We find her being grilled by a psychological medical team trying to determine if she should be allowed back in the game. After all, she was held by the Russians for 213 days, and hardly treated with candy and flowers.
She's whipping herself back into shape by doing laps back and forth on a fenced in tennis court. A court so fenced in returns can only be made from behind the baseline. It's a bowling alley.
But Saul comes a-calling. He needs Carrie to get Afghan peace talks resumed. They've broken off by something as so insignificant as the release of 100 Taliban prisoners being held by the U.S. The medical team is very much on the fence about Carrie's fitness for re-certification for duty as a CIA operative. She's been away too long, and might have coughed up asset names under the Russian's enhanced interrogation process, which we're led to believe was mainly through drugs.
But the show must go on, and Saul has Carrie on a military jet headed for Kabul in a day. On landing. she's whisked to the CIA station in Kabul, brought up to speed a bit, and shown a room to settle in.
But of course anyone who knows Carrie knows she's not there to start reading novels while propped up in bed. She's there for action, and she immediately proves it by wearing the Muslim head gear required of women, revs up a motor cycle in the station's basement, and heads out to make contact with an informant she's never told anyone about. Or has she?
It's amazing the people she still knows. She makes contact with an intermediary who is now running a fleet of gasoline trucks in Kabul. It seems Carrie got the lucky guy started in business when she was last there, which looks like it was eight years ago.
She naturally asks how things are going, and he tells her. It's a timeless response about government, plots, corruption and power grabs that could probably he recited by a chariot driver in ancient Rome. Carrie nods knowingly.
She reaches the informant's home, but finds out he's been killed by the Taliban. Apparently, during her Russian interrogation she did give up a name, and the Russians are working with the Taliban. This gets confirmed by the CIA's station chief in Kabul who tells Carrie that the Russians will do "anything to mess with us." It's the understatement of the century.
Meanwhile Max, remember Max, the tech guy? He's been flown into Kabul to be imbedded with a Special Forces squad to reach a listening device planted in the Afghan hills that has stopped transmitting. It's a Taliban controlled area, so getting there and back is quite dangerous. Not the time to learn you didn't pack the right screwdriver to get the lid off the unit—if you even get there. Tension.
A bit of a spoiler, but Max does realize he's got the unit working again when he checks with his laptop back at the base. Conversations made by the Taliban are now theirs to intercept. This of course means everything, including Taliban take-out. Everyone's got to eat, right?
The wrap-up in this setting-the-table episode is when Carrie is just about to meet the Afghan mucky-muck—who she of course is supposedly on good terms with—and sees a Russian delegation leaving his office. And in that group, is her principle Russian interrogator who mentally worked her over while she was a prisoner.
They didn't use a musical soundtrack to this scene, but Willie Nelson's "Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning" would have been appropriate. You know, where the lyrics include, "and the hinges fell off the gate."
Carrie's got a lot to do. She better have the right screwdriver.
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