“Slugline will be what Politico was a year and a half ago,” she says of the ludicrously named Politico/Gawker/BuzzFeed mash-up. Does she really think she’ll get better dirt if she puts out, or does she just conflate proximity to power with actual power? Or does she believe that, if Frank desires her, she can shift the balance of power in her favor? Or - always an option! - does she want him, just because? What’s really striking about Frank and Zoe’s affair is that it’s almost entirely initiated by Zoe. Things go from zero to weird in less than 60 seconds: “Are you cared for? Do you have an older man who cares for you?” Frank’s disgusted face at Zoe’s neighborhood is perfection. Zoe seal-slicks her hair, throws back a few, and calls her favorite source. Good-bye, 12,000 jobs! Peter reacts to this bad news by coming home (surprise!) shitfaced, so Christina quits and dumps him. They’re going to have to close the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Or won’t.įrank and Doug, Frank’s chief of staff, start war-rooming, moving human beings around like pieces in a board game. Who seems to provide something Frank just … can’t. Adam, who is basically the polar opposite of Frank. When Frank disappoints Claire, Claire calls Adam. Much as I hate Adam, the human cliché, this pattern of Claire’s is worth noticing. “There are no mistakes, Claire.” Fun fact: Adam is fluent in “inspirational quotes from Starbucks cups.” He doesn’t book round-trip tickets, not this wandering soul, this freest of spirits! But when Claire ends something, she ends it. YOU ARE DEEPER THAN THE DEEPEST WELL IN CENTRAL AFRICA. “She died shortly after this photo was taken.” WOW, ADAM, YOU HAVE ALL THE FEELINGS. “I found her in a village,” this British gent says. That said, Claire clearly thinks Frank is overstepping. Lady and Mister Macbeth don’t need anybody else. But Frank is skeptical, and Claire refuses Remy’s money. Remy - formerly Frank’s press secretary, now an almighty lobbyist for natural-gas company San Corp, says his people will donate $1.5 million to CWI and that he wants nothing from Claire in return. In a very realistic bit of casting, one of the only people who survived Claire’s CWI layoffs is an assistant type who looks even younger than Zoe.
Even when Zoe is hungry for scoops, Mara’s voice captures that unimpressed tone of a twentysomething. But Mara nails the physicality of Zoe - the nervous tics, the imperfect posture - and the sound of her, too. She’s like a fever dream of all those anti-millennial trend pieces: scrambling for online fame, typing faster than she can or cares to think, insisting she has a right to be heard before taking the time to fact-check what she wants to say. Zoe is far from the best-written character on HoC, and she’s made to behave in ways that make her profoundly hard to support. Kate Mara has an ice-for-eyes look that’s only outdone by Claire’s killer stare. “These days, when you’re talking to one person, you’re talking to a thousand.”
Zoe tweets his invective with the chilling warning. What is it with this show and women getting awesome job opportunities that douchey guys coerce them into passing up? Tom, the Herald’s editor-in-chief, calls Zoe “an ungrateful, self-entitled little cunt.” WHOA, TOM. (This is kind of hilarious when you remember that Kate Mara attended last year’s WHCD along with show writer Beau Willimon and her HoC castmates.) Frank considers the job offer a total turnoff. But Zoe has no interest in the Herald ladder or the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
#Kate mara house of cards season 4 tv#
We’re back, and this second trio of episodes deals not with sex or violence but something more scintillating: the education bill! This is fine for HoC’s devotion to veracity - policy is slow, often dull, and apparently involves a lot of negotiating over urinals - but unfortunately, this requires us to spend a lot of time watching Frank, Chief of Staff Linda Vasquez, and the least effective TV POTUS since Scandal’s Fitz talk about collective bargaining.īack at the Herald, Zoe gets promoted to White House Correspondent.