Season Four Review: Despite Its Best Efforts, ‘House Of Cards’ Has Become A Good Show Again

This article contains mention of plot points up to the end of Season Three of House of Cards.

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After an indifferent third season, expectations that House of Cards could pull off a much-needed revitalisation were fragile at best. But something’s happened in the long break since Claire told Francis she was leaving him; the show’s pivoted in subtle but vital ways, blowing away the lassitude and deathly slow pace that characterised Season Three.

Don’t get me wrong, all the elements you hate to love and love to hate are still there: the ice-cold characterisation, the hysterically foreboding soundtrack, the gloomy rooms and dour faces. Frank still chews scenery and Claire continues to emulate a still-life. But finally, in a way we haven’t seen since the earliest episodes of the first season, the basic building blocks of drama are present and in order: conflict that’s external, internal and interpersonal, and storylines that amplify it.

The Underwoods’ marriage has always been a curious bond; at times the two are so intertwined in both disposition and dedication it seemed, for a while, that that they might well have the strongest marriage we’ve seen on TV since Coach and Tami Taylor, as perfect a Machiavellian coalition as the Taylors were a motivating one. At other times, theirs was a relationship more akin to Walter White and Jesse Pinkman (despite the notable absence of an innocent): bound together not by love or affection, but by the heavy load of ammunition accumulated over the course of a long and brutal cold war.

Season Three saw this festering wound split open after Frank suffered the Wildean tragedy of being given everything he wanted at the end of the previous season: suddenly he had the Presidency, and having built him up as a character who would stop at nothing to gain power without ever questioning what he intended to do with it, the show seemed unsure how to move forward. It struggled to turn Frank into a character that actually cared about something as suspiciously high-minded as the plight of the unemployed, and the growing chasm between the Underwoods moved into the spotlight. (The finale also dispatched of both Rachel and Doug’s last shreds of humanity in a sequence that was as heartbreaking as it was efficient.)

The pilot opens where we left off; Frank facing an uphill climb to secure the party’s nomination for re-election, and Claire gone. Frank’s chasing influence, money and popularity, in that order, and Claire’s retreated from the battlefront to work on a campaign of her own. When the two are separated, the difference between them clarifies: of their operation, Claire is the brains and Frank is the barbarian. Season Four sets out to rebuild the uneasy alliance between the two, and in the process it offers the most detailed, careful and nuanced depiction of political negotiation that the show has managed so far.

One of the issues with House Of Cards up ‘til now has been that things always come a little too easily for Frank. He’s never really faced an opponent who equals him in his skill for scheming or his moral abandonment. (Former President Garrett Walker, bless his cashmere socks, must have been the most innocent little flower ever to occupy the Oval). For the first time, he’s actually in a fair fight — against Claire, the one person who can match him.

Elections make for great TV, and even more so when we’re seeing a real one play out in tandem. Here again, House Of Cards appears to be raising the bar: after years of such pedestrian political issues like covering up murders and framing people for cyberterrorism, it’s almost shocking to see the Underwoods apply their skills to a Congress divided over gun legislation or the testy relations between the US and Russia.

Perhaps it’s because we’re watching this facing the ever-increasing likelihood that a man who wants to build a wall, deport Muslims and shut down the internet will be the Republican nominee, but there’s something softening about watching this indomitable couple face challenges that can’t be overcome with an impassioned monologue or an indifferent murder. There are times when it appears that Frank and Claire might be becoming almost… likable? It is difficult, at the very least, to learn more about Claire and Frank’s backgrounds without, if not going so far as to feel sympathy for them, understand a little more that their hearts were first frozen by others, rather than by their own doing.

House Of Cards’ Washington is still portrayed with a filter that’s as cynical as it is steel-grey, but there’s a creeping sense now that power might not just be the plaything of sociopaths but a privilege hard-fought and well-earned, and that the soul is simply the price leaders must pay to wield it. Whether they do so it anyone’s eventual good? That is yet to be seen.

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Maddie Palmer is a writer, broadcaster, TV and digital producer. She tweets from @msmaddiep.