Opinion Piece- House of Cards is Dead... Thank God

What is it with the amount of trash I've watched this year? I know a couple of weeks ago I was talking about how disappointing a year it's been but man, this is a whole new low. See, I used to be a huge House of Cards fan. I got into it when season 2 came out and as someone who doesn't have the most sophisticated taste for politics, I was wowed by how enthralled I was constantly. Slowly, the series got less and less good and then very suddenly, the Kevin Spacey accusations came out. Headlines start to fly about how the House of Cards is tumbling down, jokes are made about how even fake Hilary can't get her shot at the presidency but among the rubble, the cast and crew of the show united and pledged that, for the fans, they'd finish up one last season. And maybe they shouldn't have. As a warning, there will be spoilers from here on out but that shouldn't matter for such a poorly written final season.

I'll address the elephant in the room right away; the show isn't bad because Kevin Spacey was fired. Well, maybe it is a bit but it was a situation they could have managed and moving on without Spacey was the right move, much as I used to be a fan of the actor. After those allegations, it would be hard to justify still paying his keep and so I have no quarrel with his firing. The problem comes with how exactly the writers dealt with it. Of course it's a huge task to completely write out a character who is so central to the plot but the reason it didn't work was because the show kept insisting they had moved on. This was a season that existed in the shadow of Times Up and they knew that but while they keep trying to push women to the front of the story, they are constantly talking about Spacey's character, entirely unable to move past from him. Hell, the final confrontation that ends the show (and I'll get more to it in a second) is Doug and Claire talking about Frank's legacy, Doug going full meta and saying "I had to protect the legacy from the man". Moving on from Frank Underwood is fine but maybe actually do that instead of constantly pledging lip service to his corpse.

What felt like a step in the right direction at first was the announcement that this final season would be only 8 episodes instead of 13 which, as a believer in Netflix bloat, is great to hear. It's why I love something like Maniac which hit 10 episodes, all of varied length and wrapped it all up. The problem is, we only have 8 episodes because the writers literally couldn't squeeze any more content out of a non-Frank Underwood world AND STILL the pacing is abysmal, abysmal enough that I had to take a nap as early as episode 2. Just because there isn't much content, doesn't mean all the episodes aren't going to be 50 plus minutes long and with, I'm gonna say, about three episodes of nothing happening in the middle. Bear that in mind, five episodes were cut out and it still feels like three more could have been trimmed. In defence of this last season (and I think that'll be the only time I say that), the bloat has been a problem of many Netflix shows and especially the last couple of seasons of House of Cards but that the show can still suffer that after so much content has to be abandoned shows the writers are not on top form. I'll go back on one statement now actually, something I did really like about this season was a subtle Rosemary's Baby reference. I haven't seen the actual film but I have a solid grip on the thematic levels of it and it is essentially about a woman who gives birth to the son of the devil. Early in this season, Claire is shown watching a film and the score is recognisably from that film and by the end, she is pregnant with Frank's child, a man who has basically been pitched as the single worst human alive. It's an interesting take which is more than you can say about basically anything else in the season.

All of this could be forgivable if the ending capped off the series well but oh no, it most certainly does not do that. I'd even rank it up there with Dexter in terms of worst finales I've ever seen which is saying a hell of a lot. In the middle of this, I also just checked IMDb to see if my feelings are shared and holy shit, the finale has a 2.9 which is near unheard of, unless you're the Dexter finale. At one point, there's a story thread hanging in this episode about possible nuclear warfare and I was at the point of aggravation where that seemed like a funny enough ending to me. It would have been better than the actual ending though which is just a Claire and Doug standoff, Doug confesses that he killed Frank and Claire kills Doug with Frank's letter opener, right there in the oval office. She references that infamous line that opened the very first episode about types of pain which had been subliminally (not) inserted into the episode before. Maybe that would be appropriate if other arcs had been wrapped up but we still know nothing about what will happen with Claire's baby, we don't know if any journalists will leak the truth about the Underwood's and we don't know if those nukes will be dropped. There is no epilogue, which is not always a necessity but it feels like we're missing a huge chunk of stuff that was supposed to happen.

In the final episode, a journalist uses the phrase "I am going to finish this godforsaken story" and that sums up this whole season. It is one for completionists only, that offers nothing of any merit but is only worth watching because this is the last we will see of House of Cards. Much like with Dexter, this is the ending we get and while it's utter shit, we must stick with it. But the show had been going downhill for a few years and now I never have to give up a weekend to it again. So for that, I am thankful. No more pain.