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House of Cards recap: 'Chapter 45'

House of Cards recap: 'Chapter 45'

Finally, Frank Underwood is back. The President isn’t just back to being relatively healthy and, you know, awake, but also back to being sharp and aware of his need for his partnership with Claire. If House of Cards can bring back the old Underwoods, the ones who were despicable people but also charming in their devotion to one another, perhaps the show can inject some energy into this season.

Before Frank gets healthy though, he has to go through quite a bit of turmoil. His hallucinations are becoming more and more surreal, and clearly are tapped into his subconscious, perhaps triggering some guilt he feels about his past sins. He sees Zoe Barnes in the White House as the sounds of a subway platform fill his ears, and then sees Peter Russo in the oval office, a menacing look on his face.

These visions represent Frank on the brink of losing his life. His liver is failing. He’s second on the donor list, but Doug worries that a transplant won’t come soon enough. So, Doug does what Doug is known for doing; no, I don’t mean murdering women in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. He goes to the Secretary of Health and threatens her, forcing her to bump Anthony Moretti, the man first on the transplant list, giving his spot to Frank. It’s a decision that will come back to haunt him later, but for now, it’s Doug trying to make some sort of sense of all the chaos.

While Frank is closing in on death, Claire is fighting an uphill battle with her energy plan involving Russia and China. There’s worry that the Democrats won’t back the plan in Congress, and that Jackie Sharp, who wields great influence, specifically won’t back the plan. Of course, Claire has the trump card and once again uses the pictures of Jackie and Remy to get exactly what she wants. All the good people on this show are so helpless.

Still, the deal has to be ratified at the G7 Summit and that’s not going to be easy. The plan is for Kathy to head to the G7 as the administration’s representative, but Claire doesn’t trust her to get the job done because Kathy has been opposed to the deal all along. Thus, Claire works her magic and manages to convince Donald Blythe to include her on the trip as “support” for Kathy.

While Claire is on the plane to Germany and the G7 Summit, a kid named Danny kills himself and his liver is delivered to the President; House of Cards apparently has no issue just killing random people off with little fanfare in order to get the Underwoods moving again. Anyway, with Frank going into a 12-hour surgery, Claire has a big decision to make. She can either turn the plane around and head back to be with Frank when he gets out of surgery, or continue on to the G7 Summit and finalize her plan, all while hearing that GOP frontrunner Conway has a good chance of running away with the election because of his partnership with a search engine company.

As for her decision, Claire chooses the Summit, obviously. In a statement prepared for the media, she says it’s because she knows it’s what her husband would have wanted, but in reality it’s because this is a defining moment for her. This energy/bailout plan is hers and hers alone, and everyone else, including Remy, Tusk, and Blythe, are just pawns in her game. She needs to finalize the deal to cement her standing within this political game.

NEXT: Same as the old boss