Recap: 'Homeland' travels home for season finale

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Warning: This story contains details about the fourth-season finale of Showtime's Homeland, which aired Sunday.

Homeland went home for Sunday's season finale, a quietly unnerving installment set stateside in a sharp contrast to recent action-packed episodes.

There was no gunplay this time. The episode was mostly set back in suburban Washington, and opened as Carrie (Claire Danes) and her sister, Maggie, are going through their dad's belongings. (Actor James Rebhorn, who played him, died in March; viewers learned his character died of a stroke in last week's epiosde.) She's also reacquainting herself with her daughter, Franny, who bears a striking redheaded resemblance to her father, Nicholas Brody.

She also unexpectedly encounters her estranged mother, whom she hasn't seen in 15 years, and chases her away. "She walked out on us; what kind of person does that?" she says to her sister. "Well, you," Maggie says.

At the funeral, Carrie vows in her eulogy to be there for her daughter. Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend), thought to be still at large in Pakistan, also resurfaces at Frank's funeral, to Carrie's relief. Astrid, the German intelligence agent, helped him slip out of Pakistan. But terrorist leader Haissam Haqqani, whom Quinn had been hunting after an attack on the U.S. embassy, has escaped him.

Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) is also home, wondering (with Carrie) why black-ops chief Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) was in the car with Haqqani, which had led Carrie to abruptly halt her plan to kill Haqqani after stopping Quinn from blowing him up.

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Outside the family home, there's a passionate kiss between Quinn and Carrie, for whom writers had teased a romantic relationship that never happened.

A reluctant Carrie blames her bipolar disorder for certain failure: "I'll just screw it up,," she says of a connection. "i know how this goes; it ends badly." Quinn offers to provide them an escape hatch from the CIA: "We''ll get out together."

Carrie then leaves on a road trip to Missouri to chase down the mother she spurned: "I want her to look me in the eye and explain herself," she tells Maggie, once again handing off Franny. When she gets there, mom's at work at a local school, but Carrie encounters a teenage boy, her half-brother. She finds mom on the playground: "So you left your children to have more children?"

Meanwhile, Quinn, recruited for a new mission to Syria by an associate, rebuffs him. "I quit the group, bro," he says. "Since when?" "Since right now, I guess. I'm out." But he hangs onto a dossier about the job.

And Saul meets with Dar Adal, his old mentor, who offers to put his name on the short list to regain his old job as CIA director, now that Lockhart's (Tracy Letts) bungled effort at the embassy is leading to his ouster. Dar Adal explains the reason for his presence in Haqqani's car: He agreed to take the terrorist's name off a "kill list" for a promise not to harbor agents in Afghanistan. Saul calls the conversation sedition. "Not every choice we make is blessed with moral clarity," Dar Adal says.

Quinn calls Carrie in Missouri, and offers to meet her there. "I'm no good for you, or anyone else," Carrie says. "So it's a no?" "I'm not saying that." Turns out mom was pregnant with Tim, Carrie's half-brother, when she left her family, but Tim's dad ditched her before he was born. But there were more affairs, though dad has always blamed the split on his own bipolar disorder, which Carrie inherited.

"You're the one who let me down, right when I needed you the most," Carrie says. "I got sick, just like dad, in my first year of college. All I wanted was my mom, and you were not there, you were nowhere."

Then: "I've always thought that being bipolar meant that you couldn't be with people; not for the long haul because they'll up and leave you," Carrie says. Her mom says she can; Carrie runs back to her motel and tries Quinn, whose cell number has been disconnected. Did he go on the mission after all?

Yes. He shows up for the mission, and hands his would-be replacement an envelope addressed to Carrie. She storms into Dar Adal to find Quinn, tells him she saw him in Haqqani's car and threatens to reveal it to the Washington Post.. "You make a deal with Haqqani you dishonor every officer, every soldier at the embassy who died at his hands."

When she finds a self-interested Saul, complicit in Dar Adal's plan, Carrie drives off with that familiar furrowed brow of hers, alone but determined.

But many fans wowed by recent episodes found the finish lacking. Reaction on Twitter was mostly negative, with several viewers calling the episode "boring," "dull" and "lame."