Max Piotrowski

Max Piotrowski
Status:	Deceased
Cause of death:	Shot by Taliban leader Jalal Haqqani
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Technician
Sibling(s):	Virgil Piotrowski (brother) Fara Sherazi (love interest)
Played by:	Maury Sterling
Season(s):	1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8
First episode:	"Pilot"
Last episode:	"Threnody(s)"

“Well, Max would do anything for me. Absolutely anything. Wherever I’d go, he’d… he’d end up there, by my side. And the reason I never mentioned him, is I took him for granted. Used him, all these years and… and now he’s dead.” - MATHISON, Carrie

Played by Maury Sterling, Max Piotrowski was a technician who worked with his brother Virgil Piotrowski. They were paid by Carrie Mathison to conduct surveillance, before the former branched out on his own. Carrie's go-to guy when it comes to surveillance, Max is a private consultant with a long history of helping her out of scrapes. Max may be socially awkward and shy, but he is one of Carrie's most trusted associates.

Biography

Max Piotrowski is Virgil's younger brother, who works with him on freelance security consulting operations. Max is reserved and socially awkward, but technically adept and competent at reconnaissance work.

Season 1 / Season 2 / Season 3

He and Virgil help Carrie throughout the Brody investigation, installing surveillance in the Brody family's home and monitoring his activities after he becomes a CIA asset.

Season 4

Carrie later enlists Max alongside Fara Sherazi to her task force in Islamabad to help her find Taliban leader Haissam Haqqani. During this time, Max forms a close bond and partnership with Fara, for whom he harbors romantic feelings, until Haqqani murders Fara during a Taliban raid on the U.S. embassy.

Season 6

Max spends the next two years in a deep depression, and claims to have developed a methamphetamine habit to cope with his grief.

Max later moves to New York to help Carrie take care of Peter Quinn, who is recovering from a stroke. When Quinn uncovers a homegrown conspiracy against the President-elect, Max goes undercover in Brett O'Keefe's shadowy private company, which he learns is a troll farm whose services are being solicited by Dar Adal. Dar himself enlists Max's help in uncovering a plot to frame Quinn for the murder of the President-elect.

Season 7

After Keane's inauguration, Max continues aiding Carrie in Washington D.C., installing surveillance in Chief of Staff David Wellington's apartment, and assisting in the investigation of Simone Martin. Saul forcibly recruits Max into his Russia task force, where Max helps Carrie and Saul extract Simone from Moscow. Max and the rest of the group are personally thanked by President Keane for their efforts in thwarting the Russian conspiracy against the White House.

Season 8

About a year later, Max joins a military unit in Afghanistan, still seeking justice against Haqqani and the Taliban for Fara's death. When President Warner is killed in a helicopter crash, Max and the team are dispatched to the scene. Carrie has Max retrieve the flight recorder from the helicopter to ascertain the cause of the crash; Max succeeds, but the rest of his unit is killed by the Taliban, while he is captured a lone Taliban soldier who sells off the flight recorder. Carrie and Yevgeny Gromov track down Max, who gives Carrie the flight recorder's location before being escorted to another safehouse. At the second compound, Max is held prisoner by Haqqani's son Jalal, who threatens to execute Max unless Haqqani's death sentence is revoked. When Haqqani is executed, Jalal kills Max. While waiting for Max's body to be collected, Carrie breaks down in tears while expressing her guilt over taking Max for granted.

About Him

Max assists Virgil in bugging Nick Brody's home. When Carrie observes that he isn't Virgil's usual partner, Virgil says that he has to use him because Carrie is paying less than the usual fee. Max finds large, blue pills concealed in an aspirin bottle in Carrie's bathroom and shows them to Virgil. (Unknown to Max, they're an antipsychotic medication.) He later assists in eavesdropping on the meeting between Nick and Helen Walker. 

Max was later assigned to the CIA station in Islamabad, where he served under Sandy Bachman and Carrie Mathison.

