Let's Talk About "House Of Cards" Season 6...

Let's get "House Of Cards" out of the way because this is probably the most pressing bit of business I need to discuss. Man what a sh*tshow this was and I'm not saying that because Robin Wright is a bad actress or anything, I'm saying this because the writing sucked this season. Granted their backs were up against a wall due to Kevin Spacey's indiscretions but that really isn't an excuse for what was presented to us this Season. To summarize my issues and then go in depth a little bit, the season was disjointed, boring and difficult to track with, character motivations were difficult to gauge, things were foreshadowed that had no pay off and there were leaps and bounds in logic that were simply stunning and of course there was the obvious virtue signaling. The show butchered a lot of characters and did exactly what I expected it'd do and I that was Claire gets away with everything. Now let's dive in to this nonsense.

Let's start with the character motivations; since their introduction Mark Usher and Jane Davis have been hard to grasp. After jumping ship from the Conway campaign, Mark Usher was more or less establishing himself as a Dark Horse to Francis, even going so far as to mimic Francis' wave from proximity to power. Mark hitched his wagon to Claire and even convinced her to put him on as her Vice President (which she did). Mark in the previous season showed himself to be capable and a stone cold badass (ditching Tom Yates' body) and telling a person who's literally been in combat and suffered PTSD from it that in no uncertain terms he'd end him, that's a badass dude. Jane Davis simply annoyed me, her Bunny Eared Lawyer shtick worn thin REALLY quickly because she was always willing to hook Claire up with some inside intel about something that as doing things and...yeah...everything about her reeked of vagueness to the point where it was hard to give a shit about her.

Goodbye, Useless Character.

However, this season, was Mark Usher completely castrated by a series of new characters The Shephards, a brother and sister duo who secretly control The White House through money, influence and power. Essentially Francis threw his hat in their ring at the end of Season 5 when he realized the real power comes from outside The White House, after his passing he essentially sold Claire to The Shepherds. I have no problem with The Shepherds as new characters after all new characters introduced in shows are a standard, especially for new seasons. However, this season made more of a deal out of them than necessary, for starters Bill's tumor didn't do anything for the season as a whole, it wasn't as if Claire was going to use Bill's illness as leverage against him or anything and the fact that Bill had a tumor wasn't driving him to see his goals accomplished by any means necessary.

What I'm trying to say is that people tend to throw caution into the wind when facing death and that's not what Bill was doing, so having him battle a tumor while trying to get a bill passed did nothing for the character, the story or the actor. However, Duncan is the biggest mis-step this season because this was a real opportunity to return "House Of Cards" back to it's f'ed up state by missing the golden opportunity of making Duncan a product of incest. This was even set up by the writers themselves when Claire asked if Annette & Bill had ever had sex. Finding out Duncan was the son of the housemaid and having Bill all "He's not one of us." made NO damn sense for everyone involved. Annette looks like a hero for raising a child that she had NOTHING to do with (she wasn't his mother and she wasn't involved with his father), Bill looks like a moron because he's accepted Duncan this whole time, and Claire looks like a complete and total dumbass because she's all "Oooh, look at Annette Shehaprd she's raising someone else's kid isn't that scandalous?!" and the answer is No, it's not and the audience can hardly be asked to care about something so absolutely trivial. You'd think Bill & Annette would have more interesting dirty laundry than someone they knew had a one night stand, had a kid and Annette adopted it.

Anyone notice Duncan is dressed like Blofeld?

Let's move on; Claire was easily the worst thing about this season as all of her motives were unclear and borderline crazy. For starters, when she faked incompetence by appearing hysterical and then holing herself up in her house for days, you'd think a lot of people would look at such behavior and go "WTF?!" bare in mind that is what happened, however she manages to fire her entire staff and hire a new staff, say what you want about working for The White House, I understand it's a powerful position BUT does this new staff not watch the news? They've seen the pictures of Claire appearing hysterical as well and you've got to consider that her administration is a sinking ship, especially if articles of impeachment were almost signed. What I'm saying is if your boss came into work looking like this;

and never came into work but called you from home sounding like he'd been crying only moments before calling you and did this for a whole week and bare in mind, this isn't due to the death of a loved one or close personal friend or even a divorce, it just sorta happens...I'm 100% certain most people would be looking for another job. But Claire somehow manages to bounce back from this completely above criticism. Leaving that on the table for a moment, Claire is pregnant...and this...this is the biggest "WTF?!" moment of the series because Claire already went through menopause like 4 seasons ago. I'm no biology major but I doubt menopause takes (let's be conservative with the timeline and call it,) 2 years to actually kick in. Furthermore, I doubt that's Frank's baby (I'm guessing it's Tom but again...if it was Tom's she'd have been showing signs MUCH EARLIER. So Claire's pregnancy is a bigger ass pull than The Shadow Monks from "Mortal Kombat Conquest" literally killing everyone.

