Homeland season 8 cast, plot and everything we know about the final episodes

Carrie Mathison is coming back from Hell one last time! Season 8 of Homeland will be the last, and it’ll be wrapping up filming shortly.

The seeds of the show’s ending have already been sown in previous seasons, we’ve been promised, so it looks like there’ll be an explosive and satisfying end to one of the longest running political spy thrillers in the business.

Check back for more news as and when it happens. Here’s what we know so far…

Homeland season 8 cast

The biggest casting news of season 8 so far is that star Claire Danes’ real life husband, Hugh Dancy, is joining the show, playing John Zabel, “a savvy Washington consultant who joins the White House as a new foreign policy advisor to the President — and a formidable opponent to Saul Berenson (played by Mandy Patinkin)” according to TVLine. Dancy is most famous on US telly for playing Will Graham on NBC’s sadly-cancelled Hannibal.

Danes and Patinkin will once again reprise their roles on the series, of course, as Carrie and Saul. The US’s new President, Warner, will be played by Beau Bridges.

Homeland season 8 plot

Here’s an overview of the final season’s story, also via TVLine:

The series’ final season finds Carrie Mathison (Danes) recovering from months of brutal confinement in a Russian gulag. Her body is healing, but her memory remains fractured – and that is a problem for Saul, now National Security Advisor to the newly ascendant President Warner (Beau Bridges). The top priority of Warner’s nascent administration is ending the “forever war” in Afghanistan, and Saul has been dispatched to engage the Taliban in peace negotiations. But Kabul teems with warlords and mercenaries, zealots and spies – and Saul needs the relationships and expertise that only his protégé, Carrie, can provide. Against medical advice, Saul asks Carrie to walk with him into the lion’s den… one last time.

“We get to play this last season in DC with the intention of taking us overseas for one last chapter,” showrunner Alex Gansa has teased. “Season eight will be overseas somewhere. We get to play a story with larger national stakes in season 7 and we’ll go back to a smaller intelligence-based season in 8. We get to pull out all the stops this year and then get to the emotional heart of things in season 8.

“This show began in Israel [as Prisoners of War/Hatufim], and there’s something poetic about going back to that part of the world in the show. So we’ve been thinking, just in a thematic way, that it might be nice to end the show set in Israel.”