I want to make it very clear that unlike most viewers, I was excited to see what the writers of House of Cards could do without the presence of their leading man. For the first four seasons, and the allegations surrounding Spacey, I was in love with this show despite a lack-luster finale in Season 3. However, I fell off after the first episode of Season 5 for many reasons. It felt as though the show couldn't surprise its viewers anymore, the politics of the show's characters were adapted and betrayed to parallel America's political climate, and after 52 episodes, the show had quite literally shown its full deck. Come Season 6, and Wright taking over as leading lady I saw an opportunity for viewers to experience something new. Doug, Claire, Tom, and countless other characters have been just as complex and captivating as Frank in the past, and while perhaps no one has as much gravitas, there's only so much of the same conniving practices that you can witness from a character before it feels mundane. Robin Wright, an acclaimed actress portraying a phenomenal character could very well take back the white house, and viewers hearts.
With that said I have never witness a show's thematic intentions, it's characters, and it's integrity be so utterly betrayed in its final hours. I feel empty in all the wrong ways seeing characters of the past six seasons thrown around like rag dolls because the ghost of Frank Underwood willed it so. Claire is somehow eclipsed in importance by her posthumous husband, despite the writer's seemingly adamant intentions to move past that plot point. Yet the Underwood name is the least of this season's troubles, as the final episode is truly the worst series finale since How I Met Your Mother, Dexter, or Two and a Half Men to name a few.
Claire, a strong-willed and passionate politician is chalked up to the cookie cutter image of what every male republican fears a woman in the white house would look like. I am not implying that I too share this political affiliation, more I am tumultuously disappointed that the writers could not muster a way in which to properly write a woman in power.
As for Doug Stamper, his performance in the earlier episodes of the season provide the only psychologically engaging moments of Season 6. Kelly as always knocks his character out of the park...until his calm, collected, dedicated demeanor is usurped and replaced in the last ten minutes with a cowardly, idiotically sociopathic, and exceedingly manipulatable shell of what he once was.
The hyperbolic politics, the patronizing ambiguity, the soap opera inspired final scene, and good lord, the agonizingly atrocious final shot of Episode 608 culminate to form what is undoubtedly one of the worst series finales of all time. Never has a fall from grace been this quick and this brutal.
