He doesn’t try to live,” says Kelly of Doug surrendering and “releasing his demons.” Once she turns the letter opener on him, he doesn’t fight. “Then at the end, he’s willing to settle for her just saying it out loud, that she’s nothing without him. He gave Claire the list of people who wanted her dead and, in turn, he wanted the pardon. “He walked into the Oval and that final showdown wanting the pardon for Frank,” Kelly explained of Doug’s motivations. Doug poisoned Frank, using his own medication, and Claire found Frank dead the next morning in his own bed. Doug admits that Frank was coming to the White House to kill Claire after the events of the season five finale, and that he stopped Frank to “protect the legacy from the man” and a murder that his reputation could never bounce back from. “I think she knows it wasn’t her, so then the next logical conclusion for her is definitely Doug,” Kelly told THR of the realization. In the final scene, when Doug arrives at the Oval Office, Claire is finally convinced that he was the one who killed Frank. In the final episode, a very pregnant Claire is also on the verge of a nuclear war she threatened in order to distract from the fact that many powerful people want her dead. In season two, Claire and Frank had explored their fertility options and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene in season six confirmed that Claire ended up using Frank’s frozen sperm to impregnate herself. That would be, what’s the word? Convenient.”Īfter “weaponizing” assumptions made about women and abusing her power, Claire revealed she was pregnant with Frank’s baby. “You want to know what really happened to him,” Claire tells viewers in one of her many fourth-wall breaks in episode one. But even though his death was announced in the first scene of season six, House of Cards quickly planted a seed of speculation into how exactly he died. Underwood name is now open for public viewing in a cemetery in Gaffney, South Carolina - a real town and the fictional hometown from which Frank hails in the show.
Their decision was to kill Frank offscreen, but not reveal who had killed him until the final scene of the series, which invited an “inevitable showdown” between President Claire Hale (Wright), who relinquished her Underwood name, and Frank’s former right-hand man Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly).įrank’s fate was revealed ahead of the season in an early clip, and THR has since reported that the tombstone bearing the Francis J.
After Spacey was fired over sexual assault allegations at the height of the #MeToo movement, the House of Cards writers, led by showrunners Frank Pugliese and James Gibson, quickly got to work writing him out of the show when production on the final eight episodes resumed earlier this year. Much like Kevin Spacey’s disgraceful exit from the series, the mystery of who killed Frank Underwood (Spacey) haunted the entirety of the final season.
#House of cards season 4 recap series#
The sixth and final season of the Netflix political saga starring Robin Wright ended - as was promised - with a “beautifully macabre” shocker of a series finale.