Monday, March 7, 2016

House of Cards, Wow! – Part 2

I finished the fourth season last night. Of course, it ends in a cliff-hanger.

But what a cliff hanger. The story of the Underwoods' underhanded dealings has finally begun to make it into the news. They're beginning to fear – in the last  episode of the season – that their political geese are cooked. And then they decided to double-down.

There's a hostage situation. Three Americans have been taken hostage on American soil but members of a group obviously modeled on ISIS. They've successfully negotiated the release of two of them but the third remains hostage and they've not been able to track the terrorists down.

What brutal ugly course of action do you think the Underwoods decide on? At the most general and abstract level, they decided to manipulate public fear and ramp up the action so as to distract people from the news about their past mis-deads. Just how that works for them, that I assume is what next season will be about.

What has my attention, and it's why I've written this post, is the fact that we see these fictional politicians deliberately manipulating people's fears for personal gain. Is that how the game is played?

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