Michael Wampler

It wasn’t until after I had already watched this week’s episode of Scandal that I learned the episode was titled “A Few Good Women,” a play on, of course, Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, an altogether superior tale of abuse in the military. Of course, Scandal is dealing with a different type of abuse—rape, here, as opposed to hazing in Sorkin’s film—but the problems in execution undermine any effort at serious discussion of a topic that absolutely merits discussion in this high profile of a venue. The end result, though, is a scattered story that addressed this topic with even less subtlety than (and this is quite unbelievable) House of Cards managed in its second season.

Scandal’s recent attempt at topicality, “The Lawn Chair,” was successful in large part due to its willingness to forgo the trappings of a typical episode of Scandal. In its position as the penultimate episode of the season, “A Few Good Women” has no such luxury, and so it is mired in #whatisfoxtail, the hashtag that flashes on screen literally – and I mean literally – any time anyone breathes the word Foxtail. Beyond knowing that it is some B-613 scheme, I really do not care #whatisfoxtail, and no hashtag will sway me. I can’t imagine it’s working very well on the rest of the audience, either.

Nor does the reveal that Foxtail has something to do with Mellie Grant really do anything for me either. I suppose this is some sort of payoff for the inordinate amount of time we have spent on Mellie’s incredibly unlikely run for a Senate seat in a state in which she does not reside. Considering that this story, but for the logical hole at its center, has been a lighthearted, much-needed break from the dour, torturous (and again I mean that literally) proceedings over at OPA, allowing it to be swallowed as well by B-613 seems a misstep more than anything.

Even the case of the week here is done more in service of furthering the B-613 nonsense than it is in service of actually discussing rape in the military on any serious level. Olivia, Quinn, and Mellie just spout platitudes about the issue—Mellie’s closing speech, especially, comes too easy, a pat resolution to what should be a much more complex discussion. That’s not necessarily the type of show Scandal is, but if you’re going to take on rape in the military, well, take on rape in the military. “A Few Good Women” gives us some cartoonishly villainous sailors that may as well be sitting there twirling moustaches, and the bumbling naval lawyer they assign to Olivia solely because he’s such a useless idiot. Except—surprise!—young Virgil is only pretending to be a useless idiot, apparently quite well and for quite some time, but really he’s a B-613 plant, like every minor character on this damn show.

I want to comment more about the rape case at the episode’s center, but I can’t because there is so little about which to comment. There are the token scenes of Olivia, Quinn, and Virgil interrogating the Navy admiral accused of rape. They go back and forth with sub-Sorkin pithy barbs. An unlikely, last-minute assist from Fitz gives Olivia the evidence she needs to incriminate the man. And that’s it—a furious victory for all involved. It’s just so lazy.

Elsewhere in the episode, Olivia, Huck, and Quinn are just casually torturing Russell, a sight that has become par for the course. Fuck your white hats. Between this and the absurdity of the rape case, “A Few Good Women” really lays bare my biggest issue with Scandal at this point in the show’s run. For as good as Kerry Washington is, and she really is still excellent, the character of Olivia is a pale imitation of the one we met four years ago. Some of that is intentional, and her PTSD rears its head again in this episode to remind us. She is in a situation here, as Jake uncomfortably makes clear to her, where her entire life is a construction. She has no way of knowing what is real and what is not or who to trust or who to not. Anyone can be an agent of Rowan’s.

But this only goes so far. Olivia hardly seems the competent professional she’s meant to be anymore, even in situations where she’s clearly meant to seem as such. In this episode she is shrill (god, it pains me to write that, but it’s true), intrusive, and , worst of all, ineffective. She runs around shouting orders like she is still the legendary Washington fixer Olivia Pope, but is she really? She fucks up left and right. Huck killed a girl. She doesn’t even work in the White House anymore. Huck killed a girl. The further Olivia is dragged into wacky conspiracy land, the less effective her character is.

