'Homeland' Season 2 Complete Recap - Season 3 Starts Tonight!

The third season of the hit series Homeland will be kicking off tonight, but before that happens, we want to make sure you are fully refreshed on what happened last year!

Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin star in the hit Showtime series, which won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series for its first season. Claire is now a two-time Emmy winner for her role as Carrie Mathison.

If you watched the second season of the show, you will understand why Homeland will be adjusting greatly for the upcoming third season following the shocking season two finale. In fact, we can tell you that Damian‘s character Nicholas Brody isn’t featured in the third season’s first two episodes at all.

Make sure to watch Homeland‘s season three premiere tonight (September 29) at 9/8c on Showtime!

Click inside for a complete recap of Homeland‘s second season…

The second season of Homeland starts off six months from where the first left off. Carrie (Claire Danes) was forced out of the CIA after no one believes her claims against Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) and now she is working as an ESL teacher. She is asked to help the CIA with a mission after one of her former assets says she has information on an attack and she goes to Lebanon with Saul (Mandy Patinkin) to check on the intel. Carrie finds out that Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban) is going to meet with a district commander, but Saul and Estes (David Harewood) don’t trust her judgment due to her recent history. She eventually convinces Saul that her instincts with her source are valid and the mission to capture Abu Nazir is green lighted.

Following his aborted attempt to kill the Vice President at the end of last season, Brody is now the Congressman of Virginia’s 2nd congressional district and he is approached by VP Walden (Jamey Sheriden) to be his running mate for the presidential run. He later meets with Roya Hammad, a journalist who reveals that she is an ally of Abu Nazir. She starts giving him missions to prove his loyalty to Al-Qaeda and help their goals.

When Carrie’s mission to capture Abu Nazir is happening, Walden invites Brody into the situation room to watch it all happen. Realizing what is happening, Brody texts a message to Nazir as a warning and he is able to successfully escape. Carrie and Saul decide to go to her asset’s apartment to gather documents before leaving town. Before shipping to documents to Langley, Saul finds a hidden memory card and is stunned to find Brody’s video confession that he taped prior to his attempted suicide bombing.

Saul arrives back in the United States and shows the video to Carrie, who is relieved to know she was right along, but she is still upset that she is not being reinstated into the CIA yet. They show the video to Estes and they decide to put Brody on surveillance, bringing in analyst Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) to do the job.

Brody is given a task by Roya to bring the “tailor” to a safehouse and the mission goes awry with the Brody eventually killing the man in the middle of the woods. His wife Jessica (Morena Baccarin) grows suspicious of his whereabouts and when he arrives home, she orders him to tell her where he was or to leave the house. He ends up going to a hotel. All of this is captured by the surveillance team and Quinn asks Carrie to bump into Brody to get him paranoid. She does it, he gets paranoid and then invites her to the hotel bar where they talk. Thinking her cover is blown, Carrie storms up to Brody’s room and reveals she knows everything. Quinn and Saul watch in disbelief on the surveillance feed and dispatch their men to apprehend Brody.

In an unknown location, Brody is questioned by “bad cop” Quinn first and then “good cop” Carrie second. She gets hm to confess that Nazir is planning an attack on the U.S., though he doesn’t know the nature of it. He gives up the names of Roya and the “tailor.” Brody decides that he will use his position to help the CIA rather than be put to trial. When he gets home, Brody reveals to his wife that he is helping the CIA on “matters of national security.”

Brody informs the CIA team that the “tailor” is dead and the team decides to take their surveillance off the tailor’s shop and to send a forensics team in to investigate. While the team is investigating, four men with riot gear and assault rifles open fire and leave everyone for dead, first taking a large trunk hidden behind a false wall. Quinn is shown to be wounded but still alive. We also see that one of the attackers is a man that Roya had met with earlier and who Brody had tried to get some intel on.

Carrie is persuaded by Quinn to get closer to Brody and try to empower him. When she secretly meets up with him at a political fundraiser, they share a long kiss, but he shares that he knows he is being used and manipulated, though he continues to kiss her.

While all of this has been going on, Brody’s daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) had started up a new relationship with Finn Walden (Timothee Chalamet) who is the son of the Vice President. They were out together one night when he hit a woman with his car, but they ran away. Dana is overcome with guilt and visits the hospital, eventually finding out that the woman died. She and her parents decide they want to file a police report. When Brody takes Dana to the police station, they are stopped by Carrie, who explains if they do this, he will fall out of Walden’s good graces, which would jeopardize his relationship with Nazir. Brody vents his frustration.

After his ordeal with his daughter, Brody is found nearly catatonic in his home by Carrie after he is later for a meeting with Roya. When he has the meeting, Brody expresses his frustration at being kept out of the loop and tells her he is “through” and walking away from Al-Qaeda. Carrie tries to salvage the operation and takes Brody to a safe room in a motel where she convinces him to continue with the mission. They have sex.