And speaking of literally killing everyone, Claire literally kills everyone: Tom Hammerschmidt, Jane Davis (albeit, no one gives a shit about her), Katherine Durant, and freakin' Doug Stamper, and she kills Doug IN THE WHITE HOUSE!! Talk about sh*tting where you eat. Frank has killed a total of 3 people: Peter Russo, Zoe Barns and Neve Campbell's character whose name I can't and won't be bothered to remember. And while I'm not 100% sure about her murder, the other 2 were loose ends that needed to be tied and Frank tied those ends personally and without scrutiny. Claire is stacking bodies like no tomorrow. Now granted while she may get away with killing Doug (not without a massive investigation and questions regarding her own intelligence arising) by pleading self-defense (and she has a neck scar to prove it), I just have a hard time with her facing very little drawbacks. Despite Francis killing Russo, Zoe was close to figuring out the truth, likewise, Goodwin was close to figuring out what happened to Zoe. Zoe dealt with Francis personally she had to be eliminated, but Lucas, Francis had him set up. Claire isn't savvy enough to pull that off (I'll explain later) and had everyone killed.

This one hurt though. I always liked Tom.

Claire's savviness extended to making a backdoor deal with Russia in exchange for President Petrov agreeing to establish the appearance that they had something to do with Thomas Yates...who's a White House speech writer...Granted, this trickled down to eventually involve Mark Usher (The Vice freakin' President)...but still...Frank playing puppet master is Season One was nothing but fun, watching him systematically set up and replace each candidate that Garrett Walker had selected showed Frank's cunning, his intelligence and his willingness to do whatever it takes to accomplish his goals. In the Season 2 finale when Frank finally enters the Oval Office as President we feel the gravity because we knew what it took to get there.

And that's really the big problem, Claire made herself out to be the Anti-Francis SO much so that she became a parody of him. The character of Francis operated on a graph, if you've noticed as the series progressed he started to do less and less soliloquies, that's because his soliloquies are directly tied to his ambition, the more ambition he is the more he talks to us (that's why in Seasons 1 & 2, Francis talked to us a lot) and then when Season 3 and 4 rolled around he talked to us only briefly and not at length only in times when he was desperate and needed to let us know about a scheme he was setting into motion. Because of this we knew how Frank thought and we were along for the ride of witnessing whether or not his plan was a success, and when it partially worked Frank talked to us and told his next game plan. We knew what made Frank tick and how he ticked. Claire isn't the same.

Also, this stupid "BEHOLD, MY ROOM FULL OF VAGINAS!" moment was BEYOND ridiculous. I'm not saying having an all-female cabinet is dumb, it's not. But the way it was presented and the absolute SHOCK on Annette's face was like "Really?". What was she shocked and surprised about? That it was all female or that isn't the cabinet that they selected. This Season Claire made such a point about men and women and all the men trying to control her and it all was just very shoehorned and stupid and really had no bearing on the season as a whole. And again, these women were hired AFTER Claire's hysterical period...so all of these women are aware that Claire was acting like a hysterical woman prior to hiring them. So Annette's gasp at seeing a room full of women was just such a stupid left field reaction that I had a hard time figuring out what the shock was.

Anyone who said they care about Claire is lying because throughout the entire series save for Season 4 she's been nothing but Frank's background partner, someone he can lean on when things aren't going right, but she wasn't involved in any major moments of the series (I can't think of a single massively significant thing she's done besides doing us all a favor in killing boring ass Tom Yates). The opening of this Season is parallel to the 1st Season where Frank kills an injured dog while giving us a lecture on the 2 kinds of pain (Pain from gaining strength and useless pain from suffering). That opening established who Frank is, how he thinks and the kind of actions we can expect to see from him. In this Season Claire finds a bird trapped in her walls, the bird was tapping on the wall imitating Frank's signature double knock. Claire manages to grab the bird and we see it clinched in Claire's fist before she releases it. That's the problem, she released it. If she had snapped it's neck and left it on the steps that would have established the kind of character we were going to see this Season, and had she said something like "I have no need for useless things, no matter how pretty." that'd have told us that she was more ruthless than Francis, because Francis kills an injured dog, it was going to die anyway and he just sped the process along, while not the best action to take it's certainly understandable given the situation, Claire merely kills a perfectly healthy bird for merely annoying her. See the difference?

Likewise, the flashbacks into Claire's past offered no insight into nothing and were merely just jarring. The only compliment I can pay to them is that the actress they played young Claire was cute, THAT'S IT. Bill had a throwaway line that stated someone couldn't tell if Claire was human and I agree. She's such a cold, impersonal character that if she were to die suddenly I wouldn't really care or miss anything. Finally, the conclusion of having Claire kill Doug was a gut-punch. Doug was a character we understood and cared about, despite him being a horrible human being he had some redeemable qualities about him and certain ticks that reminded us despite his unstoppable badassery and unflinching loyalty he's still human and still vulnerable. The series should have been about Doug and Claire both covering up Francis' crimes and then Doug realizing that Claire is his loose end and torpedos her presidency stating Francis would have wanted that considering she didn't pardon him. I'd have believed that rather than Doug killing Francis to keep from killing Claire. Francis wouldn't have been that sloppy to kill Claire at The White House...so that finale was just a huge WTF moment.

Never happened.

Seeing the way this show ended after such strong previous Seasons is just heartbreaking. Unlike "The Sopranos" when they lost an arc heavy character, "House Of Cards" was unable to turn it around. Claire gets away with everything like I said she would, everyone dies and that's all. While the story its self didn't live up to its name, the series overall did indeed fall like a "House Of Cards".