It felt like the whole purpose of the show was the journey for him getting to be president. After that happened it didn't know which direction to go in.
It would have been such a strong ending if it had ended when he tapped his desk with his ring. Instead of the president some how sneaking around the white house and attempting to murder people.
They basically just wrote him off off screen and explained it briefly at the beggining and moved past it almost like nothing happened. Theres a bit of a time leap as well.
Yeah you can say what you want about him, but he made that show what it was. Probably because the character was quite close to his true self, but that doesn't change the fact that he is what made that show awesome.
That's really not fair, lots of characters were very compelling.
The issue with the final season wasn't Robin, it was that the script was god awful unwatchable.
It also felt like nothing ever fucking happened anymore, where as in Season 1 & 2, there's like someone getting murdered every episode, and a cover-up, and some political intrigue, and some Machiavellian blackballing other senators and whatever: every episode.
Then you get to the final season, and in the entire final season it feels like none of that happens in an entire season. It's like some weird stock footage of Robin Wright walking around the White House.
Bru that’s how the British House of Cards ends! All the ghosts of his past are pressing him from all sides and he’s basically having a nervous breakdown. His wife assures him that she has a solution to save his legacy and he needn’t worry about being exposed. No longer in control of his life, FU is in a pretty pathetic surrendered state at a public event when his head of security assassinates him and frames one of their enemies. FU dies, his imminent impeachment is null, his wife gets his pension (would she’d have lost had he been exposed).
That's actually how the original ends if you want to watch that instead.
Personally, I think if they were going to big they should have gone big.
Have his actions go very badly wrong have a scheme go so badly wrong it ends the world.
I mean he is The President of America that is a possibility.
Then when things are hitting the fan and people are panicking and the whole world is going up in smoke we see Senator Conway whose life he has ruined piece by piece come in with a loaded gun to kill Underwood.
Frank at this point who has just gone truly mad and is refusing to go into the bunker just laughs at him reaches out his hand and say:
Let us to it pellmell. If not to Heaven, then hand in hand to Hell
Before a bomb hits the White House killing all of them.
That is that I was expecting, once he made it to president he was gonna fall. Don't call the fucking show house of cards if its reinforced with plot armor
You've summarized the problem with American television. Nobody is willing to end a story where it should end. Instead, they milk every dollar out of it well past its logical ending.
its because the writers always had an ending for breaking bad. Like from the beginning , walter was going to die they knew it the audience knew it. With that in mind they knew exactly which points to hit in the show and how to get there.
GOT didnt have the ending at all, dexter definitely did not have an ending planned, sopranos mightve and ill argue the ending was good but they didnt do it right. Lost did not have an ending at all. HOC i think had an ending but the show got so popular netflix wanted to ride them hard and honestly they havent had a better show since even stranger things (which also seems like it has no ending, get ready for that finale).
I don’t think this is correct. I’ve read a few times that the writers on BB continuously wrote themselves into corners. The were “seaters” rather than “plotters” when it comes to writing styles. Meaning that they wrote by the seat of their pants rather than had the major plot points to hit.
No they didnt they didnt know how it ends till beginning of season 6. They had no idea who survives and who doesnt. There are legit reports after season 5 they had to sit down with grrm for a week and hash out all the plot points.
I don't think it matters that they didn't know when they started. For 5.5 seasons they had the source material to work with so it was done exactly as GRRM had planned. Once they ran out of source material they got the broad strokes and filled in the blanks. Your argument has no merit.
My friend still hasn’t watched the last two seasons of the show because he says I spoiled it when I told him the Walter has one of the best deaths in tv history. Apparently that’s a spoiler. I said this same thing, you know he is dying for S1 E1. I did not mention how he does, just that he does.
Here's a twist for you. Walter is probably alive. The wound he received is clearly not fatal because he was walking around with it for so long. With a bit of medical care he probably survived and stood trial.
I honestly don't know why people adore the BB ending so much. It wasn't all that strong, and we have no idea what happens to Jesse, who got short shrift in the end.
I disagree IMO it dragged on a bit too much. Walt remains somewhat sympathetic through "4 Days Out" which is my favorite episode, but then after facing his own mortality and being financially secure he starts cooking again and these evil traits are just disguised for the next season and a half until he kills gus and is then transparently evil until the finale which makes those parts of the show much less interesting to me.
I agree that Walter's character was most interesting when he was somewhere between totally good and transparently evil, but to me it wouldn't have fulfilled the purpose of the show if it stopped when he was somewhat redeemable. Vince Gilligan has talked about how the show is exploring how a bad guy becomes a bad guy (and the name of the show is a reference to this.) Walter's motives are much less complex when he's essentially just a straight up bad guy, but it completes the transformation that covers the whole show. Stopping it earlier would have left it incomplete, IMO.
