I believe you’re correct; I would assume that he was still on the White House payroll while recovering from Rachel’s head-bonking, but the show wasn’t clear on exactly what his status was (unless I missed something).
I noticed that Robin Wright directed a couple of the recent episodes. I’m wondering if she had some input into the way her character was written during Season 3.
Frank has no compassion for the poor, it’s just that AmWorks is a huge deal. It would cement his place in history; he would be remembered as a great President. His concern now is that he doesn’t want to be Gerald Ford. He wants to be FDR. (Granted, he can’t serve more than the next term, but you know.)
Having defended that point, I thought Season 3 was horrible.
As much as one has to suspend disbelief to enjoy a show, one had to suspend WAY too much disbelief for Season 3, and even then it felt as if nothing happened. It took essentially forever to get to Frank winning Iowa and Rachel presumably getting killed - note that we never actually see her dead, we just see Doug shovelling dirt onto something, so by the Laws of Television, Rachel can be resurrected quite easily. In Season 1 or 2 they’d have told this much story in three episodes.
My problem with suspending my disbelief isn’t AmWorks, which I agree is on its face politically impossible but it’s just a symbol for “big fancy project” and I don’t care about the details. My problem is this; President Underwood is, easily, the most worst President since James Buchanan. His Presidency has been such an embarrassing disaster that it’s inconceivable he would ever have been in double digits in the primary race. He has no allies in either party, his foreign policy was a fiasco, the appointment of Claire to the ambassadorship was a disaster, AmWorks was cancelled for a hurricane that never happened, every other country in the world appears to distrust him, his pardoning of Raymond Tusk is apparently about as popular as cancer, and his Chief of Staff quit before he could even finish the campaign in Iowa. His own party doesn’t want him running. He’d be a national joke, regarded with the sort of snickering attitude reserved for Dan Quayle. The odds of him winning the nomination, much less the Presidency, would be lower than Peter Griffin’s. And yet he won Iowa. Who the hell supported him? Until two years “ago” he wasn’t even really a national figure save a few moments in the limelight like the education bill; most people in Iowa who aren’t politics junkies would not have been able to pick him out of a lineup until he became Vice President, and for his Presidency they’ve watched an administration that has literally done everything wrong. Not some things, but everything.
Of course, this may be the point; that Frank has Peter-principled himself, manipulated himself into a position where he is suddenly wildly over his head. But while that is both plausible and a logical place for the show to go, Frank did not generally act like Frank. If they wanted to take the show in that direction what we should have seen was Frank being Frank, manipulating and scheming and outwitting his enemies in Washington with acts of wonderfully sociopathic evil, but finding that it doesn’t make him popular with the people, or help him with a foreign leader who owes him no political capital, or what have you. Instead we got a Frank who is still a nasty character but seems to be outwitted by the world; he is hopelessly inept at pretty much every turn. His only really interesting scheme is making Jackie Sharp his stalking horse/future VP candidate and he blows it because he’s stupid. And of course Claire Underwood, same thing; she was a complete doofus. She was about as good at diplomacy as Don Rickles. What a clown. Her ineptitude alone would sink Frank’s campaign.
The whole point to House of Cards is “Jesus, what will these two sociopaths do next?” They were the protagonists, the subjects, the actors; THEY made things happen, and when something threatened them they came up with something even more nasty. Now they are the objects; things are happening to them. While this may, logically, make sense, as most Presidents do the job of President worse than they do any other job in their lives, it’s not helping the show.
As to the Doug/Rachel storyline, Christ, that was boring. We spend 12 episodes watching Doug drink or not drink, and then in one episode he finds her and probably kills her. That’s it? It didn’t even affect the rest of the show.
You make a lot of good points in your post, but for now I just wanted to correct one thing: We do see the side of Rachel’s poking out of the dirt for an instant before Doug shovels over it. She’s definitely dead.
