Homeland's Mandy Patinkin: "You must watch it from the beginning"  

as "a genuine serial" - insisting it is unfair to judge the show without watching the entire thing.

Patinkin told Digital Spy that he took one critic to task, after he admitted he had not seen every episode.

"I\'ve spoken to people that love the show, and I\'ve spoken to people that hate the show - I\'ve got a whole wide range of opinions," the actor - who plays CIA director Saul Berenson - explained.

"I ran into this young man - a lefty American guy, and I\'m a lefty - and he said he didn\'t like the show and had problems with it. I said to him, in fairness to this piece, it\'s written as a novel, and its twelve chapters a season - you add them all up and it becomes a whole novel. If you only read chapter one, chapter eight and chapter twelve, that is not a very fair way to talk about the book.

"I said, \'Did you see the first episode of season four? Where the lead character - the hero - Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) drops a drone bomb on a wedding and annihilates everyone, and in the next scene, the marine who controlled the drone bumps into her in a bar and calls her a monster?\'

"She represents America, so that US marine was essentially calling America a monster - I said, \'Did you see that episode?\' And he hadn\'t - he\'d stopped watching - so I told him he was not really in a fair position to discuss the piece.

is a genuine serial, you must watch it from the beginning. It\'s not a procedural show where it\'s self-contained - it has a history, you need to start from the beginning and work your way through it.

"I have to tell you, I\'m a pretty critical fellow and I\'m now on my fifth year and it\'s a pretty fulfilling experience in my life, both in my personal life and artistic life. It is intellectually invigorating, it is educational for me and it has ignited my political peace-making heart."

is designed as "an action entertainment thriller", it is also "a political piece, that is asking people to learn to listen to each other again".

"I think we have all lost the ability to listen to each other and it\'s a piece takes great care - by our extraordinary writing staff led by Alex Gansa - to illustrate both sides of the coin, and to really ask the question – who are the terrorists?

"It points the finger both at the United States, and at al-Qaeda and ISIS and Hamas and Hezbolla, and holds them all responsible and shows them all as well-rounded as possible.

"Terrorists and marines - generals and leaders - at the end of the day, they\'re just human beings, like all of us. We all come to these unfortunate states of war instead of conversation, instead of being able to sit around the table and mediate our differences and look at what we have in common, which is so much more than what we don\'t have in common."

\'s fourth season saw Carrie raising the child she had with the late Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) - a US marine turned terrorist - with Patinkin suggesting that the baby is a metaphor for peace and collaboration.

"It\'s supposedly two enemies that make literal love," he said. "It\'s

- they literally make love and make a child, and the child lives."

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