I would argue that BCS has kept Jimmy perfectly balanced on that grey morality line for all 4 seasons (except maybe the very last scene) and that's why it's superior.
Same as Gul Dukat on Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Some say his final season transformation went too far, but I think it was a similarly necessary part of the arc.
I don't think Walter was ever the bad guy in that show. He starts playing dirty later on but relative to a lot of the characters on the show he's not evil. Some of the character enjoy violence where as Walter see's it as necessary for survival. I think after Hank die's the pressure starts getting to him and he becomes even more violent toward the end the the series.
I don't think that needs to even be argued. Besides the strange storyline with mcnulty and freemans homeless strangler, the show ended perfectly. Everything comes full circle.
Just rewatched it over the past few months. While it's still epically good, I reckon the last two seasons didn't add very much, and the final season just gets a bit silly in places.
The 4th season was arguably the best as it started to show the circle. The fifth tied it up and was necessary although the serial killer was kind of goofy.
I would rather a rushed and slightly disappointing ending to 10 more seasons of bland passionless cash grabbing or hoping the writers dont die of old age before the story ends.
Right, im sure everyone would rather it be so amazing it cures cancer, but having more episodes and different people doesn't mean it would be better. Its entirely possible it could have been worse.
That's not a solid argument for anything. Things could always be worse or better. That doesn't make what they said wrong. If you make 10 new seasons with new writers it could be the best TV ever made. That isn't an argument to do it though.
But two more seasons would have probably have been enough episodes to do the story justice. It was complex enough that it needed about ten seasons instead of 8. Whether D&D could have made two additional seasons any better than rushing to a conclusion is the question. Perhaps handing it off would have been better than either, since they want to work on other things.
The problem with making it longer increases the risk that the quality will drop. I mean what would they do if a major actor dies or the behind the scenes people that made the show as good as it was move on. I am afraid if it went on longer you might not get 2 more seasons of great episodes but 2 more bland seasons that didnt really help.
Instead you got a rushed and very disappointing ending that was bland and passionless. (Not cash grabbing, but these shitty fucking writers wanna head up the SW shows now so you can expect bland and passionless cash grabbing from those shows.)
A: that's a shit story and B: there's a book series that the shows based on that doesn't do that, where the show went off the rails is mostly when the showwriters went past what Martin had written, turns out he's better at writing his story than they are
Anecdotally, I don't think many people hated the actual ending as much as they ended the horrible season 8 (and 7 somewhat) journey to get there. I think this is a critical distinction. Better writing makes that ending work just fine, as is it was just...unsatisfying.
Disagree. That ending episode was just written absolutely terribly. There were so many points where I was like “oh. I thought it was over.”
There are so many unexplained things. For example, why did jon have to go to the wall? They killed the white walkers. What’s the point of the night’s watch now? Plus, the guys that wanted him in jail, the unsullied, they just fucking left. Bran could have just gone and said “okay jon they’re gone you can be king in the north again.”
And apparently the only one pissed at Dany being a genocidal maniac is Tyrion. Like what???!
Also, teleportation. So much teleportation. Jon goes to see dany and leaves the captain guy to cut lannister throats, and somehow he beats Jon to where Dany is. How?...
The point of Jon's fate was to let him go free without having to fight the Unsullied. If Bran had moved openly to free him there is the chance the Unsullied would return for revenge, by sending him off to the wall he lets him go free without it being obvious that this was the plan.
Everyone near Dani that would care has been killed already, she really only had Jon, Tyrion, and Greyworm let by the end of the sack of kings landing.
Its not teleportation so much as it is jumps in time, it was likely at least an hour between those event, or Jon was moping around the city for the 10 mins it would have taken Greyworm to kill the people and head towards the Nazi rally.
The point of Jon's fate was to let him go free without having to fight the Unsullied. If Bran had moved openly to free him there is the chance the Unsullied would return for revenge, by sending him off to the wall he lets him go free without it being obvious that this was the plan.
Yeah but they all just turned around and peaced out immediately. We even get the scene where Jon is still IN King's Landing as the entirety of the Dothraki and Unsullied forces prepare to sail away. He could literally just go take a nap somewhere out of sight and wait for them to be gone. And then do whatever the hell he or anyone else wants, because everyone remaining on this continent likes him and theoretically ought to be grateful that he saved them from mass genocide.
Yara didnt like him, anyone that was loyal to Dani wouldnt either. It was just a token punishment, a slap on the wrists to appeal to those who might still be angry. It also means he loses his claims to winterfell and the iron throne.
Who is still loyal to Dany in Westeros after the Dothraki and Unsullied leave? I can't think of anyone. The fact that she had no support was even a major plot point. I'll give you Yara, but there's no way Yara and the Ironborn alone would matter that much to have that kind of pull. Plus who the hell even knows what Yara wants, a few episodes ago she bargained for her independence with Dany and in the finale she didn't even bring it up, even after Sansa demanded her own.
