpected twist.

For much of the second season, the writers had built up low expectations, giving even devoted viewers reason to feel cheated. The finale proved them wrong.

Season two didn't address all the unexplained mysteries or tie up all the inconsistencies, but it did leave fans in the mood for a third season.

Like an overload of love, money or fine dining, more of a great show sometimes can be a little too much. The only thing worse is less.