TV REVIEW: ‘House of Cards’ Season 6 closes out the series as a lame duck
Robin Wright stars as Claire Hale Underwood in House of Cards, released by Netflix.
House of Cards is, for better or worse, the cornerstone of Netflix’s current success. By that I mean it’s been around for a long time, supporting the rest of the structure on top of it, though it may not get much attention. Cards may not be the service’s most-watched show any more, but it is one of the few of the company’s remaining first generation of original content, and I’ve been a loyal viewer since the start.
Maybe it’s just because I have a taste for political drama, and the twists and turns of Cards’ many labyrinthine plots can be rewarding if you’re in the right mood. But not everyone has stuck with it, and as the seasons wore on, it became clear that it needed to end. The Washington power couple at the centre, the Underwoods (Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright) had pretty much exhausted the list of corrupt, manipulative, and violent behaviour they could get away with. The natural assumption was that a final season would deliver some sort of closure.
And then allegations of Spacey’s sexual misconduct hit the news. Spacey was rightly fired, in the interest of ensuring that the work of the other actors and crew on the show could see the light of day. Spacey’s absence, however, left a major hole in the narrative. Could killing off or otherwise sidelining his character allow the show to conclude in a satisfying way?
WARNING: Spoilers for Season 6 follow!
As Season 6 begins, it’s clear where the heads of the showrunners are. Claire Underwood (Wright) is now President of the United States, having succeeded Francis (Spacey) in the closing minutes of the Season 5 finale. Claire has been President for a few months when the season opens, and her staff are warily reading out a list of hateful, misogynist commentary posted about Claire online. Right from this scene, Cards announces that the final season will primarily explore the struggles a female American president would encounter; the deep-seated, often-denied sexism that likely contributed to Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the obvious corollary.
Greg Kinnear, Diane Lane, and Cody Fern as the Shepherd family, wealthy opponents to Claire.
But Cards defines itself as a show by warping touchstones from real-world politics into horror-tinged, bizarro versions. It’s not enough for Claire to merely fight back against her opponents. She has to deceive and destroy everyone in her path, in a mad quest to prove her supremacy and erase any connection to Francis – a man she loved, but in a tortured, opportunistic way. In the space of a handful of episodes this season, Claire arranges the murder of three people, hires Russian internet trolls to erase online records of Frank’s legacy, and reveals she’s pregnant with a revenge baby – a child she’s only carrying to screw over one of her enemies. It’s hard to intuit much of a thought process behind any of this, and Claire’s opponents are no better organized in their attacks. Claire claims this is all intentional, an effort to obscure her true plan, but instead it just reads like the writers losing track of things.
Cards has danced perilously close in the past to conspiracy-theory ridiculousness, but some of the characters’ decisions in this season verge into farce. Late in the season, a gathering of Claire’s enemies – including a couple of characters who were previously shown to be rather level-headed – openly discuss assassinating Claire with the matter-of-factness of an Alex Jones rant. It’s an odd turn for a show that is usually far more subtle and careful with its scripting.
Though the Underwoods are the focus of Cards, the supporting players are often just as interesting. Season 6 begins with a handful of subplots left to resolve, chief among them the fate of Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), the taciturn fixer who helped the Underwoods achieve much of their success. Doug’s biggest secret is that he killed Rachel Posner (Rachel Brosnahan) a prostitute connected to one of Frank’s murder victims, Peter Russo (Corey Stoll). One of the season’s tasks is to determine what part Doug plays in Claire’s fate, and ultimately Cards decides to go the easy way out: Claire and Doug scuffle in the Oval Office, and Claire fatally stabs Doug with a letter opener.
Michael Kelly as Doug Stamper.
This is actually the series’ final scene, and while it’s meant to chillingly echo a key scene from the pilot episode where Frank kills a wounded dog, all it does is reinforce the greater issue with Season 6 as a whole. Left to cover the Spacey-shaped gap in the show, Cards doubles down on the depravity and bloodlust, fumbling with its wider ensemble in the process. Doug Stamper was the Underwoods’ greatest weapon and biggest weakness, but the show fails to take advantage of it, preferring to kill Doug off than to fully explore the damage he could wreak on Claire’s presidency.
The show’s decision to take the easy route and let Claire win – and let her apparently trigger a nuclear holocaust as well – extends to the other supporting characters. In addition to Doug’s subplot, there’s the attempt by a series of journalists in the show to expose Frank’s crimes. Over the years, reporters like Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara), Lucas Goodwin (Sebastian Arcelus), Janine Skorsky (Constance Zimmer), and Tom Hammerschmidt (Boris McGiver) got tantalizingly close to exposing the crimes of the Underwoods. But again, just as the show is about to deliver the result of their investigations, the finale comes to an end.
This isn’t to say we’re owed a cathartic or “good triumphs over evil” ending. It’s not impossible to see what the writers were driving at. They suggest that there are no satisfying endings in Washington, and that sometimes the bad guys get away with it. The show goes so far as to put this idea in dialogue, having Mark Usher (Campbell Scott) say, “Things don’t really end. They just fade away.” But Cards has already proved this in spades (pun intended). After six seasons of TV, the show has made it abundantly clear how people in power can get away with stuff. Is it too much to ask to see what happens when the Underwoods finally suffer a true and lasting defeat?
In the wake of these final eight episodes, I’m left with the impression that maybe Season 6 wasn’t necessary at all. The show could have ended with the powerful sequence in “Chapter 65” of Claire addressing the camera and saying, “My turn.” This might have been enough to prove the show’s point, without drawing things out or making promises it couldn’t keep, certainly when it comes to the supporting characters.
Another alternative? Let’s see a follow-up show, one that explores the implications of Claire’s decision to fire a nuke and set off the apocalypse. Claire can dress herself up like Imperator Furiosa and rule over an irradiated wreck of D.C. like the one from Fallout 3. It’s probably the only thing that will make me feel better about this final season of Cards, a sadly conventional conclusion to a one-time disruptor.