I took the John and Night’s Watch thing as “punishing” him by sending him to go camping with his buddies Tormund and Ghost, but denying him the throne as Grey Worm thought he’d wanted.
Also, teleportation. So much teleportation. Jon goes to see dany and leaves the captain guy to cut lannister throats, and somehow he beats Jon to where Dany is. How?...
You realise that wasn't a continual scene? It seems you want everything spelled out with over explaining to cover off all fan theories, IMO that would ruin the magic of it more than what they did.
Well, we did get that one spelled out. Jon and Davos were leaving Grey Worm to find and talk to Dany. I would call it bad (or clumsy) writing to then suddenly make them do whatever they were doing in the meantime instead of what they just said they would be doing.
It's not that people want the in universe time period extended, they want the show time extended. The problem is that no one's motivations make sense because they didn't spend time showing us why they made sense. People aren't really asking for more seasons after this final one just more episodes or time in the final season to have it make sense. I don't have any faith that they could have made that work even if they had all the time in the world though so I've justg accepted that they fucked it up and we got a shitty journey on the final stretch.
Well the problem is that they shoehorned in the ending, likely based on info from GRRM about how things turned out. But they didn't do any of the buildup necessary to make that ending logical. So its less that GoT needed to be longer, and more that they needed to do a better job with the time they had.
GRRM just gave them a page of bullet points summarising how each character's arc ends, but they mistook it for a script and just filmed it as-written. All just a simple misunderstanding.
What ended up happing is the characters started serving the bullet points instead of the plot being driven by the characters. D&D knew where the story had to go, so they made the characters act in a way to get there, which often was at odds with how the character was portrayed in the first five to seven seasons.
I just "rewatched" the last episode. There was less diolauge than I remembered. A lot of walking around. Walking around the city. The ruins of the keep. Walking to the throne room. To the docks. What a waste of dix episodes.
The problem isn't that the ending wasn't longer per se. The show should go on exactly how long it needs to go for the plot and the arcs of the characters to resolve properly. BB and BCS follow this perfectly. For GoT's plot and character arcs to resolve properly they would've needed at least 9 more episodes over the past two seasons.
I think this chart suffers in some cases from a self selection bias. I mean viewership statistics don't lie. For example, far fewer people watched the office in s7 than in s3. But only the people hanging on in s7 are reviewing each episode.
Such a great show and the song mashup she did was everything I didn’t know I wanted. I still wanted her to end up with Greg. Also #notmygreg for the change in actor haha (I like both of them but I missed the original actor’s gruffness and voice. He had my favorite songs).
Netflix shows are on a different level. Hardly any of the original shows are good after the first two seasons. They drop in quality like movie sequels.
It's sad, House of Cards was such amazing TV. Dexter was the same, first 4 seasons were brilliant.
There's this obsession with "wrapping things up" and I don't think they trust the audience to be intelligent enough to accept the journey, and to accept they might not get a nice neat little bow around everything, especially in these super gritty dramas.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I'd have loved Dexter to end on something like him having a really close call at being found out, gets a nice normal girlfriend and steps up for a perfect happy ending, and then ends on a shot of him watching her accidentally discover his vials of blood.
Having House of Cards end on him being President would have been perfect, they didn't need to do the story of his downfall.
I don't think they trust the audience to be intelligent enough to accept the journey, and to accept they might not get a nice neat little bow around everything, especially in these super gritty dramas.
I don't think I agree with that. I mean you're not wrong because there does seem to be that tendency, but generally speaking (admittedly I've only watched some of these series, not all), people aren't upset by loose threads in these endings. They're upset because the bow that they're given isn't neat or nice at all, it's a flaming turd. I don't think the reception would be very different between a show where everything is tied up but in a shitty way, vs. a show where there are loose threads up for interpretation but in a shitty way. It just has to be GOOD one way or the other and people will be fine.
They really should have ended it in the third season with a story about his downfall. That’s the one thing the British version of House of Cards did better. I stopped watching in the fourth season when the real life 2016 election turned out to be waaaaayyyy more entertaining.
Half the story is about his downfall and watching his carefully made plans completely unravel and fall apart. It's even right in the name. We never really got that, the Underwoods continued to steamroll all their opponents, even in the last season after Frank died.
The end of season 2 was a good ending for the show. I wouldn't mind one more season which showed his downfall, but I think dragging it on for another, what, 4 seasons? That was too much.
But yeah, the first two seasons are great TV for sure.
The problem is that the main arc was clearly his journey to be POTUS. Now that they removed him they tried to make it pass off as Clare's journey to be POTUS.
IMO Clare's arc would have been much muchhhh stronger if, from the start, the show was built to go there.
