He was executed in Tehran and with his passing also went the Mathison-Brody story - a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, according to Mandy Patinkin who plays Mathison's mentor, Saul Berenson. That means season four is heading into all new territory. It certainly has.
For while the previous seasons of Homeland have been filmed mainly in Charlottesville, North Carolina (substituting for Washington) and occasional excursions to Morocco for Middle East scenes, today's scene is taking place on one of many sets built inside a factory on the industrial edges of Cape Town.
Moving the production to South Africa was a combination of economics (the low rand helps the local screen production industry ), story demands (much of it is set in Pakistan) and production practicalities (there's a sizeable local Asian population to be extras; like Pakistan, South Africa uses right-hand drive cars). Also, pockets of the local landscape can be made to look like Pakistan's remote regions.
South Africa wasn't the first choice. But with another candidate, Turkey, wanting script approval, and the rest of the Middle East politically problematic, if not a security hazard, it was off to film behind the razor wire and electric fences of the Rainbow Nation.
That has meant the factory housing sets for the ops room, the rest of the embassy in all its marble and mahogany glory, a CIA safe house and the office of CIA boss Andrew Lockhart complete with photoshopped pictures of the agency head shaking hands with the show's most famous fan, President Obama.
There's also Carrie's surprisingly spacious embassy compound apartment - where TimeOut checks her bathroom cabinet to see if she's keeping up her meds for her bipolar condition (but can't get the door open).
Parts of downtown Cape Town itself have been used to depict Islamabad while smaller Pakistani villages, cities and slums have been conjured up in the surrounding region.
"We have certainly found places that don't look like Kansas," quips Gatter about the location shoots.
But if the story, which has Carrie as the CIA station chief in a political hotspot aims to reboot Homeland, it's got some work to do to capture its past glories.
As well as getting mixed reviews the third season of the show was the first not to win it an Emmy nomination for best drama, though Danes and Patinkin were both up for awards.
The third season relied on a ruse, that Berenson was selling out Mathison's character, landing her in a mental health facility at the end of her tether and vulnerable to recruitment by Iranian agents.
It demanded a lot of faithful fans, many of whom felt hoodwinked more than entertained by the supposed twist.
Danes says she was surprised by how the show was so acclaimed in the first season but it was inevitable the pendulum would swing back the other way.
"We definitely feel an obligation to make the best show that we can and we want to excite and please our audiences but that can never be the motivation for our decision making process.
"We have to follow our own diviners and just have faith that people will remain as interested as we are.
"We are not a complacent group and we don't want to be doing this for the sake of it, we don't want to be on a loop. We want to feel like there's something at risk for ourselves creatively every time we go out. That's the goal."
Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison in Homeland.
Patinkin likens the show's dip from favour as being like chapters in an ongoing book.
"Clearly you're saying to me there's been criticism over the third year. I'm well aware of it. My attitude is that one of the gifts of this, what seems to be this more novel form of television, it's more like a novel.
"I think even when you read a great novel, you come toward a part that's harder to get through, and sometimes they're not, sometimes they're like the first year where every page is overwhelming.
"And then you get into the second chapter and you're not so fulfilled, but you heard it's a great book so you get to the third chapter and it was amazing and the fourth chapter is even more amazing, and then it's not so great.
"But you keep reading, because you have some faith and trust in the people who wrote the first chapter."
This new chapter, though, has Danes's Mathison dealing with the fallout from the previous confusing and lacklustre one. She's had a baby and leaves it with her sister so she can take up the post in Islamabad. She's still mourning Brody, whose death she effectively hastened.
"She's not a lot of fun right now," Danes laughs as she talks in Lockhart's office between set-ups. "She has not processed the death of Brody and that's a very complex grief to experience because she was culpable in that ... she led him to his death.
"And she has this kid, who she's just kind of deposited with her sister and is not really able to face.
"We're always testing audiences' tolerance of her shortcomings - she has many of them, but the writers manage to keep her a hero ... I just want her to be happy. We all just want that. It might be a little while."
Ask Patinkin, well, anything about Homeland and you'll get a professorial lecture about it being a show that has a higher purpose of making the world a better place through showing how warring factions can embrace.
It's quite a speech. Though you do get the feeling he's made it before on seasons one through three.
Danes is less worried about Homeland's deeper meanings or its believability, despite the strenuous efforts to make it seem realistic.
"I'm an entertainer, and that's not without meaning or significance, but I think it's a fairly modest contribution in terms of the shape of the world. But you know, I'm just so grateful to continue to do what I love to do, which is make funny faces," she laughs in reference to Carrie's much-parodied range of expressions, especially at times when her mental health isn't the best.
"Look, we're taking huge liberties here, I think that there's no way she would have been able to survive like she has in the show, it's a piece of entertainment and I accept that."
The fourth season has Patinkin's ex-CIA chief Berenson man working as a consultant in the private sector and judging by the trailer, still acting as a paternal guide to Carrie.
Watch: The trailer for season 4 of Homeland
App user: Tap here to view the trailer
Other regular characters on past seasons look to be becoming more prominent.
Like Rupert Friend's aforementioned Peter Quinn, who has had a love-hate relationship with Carrie in the past - he ended up shooting her in the shoulder last season.
So how is he going to top that?
"That is a good question," says Friend in his usual English accent. "That's right, I put a knife through one lead and shot the other one. So now what am I going to do with Saul?"
Last season, Quinn's character started to show the inner conflicts that come with being a ruthless killer as well as feelings for Carrie. Is he to become the new Brody?
"No, I think the new Brody is a weird term. Brody was such a specific and interesting character, and Damian [Lewis] knocked it out of the park.
"Absolutely, I think story-telling wise it was so exciting to say, 'Yeah, we've killed the main character'. I think that's brilliant. I think it's brave, and I think it's indicative of what the show does. And to that end, just replacing your lead with another character is not the way we make this programme -- it's about following the truth of a character to one resolution or another."
New to the cast is Life of Pi star Suraj Sharma as Aayan, a Pakistani medical student, whose family is central to the plot involving US drone strikes, and who Carrie attempts to recruit as an asset.
"He's a good person essentially and caught in a very bad situation," explains the young Indian actor who is now studying film at New York University when he's not on set.
He laughs when TimeOut suggests there might be a parallel sharing a scene with Pi's large, snarling tiger...
" ... and Claire? I see what you are saying. Being Aayan, no. He eventually begins to trust her. For anyone else looking from the outside, it's very similar. It could kill you. Yeah."
So far as the woman who plays her, Danes says she still finds Carrie intriguing to play and still hasn't quite figured her out.
Alex Lanipekun as Hank Wonham and Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison in Homeland.
"I don't really relate to her. We both have the same hair," she laughs.
"It's really fun to play her though because she's so unapologetic about striving for the things she wants. She's not defined by her sex, she doesn't put up with shit, she doesn't conform to conventional social standards and that's very liberating. I take a kind of perverse thrill in that."
How long will that thrill last? How much longer does Danes figure on staying in the role?
"Is it really my decision? I love this job and there's always a new iteration.
"So as long as I'm with this team, I'm happy. It's a marathon. I've never done this before. It's really interesting to have this challenge - to see one character through so many different phases of her life. To grow up with someone like this.
"And I like her, I like her a lot. She's definitely not boring."
And with that Danes and her shining Carrie hair head back to war.
* Redacted due to possible spoilers.
What: Homeland starring Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin, fourth season
Where: SoHo
When: From Wednesday October 8, 8.30pm
Also: Season3screens in its entirety on SoHo from 12.30pm Saturday, October 4
- TimeOut
