'Homeland' Spoilers: Showrunner Reveals the Who, Where, and When of Next Season

SPOILER ALERT: Storyline and character spoilers ahead for Homeland Season 4.

From the Homeland cast and crew’s PaleyFest LA panel on Season 4 Friday night, we learned these intriguing teasers for Season 5: Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) will no longer be an intelligence agent; the season will be filmed in Europe, most likely Germany; and the story will jump ahead two and a half years.

Also, we’re not sure how official it is yet, but when panel moderator Julie Chen asked Showtime President David Nevins, who was in the audience, when Season 5 would debut, he answered the last Sunday in September, which would mean Sept. 27.

Now, five things we learned about Season 4 (and one more hint about Season 5):

* The reason the season was set in Islamabad? Showrunner Alex Gansa — who said he has a seat belt that locks him into his chair at his home office writing desk so he is forced to focus on his work — explained it’s because when the show’s writers talked to the real-life intelligence officers who advise them and asked them where they’d most want to be working, they answered “Islamabad.”

* Claire Danes said she wasn’t nervous tackling the storyline about Carrie’s ambivalence — which is putting it mildly for the scene in which she considered drowning her baby — about motherhood. “I don’t know if there is a greater taboo than an unloving mother,” she said. “I was very happy to start a conversation” about the complexities of being a mom.

She did say she also realized that though Carrie can be “perverse, subversive, and morally questionable, you still gotta hang with her, and that seemed like a pretty real challenge to an audience.”

* Gansa said his wife is responsible for Max (Maury Sterling) living through the embassy bombing while Fara (Nazanin Boniadi) died, because she pointed out to him that it would make for a more dramatic scene if, after the attack, Carrie was discussing Fara’s death with Max than if Carrie and Fara were discussing Max’s death.

* Executive producer and writer Patrick Harbison broke down the dramatic tarmac scene between Danes and Mandy Patinkin in “There’s Something Else Going On,” the season’s ninth episode. In the early takes, he said, “it frankly wasn’t working. It was good… but there was no sort of spark to it… and suddenly some sort of switch flipped in Mandy, and he just turned into a different man almost… and that gave Claire the cue she needed. It became what we saw in post-production, which was something quite extraordinary between two actors, this incredibly emotional actor persuasion.”

He also added the shoot was made more difficult by a small plane, which carried an advertisement banner for a local strip club, that kept landing to refuel every two or three hours.

* John Redmond, the doomed CIA deputy station agent played by Michael O’Keefe, resonated so much with real world CIA agents that they held a wake for the character, according to executive producer and writer Chip Johannessen.

* Back to Season 5, an audience member asked that, since the show weaves in so many current political topics, if Homeland writers will consider taking on ISIS next season.

Said Gansa, “Right now, what’s front and center is what’s happening in Syria and Iraq. It’s an interesting question for us and one that we’ve been talking about in the story room about Season 5… we try to humanize our villains or our adversaries, and I must say that that group of people down there is difficult to humanize and understand. So do we dramatize them? Do we give them a platform? I don’t know. It’s an interesting question.”

Homeland Season 5 premieres Sunday, Sept. 27 (we think) on Showtime.