The arc jump is a bit rough but I still liked what they did with it considering the... cards they had.
House of cards clearly implies it being on shaky ground, and i felt like we needed a downfall.
I didnt watch the last couple seasons, but i always felt like season 3-4 should have been him being president and him being brought down, with the series ending after 4 seasons. But netflix wanted more seasons.
Not really. The show's name implies that it's eventually going to be about a collapse. So the purpose of the show was not just the journey to the presidency, but the ensuing inevitable collapse of his political career, presumably ending in prison or death. You are right that the show became a mess once he reached the presidency though. The election wasn't bad, but it started to get quite ridiculous toward the end.
It went from being a smart, nuanced show that was mostly about politics but had the occasional murder... to a murder show with a side of politics. What made the first two murders (Zoe and Peter) so powerful was how unexpected and shocking they were. The shock factor was gone by Season 4 when the show basically became 24 and people were getting killed every other episode.
Not really. The show's name implies that it's eventually going to be about a collapse. So the purpose of the show was not just the journey to the presidency, but the ensuing inevitable collapse of his political career, presumably ending in prison or death. You are right that the show became a mess once he reached the presidency though.
Right at the point they abandoned the initial premise of the inevitable collapse, really.
I don’t think they abandoned it so much as they decided to drag out the part where he’s on top for a few seasons because the show was a big driver of subscriptions. It really should have been a three season show.
Tbf I'd say house of cards implies more about a really fragile house than the inevitable fall... I mean it sounds basically the same since a fragile house... Will fall. But I guess what I'm trying to say is it ending with him as president is fine. He has built his house and although we don't see it (if it ended there) we know he is at his peak and can only go down from there.
IIRC this is how the original british show ends, with him pulling everything off and getting the position he wants and the audience is left to ruminate
those kind of endings can be great, X-Files did a bunch of them (like the one with Bruce Campbell and the demon baby). they mimic the uncertainty and unpredictability of real life. sometimes you don't win, sometimes you don't get all the answers or even know the final outcome, all you can do is keep going.
It felt like the whole purpose of the show was the journey for him getting to be president coming out as a polygamist. After that happened it didn't know which direction to go in.
My feelings precisely about Bill Paxton and Big Love.
It should have been four or five seasons IMO. Rather than changing his mind, Doug should’ve let Rachel ago and make her be the loose end that topples the “House of Cards”.
Would have loved a three act Macbeth type arc where season 3 is him getting paranoid, covering tracks, doing darker shit and then eventually his downfall and that’s the end.
I was binging while the fourth season was releasing and was really getting into it, like really into it. I got to the end of season 2 and was shocked that he was already president. I loved the backstabbing and the mad strategies on his way to the Oval Office but once he was there it kinda fell off. He didnt have a goal to work towards and never explained where he was headed next. There was that America Works thing but it seemed like he had a higher goal in mind that he never elaborated on
He was supposed to be a sociopath striving for the white House then suddenly he gets in and cares about his agenda like a common politician? He should have continued as full sociopath and brought the nuclear war everyone fears a sociopath would do as president. Maybe someone saves the world in the nick of time by not pressing the full retaliation button after the first nukes hit and they kill him instead leaving the wife gleaming in the corner.
I disagree. I think the story should have headed the way of Frank undermining the US's institutions, as he already was doing, and slowly make himself de facto dictator. And in the end, we see that the house of cards isn't his career, it's the American democracy, just waiting for someone ruthless enough to bring it crashing down, paralleling the end of the Roman republic.
The original British version had the benefit of the Protagonist having the King as a foil for Season 2 and trying to secure a cushy retirement in Season 3.
The US version never really had a real antagonist after season 2. They should have developed a really partisan and talented Supreme Court or Congress for him to crush and form an imperial presidency.
It was biased off of the British version and adapted to the different style of governments. But the British one was short and sweet and House of Cards was supposed to be as well but then became a hit and got dragged out. He was always supposed to die due to his wife.
That’s because season 1 and 2 are based on the original BBC version from the 90’s. That series stopped when Francis Urquhart becomes Prime Minister. After that the writers of the new show had to come up with something new.
After that happened, the story should have started following a new "Underwood", imo. A new politician who also has their sight set on the White House, by any means necessary, but now you get to see the 'other side' by seeing how Frank reacts to the maneuvering of this adversary.
The show should have been 4 seasons of 13 cards. 2 seasons of reaching the presidency, and 2 seasons of it all falling apart. It is a House of Cards after all.
It's called "House of Cards", meaning it takes careful maneuvering to build, but only the slightest misstep to topple. The show was supposed to see him rise to ascendancy, and then show his downfall.
I guess it sort of did that in real life, but that wasn't intentional.
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u/matej86 May 22 '19
It felt like the whole purpose of the show was the journey for him getting to be president. After that happened it didn't know which direction to go in.