House of Cards Season 3: What We Know

House of Cards has been filming indoor scenes at Johns Hopkins University, transforming the school's various rooms into official offices and interiors. Students have been snapping pictures from the set, including a very revealing shot of a whiteboard inside what looks like a conference room in the Wall Street Telegraph. We'll get to the paper in a minute, but the topics on the board (most likely story ideas for the fictional paper) give a major hint that Russia is going to be a big point in the third season. The first item under "Features" is "Underwood in Russia," meaning that our favorite evil politician might be taking a diplomatic trip soon. Other notable items on the board include "Gay rights US vs. Europe," "Diplomatic tie to Pakistan," "Will ISIS attack the West," and "Chinese supply lines." Make of those what you will.

On another note, Russia's UN delegation nixed the idea of having House of Cards film inside the UN for its third season. At the time, the Russian diplomats said that the UN needed to be available for any type of crisis that should pop up and that the official rooms were not meant to be used for filming and staging. Granted, the Russian diplomat's refusal to allow the filming may have had nothing to do with the plot, but it's fun to think about, isn't it?

In the second season, we met Ayla Sayyad (Mozhan Marnò), a journalist at the Wall Street Telegraph who helped expose the money-laundering scandal between Raymond Tusk (Gerald McRaney), Xander Feng (Terry Chen), and then-President Walker (Michael Gill). The shots of sets involving Ayla's paper hint that the Wall Street Telegraph may be playing a bigger role in the upcoming season.

A photo snapped by an eagle-eyed fan in Baltimore showed the crew filming a group of protesters holding up signs decorated in rainbows, a symbol closely associated with the LGBTQ community. Some fans have speculated that the protesters could have something to do with Frank's bisexual escapades getting leaked out. (Who could forget the threechum?) But that plotline doesn't seem plausible, since that doesn't explain why there would be pro-gay protesters if the POTUS came out as bisexual. More likely, since there are already hints of a Russian plotline, Frank may be getting pressure from pro-gay-rights groups during some sort of dealing with the Russians, who passed antigay laws in 2013.