“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.

The Breakfast Meeting: Fallon to Become Host of ‘Tonight’ and Ads Aim to Close Digital Divide

NBC has made a commitment to make Jimmy Fallon, the 38-year-old host of its “Late Night” show, the host of the “Tonight” show and to move the show from Burbank, Calif., back to New York, Bill Carter reports. Mr. Fallon would succeed Jay Leno, who will turn 63 next month and whose show still regularly leads the late-night ratings. The change would by fall 2014 at the latest. NBC has been desperate to avoid acrimony that often surrounds one of the biggest changes in late-night television; their attempt to replace Mr. Leno with Conan O’Brien three years ago ended with recriminations and a reversal, as Mr. Leno was reinstated and NBC endured weeks of negative coverage.

The Advertising Council and Connect2Compete, a nonprofit group dedicated to eliminating digital illiteracy in the United States, are introducing a public service campaign to help those on the wrong side of the digital divide find free classes to learn relevant new skills, Jane L. Levere writes. The campaign will reach out to what the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, said were the approximately 100 million people, mostly low-income families and minorities, who still do not have broadband in their homes. Ads will appear on television, radio and outdoors, and will feature a toll-free telephone number and texting service that provides information about free classes nearby after callers send their ZIP codes.

The new Big East college athletic conference chose an appropriate location for the its first party, given that its seed money is coming from Fox Sports 1: the Manhattan headquarters of News Corporation. On Wednesday, in the Fox News studio where “The Five” is produced, leaders from the seven Catholic universities that left the Big East gathered for a news conference with officials from Butler, Creighton and Xavier, their newly added conference mates, Richard Sandomir reports. The Big East presidents took a big risk two years ago when they rejected an ESPN contract for $140 million a year. Starting this season, the 10 colleges will share in a 12-year, $500 million contract with Fox Sports 1, a sum that will rise to $600 million if, as expected, the league expands to 12 members.

Critics of the government of the rightist Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, are decrying what they call bald attempts by his party to control the news media, judiciary, central bank and education, Dan Bilefsky reports. A long clash between Klubradio, a radio station that is often critical of Mr. Orban’s government, and Hungary’s news media council, which hands out frequencies to radio stations and is stocked with Orban supporters, is a primary example of the conflict; the station’s license was renewed last week after years of contention. Mr. Orban’s restrictive news media law has come under fire from the European Commission, news media watchdog groups and the Council of Europe. Government officials assert that since nearly 75 percent of Hungarian media is foreign-owned the idea of government control is ludicrous.

The computer networks of three major South Korean banks and the country’s two largest broadcasters were frozen Wednesday in cyberattacks that some experts suspect came from North Korea, Choe Sang-hun writes. The attacks, which left South Korean news crews staring at blank computer monitors and many people unable to withdraw money from ATMs, originated from an Internet provider with a Chinese address but the responsible party was still unknown, the Korea Communications Commission said. Many analysts speculate that North Korean hackers hone their skills in China, but their is little evidence to back them up.

Facebook’s Graph Search is a new tool that lets users search via phrase rather than keyword, and can turn up some interesting results if used correctly. Paul Boutin writes about how to make the most of the new tool.