I’ve really enjoyed this show and am looking forward to season 5.
I reviewed a few episodes of the previous seasons to get reacquainted with the characters, plot lines, etc.
I love the intro music.
And I still fear Kevin Spacey speaking directly to me, though.
So creepy. I swear Kevin Spacey talks to me more than my husband of 30 years does!
LOL!
Just watched 5.1.
Something has changed. Maybe the directing. Maybe the writing.
I hope this isn’t the 5th season curse that afflicts so many previously great shows.
Nobody else binging yet? I’m 8 eps in. No spoilers, but I’m finding the endless phone calls and in person conversations re which senator/rep is voting which way very boring. 
Jeff Beals is a master. I love the HOC theme almost as much as the one for Carnivale.
That last exchange of ep 1 was… perfect terror.
It seems a tad shallower and more obvious. Maybe that’s deliberate, as he’s no longer hiding his actions as much. I hope it builds depth.
I quit in the first few episodes of season 3(found the writing getting worse). However, the moment at the end of an early S2 episode where Spacey(Underwood) is looking in a mirror then stops and looks at the camera is freaky and amazing.
It’s the one where he had just pushed that girl in front of the subway train.
“Oh, hello. Perhaps you thought I forgot about you? …maybe you were hoping I did.”
I was surprised by the Bohemian Grove manque which appears in… episode 8?
I suppose Alex Jones should get the credit for that. Suddenly, that sort of thing is popular.
Here was an interview Beal did on Song Exploder a while back you might enjoy (if you have not heard this interview already).
I actually quit watching the series after that episode. The very idea of someone who is days away from being sworn in as Vice President personally (that’s the key word) murdering someone was so absurd that I stopped watching.
Now I’m not so naive as to believe that people haven’t been murdered for political reasons, but there’s absolutely no way Vice-President Designate Underwood would have done it himself. He would have had it done for him so as to allow for plausible deniability.
I know he took precautions, but it was still too much of a risk for someone in that position to commit that act in a public place like a subway station.
Suspension of disbelief can only take you so far.
I know he later became President Underwood…but are they getting close to figuring out he was the killer–or are they close to finding out some other nefarious deed he’s committed since S2?
Here’s hoping so.
You saved yourself a lot of frustration by bailing early.
Finished yesterday. Oof, it went downhill. I didn’t like last season very much and this season wsa a drop off that. Most shows do drop off eventually, but it’s not great for Netflix if their shows drop off so much so fast, ESPECIALLY if they’re doing half the episodes per season as network shows.
I find it too hard to suspend my disbelief now and there’s literally no one to root for at all. Even Tom from the Herald is mostly annoying now via being a dupe.
I tend to look at it as Frank thinking he’s this deep Machiavellian chess-master, but really he just does a lot of impulsive vindictive things and pretends they were planned all along when events luckily happen to go his way.
Unfortunately in a scripted drama, “luck” means “contrived plotting”, and it wears thin.
Wow, this show has lost it.
They already did the “Congressman becomes President by magic.” thing. And that wasn’t absurd enough*. So they resorted to the very, very tired trope of a Electoral College mess plus Congressional deadlock. We’ve just seen it done on Scandal and Veep and seemingly all other shows of this type. Enough already. No good show should ever go there ever again.
And they yet managed to find a way to go even further downhill from that.
It was all full of stupid.
E.g., PotUS shows up at the door of the House chamber and walks in. Until the door opens no one inside knows PotUS is there. What? In what universe can the President sneak around like that? People have cell phones now, folks.
Just a ton of stuff like that.
I know they gotta keep the cast small, but the White House is crawling with a ton of people (who actually do most of their work in the EOB). Claire as VP would have her own staff and her own chief of staff. I saw only one brief bit where she was being briefed on her schedule by an aide. There are more than 3 people running things.
No way does some nobody newspaper guy who was recently fired get a plum press job and then fills in for the Press Secretary. Too much magic.