Brody calls Roya and tells her he made a mistake. They meet in a remote location and are tailed by the CIA. Roya takes Brody to another random location, where they meet up with the man who led the attack on the tailor’s shop. The man leads Brody to a helicopter in the middle of a field while Carrie secretly follows them on foot, reporting everything back to Saul and Quinn. The helicopter takes Brody to an unknown location where goes face-to-face with a now Western-dressed, clean-shaven Abu Nazir.

Brody eventually returns and demands his family be taken into protection immediately. While being debriefed, he tells the CIA that Nazir is in the U.S. to plan an attack on an event hosted by Vice President Walden where 300 special ops soldiers will be reunited with their families. Brody’s task from Nazir is to convince Walden to allow Roya to be the lone journalist covering the event. The CIA ends up tracking Roya and her news team to a restaurant where they move in and successfully capture the terrorists, including the man who led the attack on the tailor’s shop. Abu Nazir is not one of the men though.

Saul has grown suspicious of Quinn and digs into his background. He finds out that Quinn is reporting to a man named Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) and figures out that he is more than just an analyst. When the team goes to the restaurant to capture Roya, Estes sends Quinn elsewhere. We find out he is driving a limo and parks in Brody’s driveway. He takes a silenced handgun from the glove compartment and prepares to shoot Brody, but then gets the call that Abu Nazir was not captured and he is ordered to stand down.

Saul talks with Dar Adal and confirms that Quinn is one of his men on lone to Estes. He then confronts Estes with this news, who is furious at the Saul for assuming Quinn was hired to kill Brody to cover up the drone strike that killed Abu Nazir’s son. Estes then tells Quinn that “he knows.”

Carrie is in a car accident and we find out that she has been taken by Abu Nazir in an abandoned mill. Nazir calls Brody and threatens to kill her unless he carries out a special task. The task is to enter Vice President Walden’s home office to obtain a serial number that corresponds to Walden’s pacemaker so it can be manipulated wirelessly. He completes the task and gives Nazir the number only when he can confirm that Carrie is set free. While still in Walden’s office, the VP comes in and is killed via the pacemaker while standing in front of Brody. Carrie stops a truck driver on an unknown road to call Saul and tell him her location. Langley forces move in, but Saul is detained at the office by two men. Carrie decides to return to the mill and look for Nazir.

When she arrives back at the mill, Carrie sees someone but loses track of him. She then finds a slew of CIA and FBI reinforcements already there and no one can find Nazir. Carrie is convinced he is getting help and she goes to interrogate Roya, who mentions that Nazir would never run, which leads Carrie to believe he has been holed up in the mill the whole time. She goes back to the mill and Nazir is eventually found after a hidden room is discovered. Nazir is shot dead by the SWAT team after he reaches for a fun. Carrie is commended for her work by Estes, who then privately tells Quinn to kill Brody as soon as possible.

While being held in an interrogation room throughout the whole mission, Saul is told by Estes that he wants Saul out of the agency, either on his own terms, or by Estes using evidence against him to destroy his career.

Brody and his family are told they can leave the safehouse they had been in throughout the ordeal now that Nazir is dead. All season long, Brody and Jessica have been having marriage problems, which are coupled by her connection with his old friend Mike (Diego Klattenhoff). When the family arrives home, Brody tells Jessica that he cannot go inside the house and they come to terms that their marriage is over. He goes to Carrie’s house where he embraces her while Quinn watches from afar.

Carrie and Brody go to spend a night at the cabin where they had their previous tryst. Quinn tracks them down there and when he is given the perfect opportunity to kill Brody, he decides not to. He reports back to Estes that he wouldn’t kill Brody as its not critical to the CIA’s mission anymore, only to Estes’, and he will not ruin Carrie’s life yet again. Estes then decides to release Saul from detention and admits Brody shouldn’t be killed.

Carrie and Brody go to Langley to attend a memorial service for Walden while Saul oversees a ceremony to bury Abu Nazir at sea. While Estes is giving the eulogy, Carrie and Brody sneak off to Saul’s office to talk. During their conversation, Brody looks out the window and see his car has been moved and is parked right outside the building where the memorial is held. The car explodes and levels a large portion of the building. Brody convinces Carrie that he had nothing to do with the bombing and they decide they need to go on the run immediately. While getting supplies to flee the country, Carrie and Brody see a television report that Al-Qaeda has taken responsibility for the attack. The terrorists also released Brody’s confession video to tie his name to the attacks. Carrie takes Brody to the Canadian border where he is to cross to Montreal on foot. She decides not to go with him and promises to clear his name.

Carrie heads back to Langley and meets up with Saul, who is standing among the rows and rows of dead bodies. The death toll is near 200 and rising. Some of the dead include David Estes, Walden’s wife and son, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Homeland Security. Saul, who is now the acting director of the CIA, is elated to find out that Carrie is alive as he presumed she was dead because she was unaccounted for. The season ends.