‘House of Cards’ Season 6 Review: Frank Underwood Is Dead and Claire Underwood Is The New Queen

House of Cards Season 6 has an unusual villain problem. Yes, the whole season is shadowed by the absence of Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood. The star of the show was fired once it was revealed he had a long sordid history of sexual harassment and assault, and the character’s evil deeds haunt every plot point in the new season. But that’s not the villain problem I’m talking about. It hit me while watching the first five episodes of House of Cards’ sixth season that the whole show is just villains monologuing. Characters speak in metaphors and thinly veiled threats, the dialogue is equal parts verbose and stilted. What that creates is a show that is terribly unrealistic and dramatically bonkers, but incredibly watchable to boot.

When House of Cards Season 6 opens, Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) is a widowed Commander-in-Chief. She’s besieged by death threats and facing down misogynistic critiques. This season Claire has outfitted herself like some kind of high fashion supervillain. Every outfit is monochromatic, sharply tailored, and nothing at all like the clothes a real person would wear. Her hair has been ironed into an abrupt helmet-like bob that makes her look exactly like Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl. (You know, in that scene where Amazing Amy slits Neil Patrick Harris’s throat mid-coitus.) The message is clear: Claire is armed and ready to battle back.

The biggest threat to Claire’s power isn’t the political circus of Washington, D.C., but the insidious influence of the Shepherd family — Bill (Greg Kinnear), Annette (Diane Lane), and Duncan (Cody Fern) — a trio of wealthy donors who control politics in the capital. It turns out that Claire and Annette were girlhood friends, so there’s a venom to their already catty interactions. The Shepherds are funhouse mirror versions of mega-donor families like the Mercers, and we soon learn their real power comes from their intelligence network. Before he died, Frank revealed several damning secrets to the family, and Annette’s son Duncan has masterminded an app that tracks users’ every movements.

There’s an element of horror to House of Cards Season 6. Paranoia lingers in every frame. An early scene actually feels supernatural, and serves as a way to let Claire to try to say goodbye to Frank, whose memory haunts the series. While House of Cards toys with this lean into horror, Season 6 is campy above all. There is no longer any pretense that this show is trying to reflect reality. Like I said, it’s just villains monologuing. There are juicy speeches to the camera and ridiculous threats slipped into what fronts as small talk. This isn’t a political drama, but a warped acid-tripping vision of what some cynical Americans think Washington, DC is.

Speaking of the over-the-top monologuing, it affects everyone in the show. It’s not just Claire breaking the fourth wall. There’s a pillow talk scene where Sylvia Plath is quoted, and before that someone else, swirling iced tea and lemonade together, muses, “Arnold Palmer was a great man.” Another supporting player calls another on the phone and declares, “I curse you! I curse you and wish you a painful death.” Finally, there’s one performance in particular that is so pointedly over the top — a newspaper reporter who enunciates his words like he’s Jafar — that I fell out of my chair laughing.

House of Cards Season 6 defies all reason. It’s an exaggerated political cartoon riffing on the worst headlines of the last few years. There are murder plots, faked deaths, and one shrill new pundit character whose news reports are basically just her shouting epitaphs to the audience. You know, while an American flag chyron hangs behind her. As art, House of Cards feels too cartoonish to take seriously, but that’s why it makes for tremendous entertainment. I was rapt up in its ridiculousness. At one point, I told my co-workers, “I’m not a pot smoker, but this show is making me feel high.”

So House of Cards Season 6 is a must-watch. It’s serving a bombastic, oversized, absurdist end to Netflix’s first major original drama. And I’m okay with that. If nothing else, it shows just how much has changed in television over the last six years. The very first season of House of Cards felt like a revelation, pushing TV into a new realm of pulpy artistry. Now that the show has launched a thousand imitators, its greatest artistic triumph is surrendering to existing as just pulp.

House of Cards Season 6 premieres on Friday, November 2.

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