I’ve seen the first
five episodes of Season Two of House of Cards. I will absolutely be spoiling
the first episode and mention minor things in the next four.
I thought the first season of House of Cards was fine. It had a cool style and fine performances,
but it never lived up to the hype that it was creating for itself. Then
something changed during the premiere of its new season. It decided that it was
going to be crazier.
Sure Frank killed Peter Russo at the end of his convoluted
plan to make the Vice President quit. However that was seen as a dark scary
moment in Frank’s psyche that allowed him to improvise from his scheme and
learned a bit about his psychotic ambition. Yet it still wasn’t that interesting
of character inspection because I never cared about Frank. I didn’t care about
any character on the show; I felt bad about the lack of control in Peter
Russo’s life but now he’s gone.
In Season Two, the show seems to embrace how emotionally
distant the show is and will just let us enjoy the chaos. And this show really wants
to be chaotic. It’s taking the Breaking
Bad big moments without any of the emotional stepping-stones it takes to
get to those moments.
At this point in the show, we have a vice president who is
essentially a serial killer, a wife who is threatening unborn babies, a McPoyle
hacker who will bark like a dog to save his beloved guinea pig and a possible
Christian lesbian—definitely Christian, maybe lesbian—who is converting a prostitute
who can blackmail the aforementioned VP.
This show is silly.
So very silly.
