That it’s only an eight-episode season implies pithiness, but, if you edited out the stagnant pauses and impotent staring matches, it would shrivel to five and a half.Įven the sex and murder is limp.

Scene after scene is a muted, misfiring two-hander in which someone or other, straining stiffly for an epigram with every line, elliptically threatens someone else. His former fixer, Doug (Michael Kelly), who clanks around lugubriously like the ghost of seasons past, is one of several indistinguishably peeved men who would, had the writers wielded their new broom with more conviction, have been swept away. Themes, plotlines and characters drift in and abruptly drop out as the show gets bogged down in re-litigating old Frank-related storylines. Wright is so majestically dignified she’s inert, reacting impassively to blackmail and treachery, and only rarely turning to the camera for wall-breaking asides that, when they do arrive, are platitudes by writers who don’t know exactly who their new main character is.Ĭlaire’s biding her time of course, but biding it with her is a slog, made worse by flabby story structure. The circumstances behind Spacey’s departure predispose us to not care that he’s absent, but it’s impossible not to miss his gnashing campery, as season six’s attempt to be more measured and sophisticated comes off as monotonous.

Who will win? The twin modern evils of ingrained misogyny and a super-rich 0.1% who cannot tolerate any dent in their privilege? Or Claire, cool, battle-scarred and quietly ruthless? (Let us not forget that she once poisoned her lover, then rode him one last time while she waited for him to die.) The wider world, meanwhile, is angry with her simply for daring to be a powerful woman, as demonstrated by an arresting opening scene in which an aide reluctantly reads out that day’s most imaginative gendered death threats. Bill and Annette Shepherd (Greg Kinnear and Diane Lane), billionaire siblings in the Koch/Mercer mould, are incensed that Claire’s not as corrupt as her husband. We rejoin Claire 100 days into her reign. With Robin Wright as the sole star, it’s a chance not just to refocus, but to reboot. He’s been unceremoniously killed off before this sixth and final season begins, thanks to the private disgraces of Kevin Spacey, the man who played him. Fans who had hung on through the increasingly silly years that followed Frank lying and murdering his way to the presidency, after which the show lost its fundamental reason to exist and resorted to empty excess, wondered if Netflix’s political potboiler was about to rise out of its self-parodic rut and refocus. His wife Claire had replaced him in the Oval Office and was no longer taking his calls. A t the end of House of Cards’ fifth run, Frank Underwood was almost dead.

House of cards season 4 episode 8