I think what they were trying to do with the whole Doug sequence was paralleling his physical recovery with a psychological one. Showing him try to change, struggle, and slide back even as he was learning to walk and take care of himself again. Then, just when he claws his way back up into Frank’s favor, and we think he might finally be over his unhealthy obsession with Rachel, we get the gut punch of him sliding back and doing something horrible. It was meant as an emotional smack in the face, and I felt it that way at the time, but on further consideration, I agree that it feels like a waste of time to set up a cheap twist. A twist that only worked because they spent so much time making us think that maybe Rachel had gotten away and that Doug had grown a tiny proto-conscience.
I agree with pretty much all of RickJay’s post, but I think Spacey’s acting saved season 3 from being completely horrible.
In addition to being dumbfounded by anyone actually supporting Frank in Iowa or elsewhere, wasn’t he unable to raise any campaign funds? How did he get any money at all to compete with Dunbar?
One more point of minor frustration; you know who came off looking the most inept in that debate? John King. My goodness, what a failure of a moderator.
And yes, we did see the side of Rachel’s face in the ground. She dead.
You see an ear. It is not verifiably Rachel Posner’s. Sorry, but according to the Laws of Television, they can leave her dead or can come up with a resurrection. It’d be lame, but all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.
Despite this season being lower in quality than the other two, I don’t think that’s this show’s style. I would be incredibly surprised if Rachel turns up alive. It seemed blatantly obvious to me that the scenes as shown were meant to indicate that Doug had a change of heart, drove back to Rachel, killed her, and buried her. It’s not like Doug had another convenient Rachel-like corpse sitting around in the van with him. If he’s willing to kill someone to make it appear as though Rachel died, why not just kill Rachel?
The whole arc was about Doug’s completely unflinching loyalty to Underwood. We’re meant to question his loyalty while he’s working with Dunbar. Doug questions it when Rachel begs for her life. He really didn’t want to kill her, we see that because he lets her go at first. But then he stops the car, clearly struggling with the decision, and decides he can’t risk her being a threat to Underwood. The brief shot of Rachel is meant to give the viewer confirmation without being too gratuitous. There’s no one else there to fool. Doug has given most of his life to supporting Underwood; if that amounts to nothing, then so does his life. He can’t let that happen.
Well that much is totally realistic ;).
As for Frank’s unpopularity, didn’t Gerald Ford have to deal with similar stuff when he was running in '76? He had a popular challenger (Ronald Reagan) and was deeply unpopular for pardoning Nixon. And Ford won the nom (he was like Peter principled himself - and likely wasn’t a sociopathic wheeler-dealer ;)).
No, that doesn’t make any sense. You see the side of Rachel’s face in the hole as Doug shovels dirt onto her. She is most definitely dead. I can’t believe this is even in question.
Or do you think Doug had another unnamed female imprisoned inside his van which he then killed and buried in the middle of nowhere for no reason whatsoever? :dubious:
Yes, by The Laws of Television, unless you see a body, an important character is likely not dead. Hence why you did see Rachel’s body. She’s dead. She’s not coming back- this isn’t The Walking Dead.
Of course, there are exceptions even when a severed head of the deceased is presented. Such is the case in Prison Break, which features, I think, the most bizarre and terribly explained return from death of any TV character.
Explain to me that whole “I want you to fuck me, Francis!” scene.
What was going through Clair’s head?
I think Claire is trying to assert some control after being frustrated that her turn in the limelight doesn’t matter and the political partnership is just for Frank’s benefit. Part of me wonders if what was alluded to in the episodes where Frank goes back to the Sentinal is at play - that Frank is actually a closeted gay man and their relationship isn’t all that sexual. Therefore Claire is trying to demand some intimacy after she realizes that her political goals are always going to be secondary.
I wondered if the stunt was meant to emasculate Frank, given how he marginalized her contributions and opinions. Of course it backfired when he pointed out that the oval office contained only one chair behind the president’s desk. Realizing that all she has left is to play second fiddle to his authority, she’s decided to do the only thing she can to get her revenge - take the presidency away from him.
Because he fucked her over politically, so he might as well fuck her physically too?