‘Homeland’ season 3 spoilers: Series boss speaks out on controversial Claire Danes storyline

So do you really like the story when it comes to Carrie Mathison’s pregnancy on “Homeland” season 3? By far, this has been the most polarizing plot of the entire year thus far. This has been a story that started out with frustration, mostly because this is the sort of thing that makes you think that this is a parachute plan just when you want to make things more dramatic for the mere sake of doing so. We didn’t need to see Carrie welcoming a child into this world for the “Homeland” story to be particularly interesting, just like we did not need to see her try to avoid the fact that it was happening for so long.

But rather than just share an opinion on this story that we have done a number of time already, we’re going to do something a little different here and let show executive producer Alex Gansa give his perspective. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he justifies a pregnancy as something that is a part of life sometimes, and also discusses why Carrie is having a hard time figuring out what to do with the child thanks to her past relationship with Damian Lewis’ character:

“I welcome that kind of speculation about Carrie [Danes’] character. One of the fascinating things that we’ve found in discussing Carrie’s pregnancy is that she didn’t really believe it until she was 14 weeks pregnant, at which point things becomes a lot realer and the decision becomes a lot more difficult to terminate. And there’s the fact the man she loves is out there and missing. And since this is a part of him, I think it makes it doubly difficult to terminate. I’m going to wait for people to watch the last couple episodes because the pregnancy does factor in. We all welcome the debate about what Carrie would or would not do with that child, but I really believe it’s an open question. Some say she’s a careerist, others say she’s really in love with Brody. It’s a real conundrum for her. And for us, it’s not melodramatic, it’s real. This is the stuff of life. People die, people fall in love, people have babies. To call it soap opera, or melodrama, it’s only in the way its handled. And I personally think we’ve handled the pregnancy in a very impressionistic way with a scene here or there.”

What is also particularly interesting about this interview is that Gansa denies that Showtime forced him and the writers to keep Brody alive at the end of season 2; while he admits that they strongly wanted to ensure that Lewis stuck around, he said that he could die this year, next year, or even somewhere deep in the future, and the network would be okay with it.

If you want to read a different sort of “Homeland” scoop, just click here in order to see what Gansa had to say about the “rough patch” that is out there right now for Carrie and Saul.

Photo: Showtime