In Season 6, though, it felt as though the writers gave up. Or the Underwoods’ pointless threesome with the Secret Service agent Edward Meechum. Or the ridiculous but fun saga of Frank getting shot in Season 4. The season-after-season wait for that comeuppance was rarely as thrilling as it might have been, but viewers came to understand that even when the plot didn’t add up-when it got lost in a stew of current-events buzzwords-it could still sometimes serve up a sensory jolt. The rest of the show would ground its suspense on the presumed inevitability of Frank’s eventual comeuppance. When the troubled but soulful congressman Peter Russo met his end at Frank’s hands, it was like the completion of the prophecy foretold in that first scene with the dog. As the shape of the Underwoods’ relationship became clear-here were fire and ice destroying for the same goal-the story imparted the satisfying feeling of dominoes falling. But the first season set the internet buzzing, and not just because of the novelty of seeing a slick, star-led drama on Netflix rather than on HBO. The show had big flaws all along: migraine-inducing implausibility, emotional frostbite, a sense that episodes were padded to fit an hour’s length, Spacey’s dicey accent, and more. By overtly calling back to the dawn of this show, the creators force the judgment that the greatest tragedy of House of Cards was its own incoherence. But so many unanswered plot questions remain that the conclusion feels cruel to viewers. And as a jerry-rigged conclusion to a story derailed by outside scandal, perhaps Season 6 should be graded on a curve.
#House of cards season 4 episode summaries tv
As far as nutso pseudo-Shakespearean TV climaxes go, the final scene worked okay: Wright got to perform a ballet of humanity and ruthlessness, while Kelly got to drop Stamper’s mask for once.
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Power kills personhood betrayal begets betrayal the seemingly meek but actually sinister shall inherit the Earth-pick your take-home message. Read: ‘House of Cards’ is chillier than ever in its final season Afterward, though, Doug seethed as Claire seemed to capitalize on her husband’s death. Throughout Season 6, the question of how Frank died (off camera) remains a mystery, and Doug finally reveals the answer right before his demise: Denied a pardon by his wife, Frank snapped and set out to murder Claire, and Doug-deciding that such a murder would “destroy everything we built”-intervened by poisoning Frank with his own liver medication. But eventually he turned on his master and was put down by another. Doug Stamper was Frank’s loyal attack animal throughout. He shared that power with his wife, but over time she yearned for a greater portion of it, and by the final season she’d taken his spot in the White House. Some sort of rhyming is going on here, clearly, but does the poem mean anything? Frank Underwood, through a combination of guile, bloodshed, and weirdly good luck, was the master of the show’s universe for five seasons. Underwood puts her hand over his mouth and nose and tells him that everything’s going to be okay. She has just stabbed him in the belly with a letter opener after he nearly slit her throat with it. In the final moments of the final episode of House of Cards-which occurs in a truncated season made after Spacey left the show due to allegations of sexual misconduct-the president, Claire Hale Underwood (Robin Wright), cradles her dead husband’s henchman, Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), in her lap. Moments like this require someone who will act, who will do the unpleasant thing, the necessary thing.” “The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain, the sort of pain that’s only suffering. “There are two kinds of pain,” he said into the camera. In the opening moments of Netflix’s House of Cards premiere episode from 2013, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) hunched over a dog that’d been injured by a car. This article contains spoilers through the Season 6 finale of House of Cards.