Homeland review: Season three, episode four - After a rough road, we're back in business

This latest episode, 'Game On', finally gave fans something worth watching

Claire Danes as Carrie in Homeland (2011 FX Networks LLC)

Well thank heavens for that.

With the fourth episode of this third season over, Homeland is back in business.

Fans have had to endure a lot: a disappointing first episode; a Carrie whose behaviour was unfamiliar and strange to the viewers who loved the character; a Brody who chose to shoot heroin over plotting and squirming his way out of trouble.

We can now excuse at least the second of those complaints, because Claire Danes has played an absolute blinder.

It was revealed at the end of the episode [spoiler alert] that Carrie has actually been in league with Saul all along in a bid to infiltrate the terrorist group that staged the attack on the Agency.

The exaggerated mannerisms of her character, which had conspired to irk viewers accustomed to the intelligent, steely Carrie, were actually part of an attempt to convince those around her of her instability. However, we're assured by an emotional reunion with Mandy Patinkin's Saul at the end of the episode that the ordeal hasn't left her entirely unscathed.

I'm not sure the big reveal justified the torpor that went before it, but at least one part of the storyline has moved on in an interesting way. After watching that, I have no real desire to go back to Caracas and see Brody's descent into drug addiction.

Nor, really, do viewers need more time with Brody's wayward daughter, Dana.

Her storyline this episode, in which she and her psychopathic love interest eloped, was reaching for Badlands, but ended up being more like Twilight.

Her mother Jessica wants a solution to her bad behaviour. For all our sakes, just pack her off to a school for delinquents somewhere far, far away. Morgan Saylor is a perfectly fine young actress, but I feel she's destined to forever be Homeland's Jar Jar Binks.