Who is vetting whom? Ashley Parker and David Carr untangle Episode 12 of “House of Cards,” and tease apart Frank Underwood’s visit to a captain of industry living in a middle place. He goes bird hunting, but if you poke around here, you will find plenty of spoilers, so by all means avoid if you haven’t seen it. If you are caught up on your episodes, but behind on recaps, you can find all of them – Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or 11 — right here.
Episode 12
Synopsis: The president sends Frank Underwood to the Midwest to vet a potential (new) vice president — but it turns out there’s more vetting going on than meets the eye. Zoe Barnes joins with her colleague Janine Skorsky to unravel what could be their biggest story yet.
Parker: In this episode, we see Frank Underwood sent to St. Louis ostensibly to vet Raymond Tusk, an eccentric billionaire, as a possible replacement vice president. But shortly after he arrives, Mr. Underwood realizes that it is he who is being vetted, and that the president and Mr. Tusk are old friends. Mr. Tusk, in fact, was the one who initially advised the president against making Mr. Underwood secretary of state — “One of the largest mistakes I’ve made,” he concedes.
“You’ve proven yourself to be quite difficult — Kern, the teacher’s strike, now Matthews,” Mr. Tusk says, accurately chronicling a partial list of Mr. Underwood’s behind-the-scenes disloyalties to the administration.
We also see Zoe Barnes and Janine Skorsky begin to team up, to puzzle out a story that could bring Frank Underwood down.
Up until this point in the show, it always seemed as if the president was a naïve, vanilla figure, getting played by Mr. Underwood. But maybe the president is savvier than he first appeared, onto the majority whip from nearly the outset. And ditto Zoe Barnes. Here, we see her turn fairly quickly on Mr. Underwood, as she realizes that the scoop of his downfall might be bigger than the morsels he’s been feeding her.
What do you think, David? Is this yet another example of Frank Underwood being behind the curve? Just how much does the president know? And has Mr. Underwood lost control of just about every narrative?
Carr: One of the rules of the game as played in the Beltway is that everyone is a player. Mr. Underwood often acts if he is plotting in a vacuum, when in fact there is the game he is playing on his own chess board — I’ve always felt that the interludes where he shoves pieces around is heavy-handed — but there are also other chessboards, other players, other games all over town.
I love Frank’s raw hatred of the outing in the woods with Mr. Tusk. At first, you think he is getting dragged through the woods like a carcass, and then you realize that Mr. Tusk knows that he hates every second of it and is doing it for the fun and provocation of it.
And there is much to love in watching Zoe Barnes and Janine Skorsky make common cause, less about their former antagonism, which is by now ancient in the life of the series, and more about watching the pure pleasure of journalists smelling a large story.
Bygones become bygones because there are bigger fish to fry. “Show me your notes,” Ms. Skorsky says matter-of-factly. “I know he was your source.”
Their nostrils flare, their hands become like birds flitting over documents and you can sense that they will soon be in full gallop. They begin to ambush, gather and marshal facts. Watching a major story unfurl, even a fake one on a television show, is a mighty thing.
Given that there is a dead congressman in the middle of the story, they both know that stakes are high and you can see they mix their own thrill of pursuit with worries about where it might lead.
Parker: And here, we get a glimpse into what animates Ms. Barnes — like all journalists, it seems, she’s eager for a good, high-profile story. She was originally willing to sleep with Mr. Underwood and do his bidding when the reward was juicy A1 nuggets. But when it looks as if the better story might involve bringing him down, she’s more than game for that, too. Her only hesitation seems less born out of concern for betraying Mr. Underwood, but for revealing that she has slept with him.
But yes, it’s great to watch Ms. Barnes and Ms. Skorsky conspire in stairwells, half-talk, half-barge their way into Congressional offices, and hop on planes to track down that one elusive source who can lead them to the next, equally elusive source. And so we see the story start to come together.
Still, I can’t imagine that Ms. Skorsky, Ms. Barnes, and even Mr. Underwood’s own wife have a sense of how high or how deep the Russo affair runs. Might we be coining yet another “gate” — Russo-gate — by the season’s end?
Carr: Betcha Ms. Underwood knows or soon will know what her darling little Francis is capable of. In a show chockablock with moral and ethical eunuchs, she seems to have the most ice running through her veins. She is a classic ends-over-means tactician, rendered all the more spicy by the fact that she runs a supposed do-gooder nonprofit organization. Looking back over the season, one of the deep satisfactions of watching “House of Cards” has been its refusal to suggest that any one part of the Beltway apparatus is morally superior to the other.
People in government like to think they answer to greater gods and journalists like to think that they are on a mission from god, while nonprofits act as if they were always on the side of angels, when in fact, all are capable of moral mis- and malfeasance when it serves their ends. If you think about it, only Remy Danton, Mr. Underwood’s former staffer who has gone over to the lobbying side, is really consistent in terms of who he is and what he represents. As a lobbyist and a fixer, he understands that brute force and large sums of cash, strategically applied, can melt away the pretense of civic-mindedness and reveal the self-interest that lurks around every corner in the capital.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/house-of-cards-recap-episode-12-the-guns-end-up-aimed-inside-the-corral/?partner=rss&emc=rss