“House of Cards” Recap, Episode 8: You Can Go Home Again, It Just Might Get Complicated

Deep into “House of Cards” and wondering what it all means You are not the only one. Ashley Parker and David Carr read between the lines of episode eight in search of a deeper message.

All our recaps include juicy asides, but they also include tons of spoilers, so don’t look if you haven’t seen. If you want to catch up with past chats, you can find episode one, two,three, four, five, six or seven for the clicking.

Episode Eight Synopsis: Frank Underwood returns to The Sentinel, his military college, for a homecoming of sorts. Peter Russo also returns home, to face a tough group of constituents and friends he grew up with, who are upset with the closing of their shipyard.

Parker: No Zoe Barnes, no Slugline, no journalism â€" what a refreshing episode! This chapter felt like a homecoming â€" warm and tough and nostalgic and bittersweet, all at once. Frank Underwood returned to The Sentinel, “South Carolina’s premiere military college,” and a clear stand-in for The Citadel. There, at the dedication of a library in his name, he caroused with old buddies, spending a whisky-fueled all-nighter that ends with him recalling an old love â€" a clearly deeply meaningful affair he had as a student, with a fellow male cadet. “I was so drawn to you,” he tells his friend and former lover, now also a grown man, and with a family of his own. “You meant something to me. I believe that.”

It’s one of the first times we see Frank truly vulnerable â€" and perhaps more meaningful â€" truly sincere. He seems, for once, at a loss of words when trying to define what this place (and this person, in particular) meant to him. No metaphors or truisms about power will work here.

Peter Russo has the opposite experience. He returns home to find an angry crowd of former kids-from-the-neighborhood-turned- constituents. They are both hostile and terrified about the closing of their shipyard and the accompanying loss of jobs. It’s another homecoming, with another bittersweet ending: Though the mob first shouts him down at a community board meeting, we watch him win them over on his and their own turf â€" a dive bar â€" as he grows into himself as a politician and rallies them behind a new Watershed bill that he says could help the community. Not as fast as you’d like, he admits, and not as much as you’d like, at least not at first, but by the end they’re with him.

This episode struck me as the most un-House of Cards “House of Cards” so far. What did you make of it, David

Carr: To paraphrase you Ashley, no Zoe Barnes, no Slugline, no journalism â€" what’s the point One of the conventions of television shows, especially one that is playing for multiple seasons, is that we come to know the characters in a deeper way. I understand the gesture, but the actual episode Glad it felt like a breath of fresh air to you, but it felt like a hot empty wind to me.

What did we learn about Frank Underwood That he was a real person who once came from somewhere and was even part of a choral group That he wasn’t always a lizard who walks upright and casually snacks on those around them So stipulated, but there was nothing in his trip back to his college days that suggested how he became what he is. The fact that he was a semester gay Again, how is that reflected in his current makeup and the choices he is making as an adult

Peter Russo’s trip home, on the other hand, felt real as politics gets. Anybody who has been near a campaign â€" I worked a bit on the Dukakis campaign a hundred years ago and also contributed speeches to the now-departed Paul Wellstone â€" knows that the will of the people can be a tough thing to meet face-to-face. You can shine all the rhetoric you want, work on set and setting, but when you are a politician in possession of a bad set of facts, you are going to get hammered on occasion. If all politics are local in one way or another, local events are when the going can get tough. Sometimes it is just one more grip-and-grin at the local cafe, but in other instances, it becomes a crucible.

As you point out Ashley, Peter enters the crucible and comes out the other side annealed by the process, but still standing. Those who cover or even watch political news unfold can sometimes cynically dismiss the whole process as artificial and often pointless, but in my experience people win higher office because they did something right, did something authentic, did something that allows people to go into the booth and pull the lever hoping that this time it will be different. Peter Russo became a guy they could actually vote for in this episode.

Parker:You’re right. Maybe I was just so relieved at not having to worry about how Zoe was trampling journalism’s not-even-very-good-name-to-begin-with through the unnecessary sexual mud. And it’s good to see Frank, supported by his ever stalwart wife Claire, blowing off steam for the night with people his age.

Returning to Frank and Claire Underwood, in a terrific Slate piece, Hanna Rosin asks if the Underwoods have “an ideal marriage.” “True, we never see them have sex,” she writes, “but there is an erotic charge between them, or at least a deep intimacy, symbolized by that nightly shared cigarette.”

So yes, getting a glimpse of Frank’s authentic self was interesting â€" even if, as you point out, having a “gay semester” doesn’t really explain anything about who he is, or even the fascinating relationship he and his wife have.