House of Cards Is the Best Show Ever

I am no House of Cards fan. The about enthusiasm I've ever had for the show, in its ridiculous, operatic 4th flavor, might exist characterized as "grudging enjoyment." Terminal year, in its fifth flavour, I called it the most irresponsible show on television.

Then I empathize that I may not be the best judge of what House of Cards fans look for in the series. Simply all the same, I cannot imagine being a fan of the show, getting excited for the sixth and last season, watching season five'due south buildup to that sixth and final season, then sitting downward to lookout man and getting ... this.

Its viii episodes comprise a centerless, ham-handed kludge of a season, ane that keeps beating you over the caput with music and ACTING and plot twists to try to convince you everything that'southward happening is Important. And then information technology ends in a series finale that feels more than incomplete than anything since Dexter Morgan took to the woods to become a lumberjack.

To be fair to House of Cards, information technology wasn't supposed to exist similar this. Season six was already in production with original star Kevin Spacey when allegations that Spacey had sexually assaulted multiple men, some of them minors, led to his swift dismissal from the series.

And when you consider that the flavor had ever been fix as a final showdown between Spacey'southward Frank Underwood, the former president, and Robin Wright's Claire Underwood, Frank's wife and the electric current president, well, finding a way to stop House of Cards without Spacey must have induced a slight panic in the show's writers' room.

But whatever form that panic took, it has manifested in a season of television that is at least 75 percent about Frank Underwood, despite the fact that he never once appears. (He's been killed off-camera betwixt seasons, and the prove barely specifies what happened to him until its concluding scene.) It has manifested in a season of television where I oft couldn't discern basic character motivations beyond, "The plot needs them to do this." It has manifested in a season of television that feels like it was written the night before information technology was due.

To explain why House of Cards' final flavour is so terrible, I'm going to talk about the three ideas the series tries to build it around — and how they come up wanting. Just, naturally, I'g going to have to spoil some things. Stop reading now if you don't want to know!

Idea one: Claire vs. the patriarchy

House of Cards rouses itself to life a few times during the season, mostly by simultaneously celebrating and skewering white feminism. In these passages, Claire pits herself against the old boys' network, represented by the moneyed interests of new characters Annette and Bill Shepherd, simply also past essentially everybody else Claire butts heads with. (The Shepherds are a pair of siblings played past Greg Kinnear and Diane Lane, and they always feel like what they are — new characters dropped into a concluding season to goose the conflict.)

The scheme that Claire hatches to cement her own power in the face of this extremely vague opposition is ridiculous even by Business firm of Cards standards. First, she leans into the worst fears that misogynists have well-nigh a woman president by appearing hysterical and unable to command her emotions.

Then when her enemies endeavour to push her out of the presidency via the 25th Amendment, she suggests that her vice president is in cahoots with Russia to instead punish anybody who's trying to get her removed from office and curry favor with the American public. (It's not explained how, exactly, she convinces everybody information technology's okay that she completely disappeared from the public eye for several weeks, seemingly in the grips of a horrible depressive episode.)

Season six'due south new antagonists are the Shepherds, a brother and sister played past Diane Lane and Greg Kinnear.

Netflix

The raw idea that Claire has to somehow interruption the patriarchy'due south back to have any risk at success isn't a bad idea to build the final season around. Indeed, some of the season'southward all-time material stems from Claire'southward apparent belief that other women will get in line backside her simply because she's a woman, when many of those women can see that Claire is duplicitous and amoral and possibly not someone they want to sell their souls to. It's nearly a fascinating dissection of pop feminism, of the thought that something is feminist solely because it centers on a "strong adult female," no thing what other values it peddles.

But, alas, information technology is only "nearly." By the fourth dimension the last three episodes roll around, House of Cards' final flavour has abruptly buried itself in a whole host of weird, borderline anti-feminist tropes. Claire reveals herself to be pregnant with Frank'southward baby, in order to hold on to his fortune (which he patently tried to leave to his longtime right-manus man Doug Stamper), and the show behaves as though it thinks viewers will plough against Claire swiftly as the season comes to a close, when its earlier episodes built her upward somewhat successfully as a lone woman holding her ground against the hurricane.

Trying to build up and deconstruct a trope at the aforementioned time is difficult for even the best Tv set shows, so mayhap you tin imagine how Firm of Cards flails as it attempts to both bolster and undercut the idea of a "strong female protagonist." And the series isn't helped by how much of Claire's storyline occurs offscreen, due to surprisingly large time jumps between episodes, sometimes of several months.

The result is that its final episodes feel like a series of plot resolutions that never resolve into anything — peculiarly when it comes to...

Idea 2: Claire vs. Doug

Yous know things are serious when Doug grows a beard.

Netflix

The 1 reason House of Cards nonetheless had the potential to deliver a satisfying finale for its many fans, despite the absenteeism of its initial protagonist, stems from how much those fans love Claire and one-time Underwood lackey Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly).

