All these hours later and it is still totally unclear why she even wanted to be president in the first place, and what she wants to do with her power now that she has alienated (and will surely continue to alienate) everyone in her orbit, besides start a nuclear war over nothing and make proclamations about feminism so blatantly self-serving that even Ivanka would probably say, “Yeah, that’s a little much.” And I cannot believe the show hasn’t raised any questions regarding the paternity of her baby! Does no one but me think she’s novelist Tom’s daughter?īut again, for this last time: Even when this show forsakes the plot, I will dutifully recount it for you. Her motives are so shallow and petty, her actions so short-sighted, that she’s essentially playing the role of Frank in his absence. Not to mention that the stakes of Claire’s presidency are, as far as I can see, nonexistent. And in between these vast swaths of show that fixated on the one person I’d really hoped we’d abandoned, we got updates on characters who are so new as to mean nothing to us. The big showdown between Doug and Claire wasn’t about Doug reckoning with the toll that serving as the Underwood’s silent assassin had taken on his relationships or on his soul it was just about Frank. It was about Frank cutting Claire out of his will. That big story Janine ended up publishing wasn’t about Zoe, or Lucas, or Peter Russo, or Rachel Posner. The driving question of the show was always: Will the Underwoods achieve their ends before the world learns of their means? But this final season shrugged off that premise and decided to fixate instead on who killed Frank and how. In his absence, he was everywhere.Īnd so the meta-narrative of the season - the good riddance, Spacey, now this is Robin Wright’s show narrative - was compromised, and the actual narrative of the season was a hot mess. Nothing in this farewell season needed to be about Frank. In the wake of these revelations and Spacey’s removal came a creative opportunity: With Frank axed, the show could go places that did not involve Frank at all. House of Cards fired Kevin Spacey, and offed his character, Frank Underwood, amid a multitude of credible allegations of sexual predation, rape, and violence. “You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him.”

This series finale, and really this entire finale season, reminded me of Michelle Wolf’s best burn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

House of cards season 4 episode 9