Until last week's final five minutes of CIA drama Homeland, fans of the show were beginning to wonder if the rest of season three would be as improbable and sedate as its beginning episodes. Just for you UK viewers, here's the recap of The Yoga Play.

HomelandSaul and Senator Lockhart in Homeland

We'd been teased by the absence of Brody for the first two episodes only to be hit smack bang in the face with an hour long, heavy handed, Nick-fest in Caracas where we saw the usually conniving Langley bombing suspect resign himself to heroin addiction rather than plot his escape

A storyline involving Brody's suicidal daughter Dana running away with her new fellow psychiatric ward patient boyfriend also dragged and we wondered when the Emmy-winning show would get back to business.

A frantic Jessica, worried for her daughter's safety, went to see Carrie to beg for some help tracking down Dana who has eloped with an apparently murderous psychopath boyfriend, Leo. Though Carrie had bigger terrorist fish to fry, she agreed to help Jessica and we saw the two former foes bury the hatchet.

Whilst the storyline of an under-surveillance Carrie sneaking out of the back of her yoga class to confront FBI agent hall during his morning coffee run was rather improbable, the scene gave Quinn a chance to slip into hero mode as he orchestrated a diversion to prevent Carrie being rumbled. After weeks of fuzzy teen love, Dana's wayward subplot was finally tethered in greater relevance as Carrie informed a disgruntled Hall that Brody's first point of contact should he return would be his teenage daughter and that he had a duty to monitor her.

Homeland
'Homeland': Slowly It's All Coming Together.

This week's episode in the UK made for the tensest scenes of the season so far as we saw Carrie rush back to her class just in time to convince the surveying thug that she'd been up to nothing more suspicious than stretches and sun salutations during her excursion. We also saw Dana met with the realisation that Leo had lied to her about his brother's death, having actually been involved in a suicide pact. Heartbroken, she ran away from her repentant lover and handed herself over to police which ended in an emotionally raw shot of Dana's scrunched-up face as she cried in the dark.

After being let in on Carrie's psychiatric instability ruse by Saul, we see Quinn gain a deeper respect for Carrie - and maybe a little more than respect we sense - as he spends the whole episode looking out for her. Or maybe, after Carrie's crazy tequila-induced stair sex scene and Dana's dalliance in the hospital's laundry room, we're just hankering for a little bit more plausible lovin' this season.

 

After having thrown Carrie under the bus in front of the CIA in the season's premiere, Saul was now episode 5's underdog as he had to deal with the crushing announcement that Senator Lockhart would be the new head of the CIA as well as returning home early from his goose shooting weekend to find his wife enjoying a candlelit dinner with a handsome "colleague." So ensued plenty of eyebrow-knitting from the temporary CIA boss who had been shot down from his assumptions of power.

The episode gave us our first real glimpse of the season's big baddie, Majid "The Magician" Javadi, who entered the USA under the guise of a paper salesman. With hardly the same surrounding aura of terror as last season's Abu Nazir, we see the "villain" scoffing a sandwich and spilling sauce down his shirt before he is set up in his own, heavily fortified mansion complete with interrogation room.

The episode culminated in a heart-racing kidnap scene where Carrie was taken from her home and strip-searched by Javadi's thugs before being taken to see "The Magician" himself. In a twist, Saul was relieved to hear that Carrie had been kidnapped, as it means the operation to infiltrate Javadi's group is still on.