Homeland Season 5 Scoop: A Massive Time Jump and Carrie No Longer a CIA Officer

The team behind Homelanddropped a bombshell on fans Friday night at PaleyFest when asked about the upcoming fifth season.

Alex Gansa, the co-creator of the acclaimed Showtime drama, revealed during the panel that the upcoming season will "jump two-and-a-half years" in the future. "We are going to be shooting the show in Europe, probably in Germany, and Carrie will no longer be an intelligence officer," he said.

Claire Danes, who stars as Carrie and executive-produces, joked, "She's making beer."

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This past season of Homeland, widely viewed as a reboot of the series following the death of main character Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) at the end of Season 3, was shot largely in South Africa.

Gansa would not drop any further hints about the new season, but one of the hot talking points was the future of the Carrie-Quinn (Rupert Friend) dynamic following their passionate lip-lock late in Season 4. Gansa admitted there was a "tremendous" amount of debate among the writers about putting those characters together.

Danes said that she and Friend were "a little jumpy at the start of the season" and wanted to make sure the pairing wasn't just born out of "desperation" for a romantic story line in the post-Brody era.

"It was handled really beautifully and really intelligently," she said. "That dynamic was always fun because, in some ways, he is so similar to her and she is so rarely challenged by an outlier. .... That kind of exposed a different vulnerability that we don't typically see in her."

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However, she also said their pairing came more from a need than a specific chemistry. "They were really struggling, displaced and disoriented and there was nobody else... that need was really about that more than any true desire to be with each other," Danes said. "They both struggle with intimacy, and I think that it was actually very interesting because he was kind of pulling with her to be human and emotionally connected and she was not in a position to hear him and responded very violently."

Although the several writers and producers on the panel were divided on the Carrie-Quinn romance, longtime writer and executive producer Meredith Stiehm defended the choice. "I was a fierce advocate. I really thought that was there something in the air from day one," she said. "I think people that live that life don't have a lot of counterparts and I think it's hard for them to have relationships with civilians... They orbited around each other for three years. I just felt like it was inevitable. Probably not to end up together, but it's a rare find."

Homeland returns for Season 5 later this year on Showtime. Where do you think Carrie will be in two years? Do you want her to be with Quinn?

(Full disclosure: TVGuide.com is owned by CBS, Showtime's parent company.)

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