Sunday, April 28, 2024

House of Cards recap: Season 6, Episode 8

house of cards season 6

These scenes are played with the utmost tension and seriousness, but it’s all rather meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Consider how much time this episode spends trying to touch on the various character arcs it began this season, and how little it manages to do with them. For instance, the story of Annette and Bill’s relationship, and how they’ve grown apart from each other as Bill gets sicker, never goes anywhere. Bill doesn’t die, and there’s no final resolution when it comes to the Shepherds and their feud with Claire. Plus there’s Seth, who has no story, and Janine, who just promises to keep digging.

Idea 2: Claire vs. Doug

Claire shares her husband's cold-hearted, ruthless pragmatism and lust for power, and they frequently scheme together to ensure the success of each other's ventures. They both work with Remy Danton, a corporate lobbyist and former Underwood staffer, to secure funds for their operations and expand their influence. There are frustrating glimpses of a searing, fresh drama, driven by its women. While Kinnear tries to be an eerily banal antagonist and ends up just being banal, Lane is in brittle Dynasty-villainess mode and is intermittently terrific, particularly when she and Wright face off. Annette and Claire were mates at school, but since then they’ve diverged, in the sense that one of them knows she’s given in to the dark side while the other, as befits the president of the United States, maintains a pretence that she hasn’t.

Unannounced start and sudden shutdown

This is an American political television series revolves around Frank Underwood who is a politician and wants to gain power. Four months after the murders, Claire reverts to her maiden name and continues her progressive agenda. Annette, now strained from Bill, plots with Usher, no longer Vice President, to assassinate Claire. She asks Doug to perpetrate the act, but he is reluctant, mainly desiring to protect Frank's legacy.

Casting

Yates reads Frank a prologue that he does not understand at first, but agrees is a decent beginning. By the end of the season, Yates has the first chapter written and Frank, not liking the direction the book is taking, fires Yates. By the season finale, tensions between the Underwoods reach a point where Claire states her intent to leave Frank. Ambassador to the United Nations and faces a crisis in the Jordan Valley, which pits Frank against Russian President Viktor Petrov. When Petrov has an American gay rights activist arrested in Russia, the Underwoods persuade him to secure a release.

house of cards season 6

Episodes

house of cards season 6

Claire, through now-Speaker Cole, blackmails Justice Abruzzo into recusing himself in a case dealing with her power to launch nuclear weapons. Janine Skorsky and Doug continue to work to uncover the Underwoods, with Doug leaking contents of Frank's secret audio diary while Claire blames everything on Frank. Claire then uses the pretense of ICO obtaining a nuclear weapon to create a crisis, leading the Shepherds and Doug to accelerate their plans.

List of House of Cards episodes

House of Cards Season 6 Review: Claire Triumphs, Coldly - The Atlantic

House of Cards Season 6 Review: Claire Triumphs, Coldly.

Posted: Thu, 01 Nov 2018 07:00:00 GMT [source]

House of Cards is an American political thriller television series created by Beau Willimon. It is based on the 1989 novel of the same name by Michael Dobbs and an adaptation of the 1990 British series of the same name by Andrew Davies, also from the novel. The first 13-episode season was released on February 1, 2013, on the streaming service Netflix. House of Cards is the first TV series to have been produced by a studio for Netflix. Claire’s biding her time of course, but biding it with her is a slog, made worse by flabby story structure. Themes, plotlines and characters drift in and abruptly drop out as the show gets bogged down in re-litigating old Frank-related storylines.

House of Cards recap: Season 6, Episode 1 - Entertainment Weekly News

House of Cards recap: Season 6, Episode 1.

Posted: Fri, 02 Nov 2018 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Frank addresses the public declaring that the nation is at total war, ordering the full force of the military be used to combat global terrorism regardless of the cost. The season ends with Frank and Claire watching the live execution of the hostage together, and Claire breaking the fourth wall for the first time by looking into the camera along with Frank. Ending on Claire killing Doug, saying, “There, no more pain,” and then looking villainously into the camera is so very House of Cards. The tone, delivery, and direction of the scene suggest something shocking and substantial, but there’s not much there underneath. This season didn’t give us a reason to care, instead running out the clock and asking us to be satisfied with guessing who might survive until the end.

Production

The sixth season marks the first of the series without Kevin Spacey, who portrayed lead character Frank Underwood. Soon after production began in October 2017, Netflix fired the actor as a result of sexual misconduct allegations made against him. Production was halted for several months while the screenplay was reworked to exclude Spacey's character.

