Of all the spoilers Ashley Parker and David Carr have published about “House of Cards,†the details of episode 11 take the cake, so by all means run away if you have not seen. If you want to catch up on recaps, by all means dive into the archive of these chats about the politics and media aspects of the Netflix original series: episode one, two,three, four, five/a>, six,seven , eight, nine or 10.
Episode 11
Synopsis: Frank Underwood goes from hardball tactics to cold-blooded murder. Zoe tries on the garment of a married woman.
Carr: Whoa. We know that evil lurks in the heart of Frank Underwood, but cold-hearted murder I did not see that coming. I guess it was foreshadowed in the first episode when Frank comes out to find a dog mortally wounded and, when no one is looking, snaps its neck with no compunction. I thought that was supposed to put us on notice that the House Whip was a man of action, but now we know that we were being put on notice that he was capable of anything.
Frank wants to be vice president, or president, or king of the world or something like that. To that end, he gained custody of Peter Russo, dusted him off, built him up, then set him up. Then he drove him home where Peter passed out in the car. Frank sees an opportunity, turns on the car, closes the garage door and in that moment, murders the Congressman. (I’ll just skip over the part where we fail to suspend disbelief and notice that he did so in a public parking garage that was likely lousy with security cameras.)
I’m sure that in it’s two century-plus history, one of Congress’s members has committed and gotten away with murder, but it seemed like a bit of a fridge nuke or shark jump, or whatever they are calling a giant plot error these days. It seemed forced, but then again, I have yet to watch much of the Brit version of “House of Cards†because the lugubrious turns toward the camera in the original are impossible for me to get past. We’ve never discussed, but maybe you watched enough to know, Ashley: Are the makers of the American version of “House of Cards†following track laid down in the U.K. version
Parker: I have not watched the British “House of Cards†â€" yet! â€" and I don’t have a great sense of how true-to-the-original the current show is. (Readers, please feel free to help out on comments below.) Ignoring, as you point out, the various implausibilities surrounding Frank Underwood’s murder of Peter Russo, I’m curious as to whether killing him was always part of the plan, or whether what we saw was a desperate Frank Underwood, improvising at the last minute.
“There was a plan here, Doug,†Frank tells his right-hand man, when Peter first goes missing. “He explodes, he withdraws, we put him back together, and he quietly goes away.â€
Putting Peter Russo back together and having him quietly go away feels like it should have been a repentant statement to the press about wanting to spend time with his family â€" not a literal snuffing out courtesy of carbon monoxide.
For all of Peter’s flaws, I think one of the things that makes him such an appealing character is his resilience, and his strong sense of right and wrong â€" even if he can’t always personally abide by it. What we saw in this episode was someone with no moral code (Frank) realizing that he might not be able to control the fierce-if-sometimes-wayward moral code of someone else (Peter), and panicking.
Realizing his own lack of control â€" Peter may not be quite the easy mark he’d first expected â€" Frank resorts to murder. And while it’s definitely in cold blood, I don’t know how premeditated it was. It seems to me that we watch the idea strike Frank in the car, and he seizes the opportunity. What do you think, David
Carr: Yeah, he was improvising all right, and as any musician will tell you, a person’s true colors come out when they leave the sheet music behind. Speaking of which, how about the provocation of Zoe putting on Claire’s dress That is pretty far up there on the naughty scale. She is clearly communicating to Frank that he is up against some asymmetries he may not have anticipated.
More and more, I get the sense that Zoe never had anything resembling a real human feeling for Frank. She saw her chance, saw a source of leverage and took it, but now her attitude toward him seems to be hardening into something that looks a lot more like hatred than desire. You could say that they deserve each other, but Zoe is a kid who lost her way. Frank is a guy who a long time ago came to the fork in the road and took the one covered in sleaze. Even in an age of very popular antiheroes and narcissists â€" â€Mad Men’s†Don Draper, Walter White of “Breaking Bad,†Raylan Givens in “Justified†â€" Frank Underwood sticks out as bad to the bone. Those other characters might be able to explain how what they do and the choices they make are somehow in the interests of something resembling the greater good. Frank Not so much. Like Zoe, I’m beginning to think I can’t even respect his sui generis version of evil. And you, Ashley
Parker: At first I was confused about Ms. Barnes’s sudden reversal on Mr. Underwood. But I think you’re right; she saw her chance and she took it. Mr. Underwood was nothing more than the conduit into a good story. Now, when Mr. Underwood is no longer proving himself as useful as she previously thought, she’s willing to drop him â€" and certainly less eager to sleep with a married married who’s older than her dad. In a way, she’s been oddly consistent. Though that certainly hasn’t made me come around to her cause.
With Frank, the problem is not merely his sui generis version of evil; it’s that he’s proving himself to be not even particularly good at it. At the beginning, whatever I thought of his motivations and choices, I at least had a grudging respect for his mastery of the messy game of politics. But from his on-air gaffe that went viral to getting double-crossed by his own wife to, now, murder as a means of damage control, Frank has proved himself not even particularly deft at being an evil politician.