And the whole Patricia Clarkson appearing of nowhere and suddenly being incredibly influential in everything. Some indications of concern that she isn’t who she pretends to be. Well, duh! Just someone awkwardly shoehorned in.
The Hammerschmidt storyline just fails. All of his hard work does nothing. I guess he’s supposed to be Sad Guy now since he realized he was played. But the arc just doesn’t work right.
They mention Jackie and Remy a few times but no appearances for these major characters from years past. Yet they bring back Major Dad for some reason.
It’s like the whole season was written by people who didn’t get the show.
And the deal with Romero: Rochelle? As in Rochelle, Rochelle, the musical? So he like cheesy “erotic” plays, who cares?
I liked the parts that were inspired by real life like the pseudo-Edward Snowden, Claire in the situation room watching a terrorist leader getting taken out, various Trump-esque lines coming from Frank, etc. But the season really dialled the silliness factor up to 11.
The scene that got me was Frank shoving the Secretary of State down the stairs. Every other time he exits his office/residence area during the show there is at least one, often two, secret service agents station right there. That single time they were conveniently missing. What, he sent them off to get him some ribs or something?
Plus, there were only like five or six steps down to the landing. How in the world could he think it a sure thing she’d be killed, or at least incapacitated so badly she couldn’t tell what he did? Heck, a couple of years ago I fell down a full flight of stairs and slammed into a glass wall. The wall didn’t break, and neither did a single bone in my body. The worst damage I got was a bruised elbow.
What did he plan to do if she’d fallen as easily as I did? Run down and strangle her with his necktie?
ftg wrote: E.g., PotUS shows up at the door of the House chamber and walks in. Until the door opens no one inside knows PotUS is there. What? In what universe can the President sneak around like that? People have cell phones now, folks.
StarvingButStrong wrote: The scene that got me was Frank shoving the Secretary of State down the stairs. Every other time he exits his office/residence area during the show there is at least one, often two, secret service agents station right there. That single time they were conveniently missing. What, he sent them off to get him some ribs or something?
This show crashed and burned (at least for me) when VP-Designate Underwood pushed the reporter into the path of that subway train, and I posted up thread that I stopped watching because the situation seemed so implausible. I haven’t seen anything past that episode, and judging from the quotes above, it seems the story lines are getting more ridiculous with each passing episode…
This one I can answer - the fixer guy (Usher?) mentioned that Romero was present at some incident where a woman was injured/died. He wasn’t directly involved, but he still wouldn’t want it to come out at this point. Underwood was upset that it hadn’t been shared with him earlier.
I don’t know if it was the worst season (they kind of all blend in my mind), but wasn’t real happy with it.
[ul]
[li]Too much ‘time jumping’. An episode would start and I couldn’t figure out how much time elapsed from the previous one until sometime in. Made things confusing for no reason I could see.[/li][li]Clarkson as some kind of super spy/fixer/??? No idea who she is, where she came from, how she knows everything, why anyone trusts her.[/li][li]The big reveal that Frank (and Doug) have been purposely sabotaging Frank to install Claire makes no sense.[/li][li] I guess Lee Ann needed to die (if she is actually dead), but if I were Frank I would have killed his new boy toy - he seems much more likely to talk out of school than any other character[/li][/ul]
I think she was gang raped by his fraternity.
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I think we’re going to find out that Mark Usher and Jane Davis, together, are going to make a power play over the Underwood’s eventually.
I was expecting it, it but it was still creepy having Claire talk directly to the audience.
Romero was part of a gang rape some time in his past. Six men took turns raping a woman named Rochelle while Romero watched.
And Frank’s lover was killed, he was the “protestor” shot and killed after climbing the White House fence in the last episode.
I don’t think they should have had Claire speak to the camera in an earlier episode, it would have had more impact if it were just at the very end.
I totally get that they made the correct decision but it’s a damn shame that such a great show isn’t going to get a proper ending. Maybe they’ll pull it off. Do you think they’ll open with Claire leaving Frank’s funeral after a nut blew his head off? He already got shot once though.