House of Cards Season 2 Review: Episodes 1-3

To keep the strategy of fear going, Doug blackmails hacker Aidan Macallan into launching a massive cyberattack on the NSA, slowing down Internet traffic and wiping out hundreds of thousands of files. On Election Day, the result hinges on Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Ohio. Underwood's political machine stages a terrorist attack in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is pinned on a local suspected ICO sympathizer. With Pennsylvania secured by Conway and Ohio seeming to swing his way, Frank unofficially calls Conway directly to concede. However, this is merely a tactic to put Conway off guard, as the Underwoods contact Ohio's governor and convince him to close the polls early on the pretense of a terrorist threat.

Underwood begins a symbiotic, and ultimately sexual, relationship with Zoe Barnes, a young political reporter, secretly feeding her damaging stories about his political rivals to sway public opinion as needed. Meanwhile, he manipulates Peter Russo, a troubled alcoholic congressman from Pennsylvania, into helping him undermine Walker's pick for Secretary of State, Senator Michael Kern. Underwood eventually has Kern replaced with his own choice, Senator Catherine Durant. Underwood also uses Russo in a plot to end a teachers' strike and pass an education bill, which improves Underwood's standing with Walker.

Instead of streamlining the show to the handful 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 about whether Annette Shepherd’s son is her biological son, or whether she and her brother have an incestuous relationship, because I have just met them.) It drums up conflict with Claire’s vice president. It comments on several pieces of legislation, including the Equal Rights Amendment. Describing Spacey as “predatory” and the set as a “toxic” workplace, the CNN report helped pave the way for Netflix severing all ties with Spacey on Nov. 3, 2017.

The Shepherds decide to influence Claire by other means, including through a Supreme Court justice they convince her to nominate. They and Seth Grayson also develop a mobile application which can secretly be used to monitor the user's activity, including their location. Secretary of State Durant also comes within the Shepherds' sphere of influence, and they persuade her to speak with prosecutors investigating the Underwoods as the Shepherds become increasingly distant from Claire. As Durant's testimony proves more threatening, Claire and Jane Davis plot to assassinate her, but she fakes her death and flees the country. Following Durant's fake death, Claire and President Petrov forge a deal on Syria. Claire then discovers that Durant is alive and living in France with Petrov's help.

Ohio and Tennessee refuse to certify the election, and neither candidate reaches the requisite number of electoral votes. Six months into his presidency, Frank pushes for a controversial jobs program called America Works. Determined not to be a "placeholder" President, Underwood reverses his previous pledge and runs in the 2016 election, competing against Heather Dunbar in the Democratic primaries. At the end of House of Cards’ fifth run, Frank Underwood was almost dead. His wife Claire had replaced him in the Oval Office and was no longer taking his calls. The story of Season 6 just doesn't cohere; it barely even tracks well enough to summarize.

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. The up-and-coming Aussie actor will reportedly join the cast as a series regular. Fern was rumored to join the cast earlier as a potential love interest for Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood before the star’s own proverbial house of cards collapsed. However, other than the role’s “modified” regular status, no other details have been revealed about Fern’s character. Thus, it will be interesting to see if the previously rumored dynamic sticks, only minus Frank, obviously. Meanwhile, Hammerschmidt continues to investigate Zoe's death, and is given information by an unknown leaker within the White House.

The sixth and final season of House of Cards, an American political drama television series created by Beau Willimon for Netflix, was released on November 2, 2018. Frank Pugliese and Melissa James Gibson returned as showrunners for the final season. The sixth season continues the story of recently-inaugurated, Democratic president Claire Underwood (Robin Wright), who faces new threats within and outside the White House following the death of her husband and former president Frank Underwood. Powerful elites, led by wealthy siblings Annette and Bill Shepherd (Diane Lane and Greg Kinnear), are attempting to manipulate and destroy her presidency, while Claire struggles to exert influence and escape her husband's shadow.

Our emphasis on final is quite purposeful, since the trailer reveals the show’s post-Spacey strategy of killing off Frank. (It’s not a spoiler if the show is promoting that narrative.) We see Claire standing over Frank’s grave throwing figurative and literal shade, almost like a demented Machiavellian reversal of the scene in Forrest Gump at Jenny’s grave. With her new Cabinet in place, Claire decides to undertake a new, progressive, agenda. The Shepherds, meanwhile, continue to plot her downfall, enlisting the help of Brett Cole, an ambitious Congressman who seeks to become Speaker of the House. Doug meets with Hammerschmidt, providing him with information on Frank's actions.

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