As much as I feel so hallow right now coming off of the truly terrible series finale; I want to remind everyone that they didn’t want this. The writers, producers, actors, etc. never wanted or meant for Season 6 to turn out as bad as it did. In case anyone is interested in reading how exactly it all went so wrong for House of Cards, I’d recommend reading what I’m about to detail below because not only is it very interesting, but I think it’s also very important to sympathize with the position the show was left in: [Spoiler-free]: To put it simply, Season 6 unfortunately was always doomed to fail miserably. House of Cards was originally intended to run for about 8-12 seasons & conclude with an entirely different ending than the one we were left with. It was the very first Netflix original series and it was the show that jump started Netflix as the iconic streaming platform it is today due to how binge worthy & simply brilliant the first 5 seasons are. After Season 5, Kevin Spacey was rightfully fired from all involvement with the show & Netflix was very close to cancelling House of Cards entirely due to the case against him. The producers ended up convincing them not to cancel the show and let them make S6 serve as the final season of the show. The problems they faced though were that by the time Spacey was fired, (according to an interview by Michael Kelly) they had already finished filming the original Season 6 so when they got news that they needed to make a brand new script, they had to cut all the footage and start from scratch. They needed to develop a new script, re-shoot the entire season with such little time without their main character, AND pull a new ending from thin air when they weren’t even at the point in the story where they could comfortably transition to a series finale. That’s why S6 has only 8 episodes instead of the usual 13 every other previous season contains. They wanted to stay faithful to Michael Dobbs’ source material which was the House of Cards books & the BBC British miniseries adaptation (both of which had very different endings), but they simply couldn’t accomplish that without Francis Underwood. The original ending involves him so without that character, it came out all wrong. Some fans even called for Francis to be recast for the final season after Spacey was fired, but that was just not possible for so many reasons. There were really no solutions to this type of situation. I sympathize very strongly with the writers & producers because it’s genuinely not their fault at all that they couldn’t save the show. They tried to, but they ended up making it even worse than it was left off on with the S5 finale. It’s very sad when you consider all of this and understand they didn’t intend for any of this to happen because this is a unique circumstance nobody could’ve saw coming. House of Cards deserved better & the ending is so devastating because it was never meant to be like that. I wish I could say there was some closure in the end, but there’s really none at all. No, it’s not worse than the GOT ending, but just like that show, HoC’s impact on television will always be overlooked & forgotten about simply because of how badly it concluded. Disappointing is the only word I can really say at this point. I wish things could’ve been different.