After Carrie returned to Brooklyn and brought Quinn home to live in the apartment below hers following his near death experience after the sarin gas attack in Berlin, she asked Max to keep an eye on him while she went to work. When Quinn left his apartment to go shopping, he suffered a seizure and having asked not to be taken to hospital, he asked Max not to tell Carrie what happened but he did so as he was worried.

He later managed to gain access to Brett O'Keefe's business by posing as an applicant only to discover that he had hackers working for him. He also discovered that Dar Adal was connected to O'Keefe which led to his phone being confiscated and Dar questioning him. After this, he showed up drunk at Carrie's house and passed out on the bed that Peter Quinn had occupied. When he later awoke he found Carrie looking at photos of Quinn's son as well as one he had of her. He comforted her as she broke down crying.

Following the attempted assassination on Elizabeth Keane, a number of government officials, including Saul Berenson, were arrested. Believing David Wellington to be hiding something, Carrie asked Max to plant cameras in Wellington's house. Carrie also came under attack from a hacker who demanded ransom money in exchange for unlocking her laptop. Max tried but failed to unlock it.

He joined Carrie, Dante and her friend Thomas Anson on a mission to discover what sort of information Wellington and Simone Martin had about McClendon's death.

Following Carrie's discovery that Simone Martin lived a few miles from the prison where Jamie McClendon was murdered, she wanted to contact Dante Allen, but Max warned her against it since it could lead to Wellington discovering that his house was wiretapped.

He was later stationed in Kabul and refused to get on the presidential helicopter before it was shot down. After retrieving the black box from the crash site, he was captured by the Taliban and shot before being held prisoner. Even though Haissam Haqqani got a stay of execution, Max was shot dead by his captors.

Personal life and relationships

Max was the younger brother of Virgil Piotrowski, but unlike him he does not inherently trust Carrie. During Season 6 his last name is revealed to be Piotrowski and he admits that he was in a relationship with a woman, which broke up due to his drug habit. In this season, Max expresses how the murder of Fara Sherazi in Season 4 deeply affected him because he loved her.

Quotes:

Max: You were mean. All she wanted was your approval, and all you gave her was a hard time. You could've said something nice. Just once. Would've meant so much.

Carrie: I wish I had.

Appearances

Season 1
Pilot	Grace	Clean Skin	Semper I	Blind Spot
"The Good Soldier"	"The Weekend"	"Achilles Heel"	"Crossfire"	"Representative Brody"
"The Vest"	"Marine One"

Season 2
"The Smile"	"Beirut is Back"	"State of Independence"	New Car Smell	"Q&A"
A Gettysburg Address	The Clearing	I'll Fly Away	Two Hats	"Broken Hearts"
"In Memoriam"	"The Choice"

Season 3
"Tin Man Is Down"	"Uh... Oh... Ah..."	"Tower of David"	"Game On"	The Yoga Play
Still Positive	"Gerontion"	"A Red Wheelbarrow"	One Last Thing	"Good Night"
"Big Man in Tehran"	"The Star"

Season 4
"The Drone Queen"	"Trylon and Perisphere"	Shalwar Kameez	Iron in the Fire	"About a Boy"
From A to B and Back Again	Redux	"Halfway to a Donut"	"There's Something Else Going On"	13 Hours in Islamabad
Krieg Nicht Lieb	"Long Time Coming"

Season 6
"Fair Game"	The Man in the Basement	"The Covenant"	"A Flash of Light"	"Casus Belli"
The Return	Imminent Risk	Alt. Truth	Sock Puppets	The Flag House
R Is for Romeo	America First

Season 7
Enemy of the State	Rebel Rebel	Standoff	Like Bad at Things	Active Measures
Species Jump	Andante	Lies, Amplifiers, F**king Twitter	Useful Idiot	"Clarity"
"All In"	"Paean to the People"

Season 8
Deception Indicated	Catch and Release	False Friends	Chalk One Up	Chalk Two Down
Two Minutes	F**ker Shot Me	Threnody(s)	"In Full Flight"	"Designated Driver"
"The English Teacher"	"Prisoners of War"