In an exciting and dangerous season everything looks different from the above, a series of exciting events in the Sixth season. Clare clashed with Marc Asher, who will be pressured to sign a new law. Doug is working to find a new way. Claire is consulting with Jane in Syria and Russian President Viktor Petrov wants a deal with Clara in the shadow of the Syrian crisis.
The self-serious drama hasn't just morphed into a Ryan Murphy fantasy sequence; it appears to have thought more holistically about what promoting women should actually look like.
House of Cards is off to a much better start this season, thanks in large part to the notable subtraction and subsequent elevation of its stars, but it is still very much House of Cards, different in good ways but still the same in the bad ones.
A nicely labyrinthine plot means the season is far from a complete failure. But with Wright required to carry the entire enterprise, Netflix's first global hit looks set to limp into the sunset rather than triumphantly take its bows.
It sounds like a compelling story, but Claire remains an icy, tough-to-read cipher through much of it, despite flashbacks to her childhood and that fourth-wall-breaking, talking-to-the-viewers thing that Spacey once did so well.
A closing chapter, without Spacey, allows the show its rightful final bow, unencumbered by scandal, and defined, in its finality, by a character far more complex and compelling than Spacey's Frank Underwood could ever have been.
Cards has always been a show whose plot contortions could confuse and whose incremental intrigue could bore, and those problems are worse now that everyone seems to be whispering.