The question of when Doug would plough on the couple that had asked him to sacrifice so much in the name of their own ambitions had e'er hung over the serial; the answer was an implicit, "near likely in the final flavor." And then without Frank (to whom Doug's loyalty was strongest), the potential for a story where Claire and Doug tried to outmaneuver and ultimately destroy one another held considerable promise.

And it's clear the bear witness knew this, also, for its series finale is all about that imminent clash of personalities, when Doug signs on to a plot to electrocute Claire and agrees to be the assassin. (His sponsors — the Shepherds, of form — really recollect he could be out of prison house in ix or 10 years, thanks to his obvious mental distress at the time of assassination.) But when Doug shows up in the Oval Function to exercise the human activity, and Claire, who conspicuously knows what'due south coming, orders everybody out of the room, the two only run out the clock on the serial. They talk to each other about unresolved plot lines until it's time for Doug to effort to kill Claire, neglect, and exist killed by her instead.

The encounter boils down the concluding flavor'due south approach to Claire versus Doug into one scene: Everybody assumes they're at odds, until a brief conversation reveals they're maybe on the same side, until Doug decides that, no, he's mad at her. And so they're back at odds. Similar everything else in Business firm of Cards' last eight episodes, it repeats itself endlessly, making the ultimate reveal that it was Doug who killed Frank a bit exhausting — yous'll probably take figured it out long before Claire does.

It'southward a lackluster conclusion to a story that might have been a powerful way to frame a final season. And that's to say nix of the many times House of Cards steps correct up to the edge of giving Doug more command over the narrative — he even speaks directly to the camera at one point, earning a privilege that was previously reserved for Frank and Claire — merely to enmesh him in somebody else's plot.

All of the in a higher place is rooted in House of Cards' cardinal misunderstanding of how to build its final season. Instead of streamlining the show to the scattering of vital characters it has left, it introduces the business with the Shepherds, which is clunky, unnecessary, and largely uninteresting. (I simply don't care almost whether Annette Shepherd's son is her biological son, or whether she and her brother accept an incestuous relationship, because I have merely met them.) It drums up disharmonize with Claire's vice president. It pushes a proxy state of war with Russian federation in Syria. It comments on several pieces of legislation, including the Equal Rights Amendment.

It throws everything it can remember of into the audition's field of vision because information technology seems terrified to but tell a story about the fates of the few established characters it has left. And perchance that's because Business firm of Cards always wanted its final flavor to be about...

Idea 3: Frank Underwood vs. the world

Claire gets things washed, at to the lowest degree when she'due south not having to bargain with all of the impaired stuff her husband got upward to.

Netflix

It is absolute madness how much of House of Cards' final flavor is well-nigh a character who never once appears in information technology — via scenes about cementing Frank's legacy, near Doug worrying that Claire is trying to erase Frank from the history books, and nearly what was written in Frank'south volition.

On the one hand, I get information technology. It was articulate that House of Cards' conclusion was e'er going to be about Frank versus Claire, with Doug as a gratuitous amanuensis, until Spacey'south deportment came to light. Doug's explanation of Frank's death — Frank came to the White House in a rage, planning to kill Claire, so Doug killed him instead — feels for all the earth like what the original, planned series finale must have been. And if y'all ever accept to rewrite a concluding flavour of television as rapidly as this prove did, it's inevitable that yous'll lean on your original textile just a chip.

On the other hand, every time season six starts to build some momentum behind either of its other ii major ideas, information technology lumbers backward to ponder what Frank would have done, or what Frank would take wanted, and it kills that momentum immediately. House of Cards needs to deal with Frank to some degree, and information technology especially needs to bargain with Claire and Doug'south complicated feelings almost the man. Merely it can never move past him. Information technology can never escape his cancerous orbit.

And that failure to escape its own past is indicative of how much this American version of House of Cards has always struggled to be nearly annihilation. The original (and far superior) British miniseries was about the former idea of power breeding abuse, and how it ruined a human who badly wanted to exist male monarch just never could, so he'd settle for the next best thing and do anything he perhaps could to scale the heights of Parliament. Netflix's adaptation is sort of nigh that, but it's generally about how power is cool to have, because you tin can have power.

Throughout the series, neither Frank nor Claire e'er does anything with the power they accumulate. They but use it to proceed to hang on to that ability. At times, Business firm of Cards has turned this into a critique of the political system, but a cynical, cocky-centered i. It was a serial that implicitly argued that information technology was cool to not care about politics, considering how does politics affect one's life anyhow?

It was a fantasy well-nigh the Clintons beingness as evil as right-fly media has made them out to be, released into a globe where politicians regularly wield their ability in a way that causes genuine, real-life impairment and fifty-fifty expiry in the lives of people all over the world.

Business firm of Cards can't escape Frank Underwood in its last season, because to do so would require shifting its focus from the simple pursuit of power. Had the show's final season tried to make that shift, it might have fallen on its face up, but at least information technology would have tried something new. Instead, it argues what the prove has always argued: Absolute ability corrupts absolutely. Absolute power is really cool.

All six seasons of House of Cards are streaming on Netflix .

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Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/11/2/18038616/house-of-cards-final-season-6-review-finale-spoilers-netflix

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