Spoiler alert!

This season of “House of Cards” was difficult yet satisfying.
Season four of “House of Cards” is indeed messy for fans. This season is just a collection of incidents that don’t even try to be meaningful. It’s as if the writers were comfortable with being meaningless.

Season three tried its hardest to be meaningful, but like this season, it failed. Season four is comfortable with being an incoherent twister full of random events that have no consequence.

Even though this season was a drag, it wasn’t boring to say the least. This season features everything from an assassination attempts to what it considers the ultimate inspection of the Underwood marriage, to threats of war with Russia, to a brokered convention and a presidential election. Although the lack of character development was annoying, the fans of “House of Cards” finally get what they hopefully been waiting for. We see characters finally stand up to Underwood. Those moments were extremely entertaining. Frank getting his butt handed to him? Yes please.

With that being said, as the season continues you start to miss the closeness the older seasons had. There’s no mystery on what the characters might do in any situation. With this seasons, there is no guessing, you already know what will happen which can be entertaining for some. Any situation Frank and Claire come across will be handled with ease. You can count on that.

As season four progressed, there were no other characters but Claire and Frank. It was the Claire and Frank show for almost the entire hour and for multiple episodes. There was absolutely no other character development, if there was it was very minimal, which made the episodes long and boring. Falling asleep during the episode is definitely a possibility. No one really wants to follow the daily struggle and petty arguments of Frank and Claire all day. Their shenanigans were extremely tedious.

Everyone collectively rolled their eyes when the scene cut over to Claire and Frank. After 25 minutes and the scene was STILL on an argument between Claire and Frank, audiences collectively put their heads in their hands and sighed.

“House of Cards” has always made the Underwood marriage a key point in the series when in fact it was never that interesting. The relationship Frank and Claire have isn’t as mysterious as the show tries to make it. It is obvious that their commonality is that they both love having power and they can use each other to get it. That was evident from season two to anyone with eyes and has made it to at least episode five of season one.

To keep up with the random incident theme, season four has Tom Yates (Paul Sparks, “Boardwalk Empire”) join the Underwood’s life. Novelist Tom Yates, who was initially friends with Frank, you may recognize him from season three.

As the season continues, we see some of the most powerful moments. When Claire and Frank are playing political strategy against each other. It delivers its most powerful image when the Underwood’s accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president and vice president, holding hands standing on an altar, ready to sacrifice anyone who stood in their way.

“House of Cards” is very sarcastic about everything. In season four, that sarcastic attitude feels more like a defense mechanism. In a time when politics can feel like a race toward elimination, it starts to get extremely harder to watch the Underwood’s actively do that and for it to be entertaining. This season was hard to finish for some but it got us closer to a hopefully satisfying ending to the series.

Rating: 3 out of 5