I don’t remember much of what happened during House of Cards’s fourth season. Don’t get me wrong—I remember a lot about this gorgeous and trashy political melodrama, just not when each individual moment occurred in the show’s dense, multi-layered timeline.
Did that journalist subplot with the hacker and the guinea pig happen in Season 1 or Season 2? Did what’s her name get pushed in front of the train in Season 2 or Season 3? Was Mahershala Ali even in the last season? When did that one guy get killed in his car? When did the guy they had that threesome with get killed?!?! When’s the last time we saw that one sexy artist who Claire had sex with? Did the book get finished? And are they fucking the author?!! Was there actually a lengthy subplot about Russia or am I confusing that with real life? I don’t know!
The tense, pulsating first trailer for the show’s fifth season is not helping me properly assemble the timeline in my head, but is getting me excited for another handful of darkly lit, impeccably acted, and implausibly murder-filled episodes that fail to provide an acceptable answer to the question audiences have had since 2013, which is, “Why hasn’t anyone killed Frank Underwood yet?”
I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes from Mrs. Blanche Deveroux, which I think best describes my feelings for this mess of a series: “You know my family had a few dollars, and I loved them dearly, but when you get right down to it, basically they were trash.”