Warning: Article contains minor spoilers. Nothing too shocking, but some plot points are involved.
Season 4 of House of Cards premiered last Friday, bringing brand new problems for Frank and Claire Underwood. Often, art imitates life. House of Cards has done this many times. Beyond the gridlock of Congress, the show has also portrayed caricatures of political players, from Vladimir Putin (Viktor Petrov, played by Lars Mikkelsen) to Marco Rubio (Hector Mendoza, played by Benito Martinez). This season, however, has been eerily close to politics in real life. Despite being filmed in June 2015, the fourth season portrayed the modern day political scene.
Putin’s Wrath
Vladimir Putin is not known to be a nice guy. As a very authoritarian leader, he does not deal well with dissent. Some of his critics have met untimely fates. Whether they’re poisoned by radiation (Alexander Litvinenko) or shot in the face (Boris Nemtsov), we don’t know who did it, but we can guess which Russian leader was behind it.
Petrov pulls similar stunts in this season. After a failed coup, Petrov begins to murder these traitors and seize their companies. One manages to escape to America, seeking political asylum. We saw a paranoid, angry tough guy in Petrov last season, but his paranoia and anger reaches new heights this season, where he blames Underwood as the mastermind of the attempted coup. We have to see where it leads.
Metadata Gathering
Ever since the revelations of defender of liberty/filthy traitor Edward Snowden, there has been a big debate on the NSA’s collection of metadata, which is the digital information of electronic communication (time, date, location, etc.). While some believe that the collection is necessary to help with national security, others fear that this is a slippery slope to infringements on civil liberties.
House of Cards deals with two politicians using metadata for their own means. Potential Republican Candidate Will Conway, with the assistance of search engine Pollyhop, tries to track people’s web traffic in order to adapt his campaign. Not to be outdone by Conway’s “big gun,” Frank looks ahead and thinks about using his own big gun: The NSA. Under the guise of tracking terrorism, Frank gets a court order and uses that in order to track metadata of his own. Though not used for too nefarious means, opponents of metadata collection can see this leading to bad things in real life.
ISIS
Speaking of terrorism, Frank has to deal with the rise of the Islamic Caliphate Organization, also known as ICO. ICO, who rose after the fall of Saddam and lead by his former Baathist cronies, wants to create a caliphate in the Middle East. How do they try to do this? The usual methods: capturing oil fields, taking over towns, and kidnapping people. They're social media savvy and their agents worldwide make them a formidable opponent.
Clearly, this is a parallel to the real life ISIS group. How will President Underwood deal with them? You’ll have to watch and see.
Supreme Court Nomination Holdup
6 months after the filming of season four, conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died. With the balance of the Court in jeopardy, Republicans have been steadfast in order to prevent a liberal from being appointed to the court. They vowed to wait until the new president is around, hoping it is a Republican (Shameless plug #1).
A similar situation arose in this season. Last season, a Justice was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. This season, he has stepped down and his seat is vacant. Congress has threated to hold up a replacement. Though this is because of a gun control bill instead of mere politics, one has to admire the coincidence.
Shaky nomination
The election of 2016 is heating up and both sides are winding down to their candidate. Though Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders seem like the popular choices, both have to worry about not getting the nomination. For Sanders, despite winning the popular vote, he has to worry about superdelegates throwing the election to Hillary Clinton (Shameless plug #2). For Trump, he has to worry about a brokered convention. If he doesn’t receive a majority of the delegates, backroom deals could have the delegates he won thrown to another candidate.
Frank has to deal with similar troubles. After a fierce primary, Frank heads into an open convention (in order to find a VP choice) as the unanimous candidate. Due to political forces, Frank suddenly finds his own nomination at stake. Despite winning the popular vote, he now has to deal with not getting enough delegates.
So there we go. House of Cards seems to attach itself to the real life political theatre in 2016/ What will season five bring us? We will have to wait a year to find out. In the meantime, we can enjoy the real life circus playing out before us.
