Homeland‘s ‘Quinn Is Alive’

Homeland creator Alex Gansa has confirmed,  not only is Rupert Friend returning to play Peter Quinn… but that he’s returning as a series regular.

This is surprising news considering the season 5 finale saw a dying Quinn (who by this point had been shot, exposed to Saran Gas, given an antidote, fallen into a coma and then woken up on the orders of Carrie and Saul against medical advice in the hopes of gaining information), described by a doctor as being with ‘minimal cognitive function’. We ended with Quinn, quite literally seeing the light, as Carrie stood by his hospital bed.

Showrunner Alex Gansa revealed at the Television Critics Association summer press tour: “Quinn is alive — I can say that much. But we want to be really careful about revealing what his condition is. He suffered a major stroke last season… so he is a very changed and altered Quinn this year.”

“He had a fairly rough ride last season, no doubt about it. Quinn this coming season will really represent a very profound and familiar casualty of the war on terror for our audience. What he endured last year is different from what he’s going through this year.”

Adding,“How Peter Quinn’s character is gonna be dramatized this year is going to surprise people, and it may not be what you think.”

As for a the romantic fate of Carrie and Quinn he commented: “Because they’re both very damaged people and I think that they have a similar attraction to high voltage, high adrenaline situations that tend to have an incredible benefit but more likely to have a very catastrophic end.”

Gansa added, “Quinn really put his life in her hands at the end of last season and we will see what decision she made, but that’s going to have repercussions moving forward for her and for that idea of Quinn as well.”

Homeland returns to Showtime in the US and Channel 4 in the UK in January 2017.