PREVIOUSLY

Carrie was right.

ESTES RESIDENCE

Carrie's failures were not only Carrie's: They were Saul's, as her handler, and they were David's, as her boss. In front of David, Saul was embarrassed in one way; as colleagues they were embarrassed, together, in another. Saul is not a solemn man, exactly, but I don't know that we've ever seen this much ... glee, burbling underneath. And his reasons are clean.

Estes's kid answers the door in a Darth Vader mask, which could foreshadow almost anything at all on this show. Estes has a child, that's fascinating. Kenny's here for the week.

Lord Vader: "I am your father. Don't make me destroy you!"

Saul: "I like your kid."
David: "Something going on? Iran?"
Saul: "Hee, hee. Kind of!"
David: "Spit it out, Saul."
Saul: "This one time, VP Walden almost got blown up!"
David: "Recently?"
Saul: "Remember when Elizabeth Gaines was shot and they dragged him down with the cronies? Remember? Do you?"
David: "Yeah, I was there, so..."
Saul: "You know who else was there? A person with a suicide vest!"
David: "That's a scary story, Saul."
Saul: "He made a videotape confession! I have it somewhere on my person!"
David: "Uh, can I see it?"
Saul: "Close your eyes and count to ten and I will hide it somewhere in this room! We can play Hotter/Colder!"
David: "Or like, you could just show it to me."
Saul: "David, do you realize how much fun this is? I'm a spy. Telling a secret is like, the one thing I never get to do! Let me enjoy this."

The whole dog-and-pony makes a lot more sense once David sees who's on the tape. He puts the facts together, collects and collates them in the same order Carrie did. There's no wrong more wrong than being wrong about being right: It's too mind-blowing to incorporate something like this into a previously self-consistent worldview, so you have to backtrack carefully. You don't want to end up questioning everything, if you see what I'm saying; you'd end up in color-coded Carrie Mathison. Hell, if you really paid attention to the cracks in what you think you know... if the world lined up in front of you to tell you exactly how wrong you were, and are; if they locked you up for being wrong when your whole body knew you were right.

Estes: "So why didn't he go through with it? Maybe he was tired after making this exceedingly long suicide tape."
Saul: "I don't know. Maybe something random like a crazy woman showed up on his lawn and activated his daughter's intuition with a magical touch, so she was moved by forces beyond her ken to place an unrealistically clear cell phone call to her terrorist father and ask him not to blow you up, without really consciously understanding either of those things were going on."
Estes: "That seems unlikely to say the least, but this show is really fucking good. It's okay to let those kind of things slide sometimes."