What To Expect From House Of Cards’ Final Season

This Saturday, Netflix will dump another steaming season of House of Cards on our plates. With rib bibs tucked tightly at our necks and steak knives raised high, what should we expect to wolf down over the next week? And just how bloody will it get?

Whatever its faults (and we’ll get to them later), House of Cards knows how to get you hooked. Season one launched with the broken promise that throws Francis into murderous indignation, as well as a straight-to-camera monologue that sent audiences scrambling to determine the tone of the show. High camp? Low prestige? Airport thriller? Avant guarde theatre?

Season two began by disposing of a central character, as Frank’s personalised cufflinks delivered a distinct message to the viewer. We’ve gone off the rails? We’ve gotten too meta? F.U. We’re doing whatever we want.

There’s a reason why House of Cards seems a different beast, slightly unique in the television landscape. While other television has adapted to new viewing methods and digital demands — Scandal is extremely twitter friendly, for example, while Bob’s Burger makes incredible viral music vids — no other shows have been built for binging like the offerings from Netflix. Arrested Development is so steeped in entendre and callbacks that rewatching is a necessity. Bojack Horseman added a new flavour to the mix with the melancholy cliff-hanger — a sort of emotional hook that rears up from the depths of Hollywood in-jokes and animal puns in each episodes’ final moments, to drag you onwards to the next.

House of Cards is more densely shallow than either of these programs; labyrinthine plotting and political jargon keeps your brain buzzing while your feelings flutter alongside Frank and Claire’s sharp mood swings. Each episode is 45 minutes of Whiplash jazz-noodling, plus a couple of catchy brainworms to keep you coming back. Do I understand what happened with the education bill, the money laundering, and that Chinese bridge? No, but I worked overtime trying to keep up. Do I remember the bit where Frank threw a steak and then had a threesome with his wife and security officer? Uh, yeah. I do. And then I sent my friend a gif about it.

Who needs clarity when you’ve got dramatic pool meat to throw?

So: what do we have to look forward to this season? Frank and Claire are in the White House, after the impeachment of President Walker. The art work for the upcoming batch of eps seems to show the Underwoods reigning supreme, but will Frank and Claire be undone on a bigger battlefield, or by their own past indiscretions? Are we watching a modern day Richard III, or Macbeth?

President Underwood must contend with some sort of military action, and, more immediately, possibly shirt-front a disrespectful, spouse-abusing, Putin-esque Russian president.

His right-hand man Doug appears to have been shut down by that rock to the skull last season, only to be replaced by the calmly slick Remy, a man who’s swapped sides more than once before. A quick squiz at IMDB shows that Doug’s brother will be dropping by – either he’s good at intimidating sex workers and saw a job opportunity, or Doug’s fatal walk in the woods has led to a messy cover-up. And everyone’s favourite hamster-owning hacker (we miss you Cashew!) has landed himself inside some kind of IT task force – most likely taking on the role of the civilian-with-too-much-info sputtering around Underwood’s periphery. That’s a lot for Frank to think about, alongside running the most powerful country in the Western world.

Meanwhile, Claire’s jumped into Frank’s old rowing machine. Is it simply too dangerous for her to jog anymore, or does she have some plotting of her own that can only be thought through via the repeated reverberating motions? If running on screen is a symbol of a character clearing their head (see Spacey’s own foray into therapeutic jogging in American Beauty), then rowing on HoC just seems to thicken the stew. Teasers so far have been sadly devoid of Molly Parker’s Jackie Sharp, an ex-military Capitol Hill operator who may have been a worthy ally and/or nemesis to the Underwoods, depending on just where she fell in the power-hungry/ethically-nebulous/happily-subservient Venn diagram that governs all characters on this show.

If House of Cards does have a flaw it’s just this – the characters’ nearly endless unapologetic moral anaemia. Look, maybe politics is a dirty game, but can we get out of the mud every now and again? It would be different if the players were ever stymied by the law, but so far we’ve seen little justice served. Are the makers of this show as cynical as its worldview seems to be? Beau Willimon, the fantastically named showrunner, recently spoke to Vulture and said “[Frank] doesn’t see himself as evil. He sees people who try to reduce things to the black and white of good versus evil as foolish. … I think when people talk about morality tales, they’re assuming that there’s an objective morality. Frank Underwood, being quite honest in the way that he approaches the world, doesn’t view things that way.” At least Claire appears troubled by what they’ve done.

When television is about politics, it’s hard not to try and gauge whether it’s descriptive or prescriptive – The Thick Of It is a perfect snap shot of Gordon Brown’s meandering, invisible leadership post-Tony Blair, where as The West Wing is a progressive, intellectual antidote to George W. Bush’s conservative ignorance. One shows us what we’re doing wrong, and the other shows what we could be doing right. House of Cards, meanwhile, depicts a Washington so entrenched in power plays that partisanship is barely part of the conversation. If everyone is acting this bad, who cares what side they’re on?

It’s a depressing take on the topic, especially if you can draw some easy parallels to our current situation in Australia. If nothing else, it should act as a clear indicator of things to come, a crystal ball towards tomorrow. After all, last season we watched an ineffectual leader try and blunder his way amongst a sea of bitter alliances and back-stabbings, only to be toppled by a charismatic, hyper-articulate shark who’s had an eye on the prize from the beginning. Binge the new episodes this weekend, and maybe we’ll know what to expect when Malcolm finishes having his ring fitted. Knock knock.

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House of Cards arrives on American Netflix this Saturday, and will be available on Netflix AU when it launches in March.

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Matt Roden co-hosts FBi Radio’s film & TV show, Short Cuts, at 10am each Saturday; his illustration and design work is here.