‘House of Lies’ season 4, episode 11 review: Death in many ways

There is physical death, the end of your career, or the death of a relationship and in many ways, these were all deaths that were front and center during the first episode in the “House of Lies” two-part finale on Showtime Sunday night.

Let’s start with the first part of that in actual death. Clyde had to say goodbye to his father, and in the most brutal fashion: Mid-argument. After learning that his dad faked a cancer diagnosis, the two started shouting. Then, Clyde’s father had a heart attack. We were good for the most part on this story, but not the way that this ended. It was so predictable and lame that you could see this coming all the way down the street. The old having-a-heart-attack-when-someone-thinks-you’re-faking-it gag is older than we are. Ben Schwartz played it off as well as he could given the circumstances, but we’re not shocked by this.

Now, the death of a career. Marty spent most of the episode convinced that he could find a way to destroy Denna, and he started to come close to that by the end of the episode after she tried to enforce some control over him. We have not watched the finale at the time of writing this, but for now it feels like Marty is flying a little too close to the sun. There are sharks, and then there are killer whales that will bite your head off. The show has done a fantastic job of proving that Denna is a killer whale clobbering everything in her path.

Finally, the death of a relationship. Marty and his dad went to bat heavily for Roscoe in this episode, feeling like the poor child was bullied and discriminated against because of his sexuality at school. When it turned out that Roscoe may have wrote the hateful graffiti himself, and then lied about it, the pain on Marty’s face was worse than him losing a thousand business deals. Roscoe is one of the few human things that he has consistently cared about and this was a betrayal.

While there were decent parts of this episode, the complicated Denna story, coupled with Clyde’s father dying in a such a predictable way, brought us down a great deal. Hopefully, the finale itself will turn things around. Grade: C+.

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