Maybe the show recognizes this. Maybe the final will be a well-considered reflection on all these difficulties, one that will dispatch Rowan, refocus the show, and get the house that Shonda built back in order. That’s a lot to rest on one episode, and while it’s possible, I wouldn’t call it likely, at this point. The best I can say about this episode is that the season may have dragged its feet, but now, at least, the dominoes are positioned and ready to fall. One way or another, this will all be over after another hour.

 

Stray Observations:

• Russell and Jake trading Rowan impressions is everything. It’s a nice scene that paints both men as human—something Scandal forgets to do more often than not of late. It’s also hilarious.
• As for the men of the White House: there’s this whole attitude here of, even if the woman was raped—a claim of which Fitz and Cyrus are overly skeptical—it’s not their job to interfere with the military. There is a fetishization of systems and structures on this show (like the endless blathering about the Republic) that every character, hero or villain (if such a binary even exists here anymore), puts above common decency. You can call it a theme of the series, even if it’s a well Scandal goes to only infrequently and superficially.
• Mellie says “we’re not monsters” of a room in which every single person is, in fact, a monster—herself included.
• “I’ve seen better writing on soap operas.” Me too, Mellie. Me too.

 

 

 

In the opening moments of “First Lady Sings the Blues” Quinn discovers Jake stabbed to shit and nearly shoots Huck in her panic. And then Huck smacks Jake on the chest and magically revives him. (Someone will need to tell me if Derek Shepard is also actually still dead?) I mean, good lord.

If you are wondering just how far Scandal has strayed in four seasons, this episode sees Olivia trading favors with an ex-KGB black market doctor to save her ex-evil spy boyfriend from the attempted murder by stabbing committed on her current evil spymaster father’s orders. The legendary “Black Sable” is now Mary Peterson, a picture perfect American housewife who serves mainly as a metaphor, as a picture of the idea that it’s possibly, maybe, to escape a life of B-613 and kidnappings and secrets and lies (watch it on ABC, Sundays at 9!), but sooner or later you’ll be sucked back in.

So Olivia becomes hell bent on releasing Mary from her service to the KGB. Surely there is some price she can pay, some trick she can pull, to call off Mary’s handler. Surely there is forgiveness? But for all Olivia’s efforts, there is none. Mary and her grandchildren and her handler all end up dead, murdered not by the KGB, but by Rowan, to prove a point.

Rowan can read Olivia like a book. He knows from her silence that Jake still lives; he casually shoots Marshall in the arm knowing it will draw Olivia out. (I don’t think he even bothers to put down his glass of wine.) This works; after discovering Mary and her family, Olivia is ready to call off the whole thing. There’s no winning, because Rowan will kill them all without blinking, and Olivia can’t do the same. Or can she? The episode ends with Olivia putting a gun to Marshall’s head after all.

I’ll give credit where it’s due: “First Lady Sings the Blues” makes all this B-613 business seem significantly more exciting than the past handful of episodes have managed. But it still is just papering over the fact that nothing is really happening. There’s the obvious doubling back of Jake’s not-death, which is just the laziest sort of cheap cliffhanger—this is some Sons of Anarchy level shit. But that cheap trick is emblematic of the overall narrative strategy Scandal has been employing too often of late. We’re at (god, I hope) the end of the long, dreary epoch of B-613, but the show pretty transparently wants to keep the big reveals stored away for the finale. So instead, round and round we go.

The B-plot goes to Mellie’s continued unlikely run for the vacant Senate seat in a state in which she does not reside. (Or I guess she does live there, sometimes? What the fuck ever, honestly.) Sally Langston, like some sort of horrible Greek chorus, uses her talk show platform to poke all the obvious holes in Mellie’s strategy. Kate Burton is an absolute delight in these scenes, but the whole storyline is so inane that some of the joy is gone, no matter how wonderfully venomous Sally is in these scenes. The issues she raises should have derailed this whole campaign from the very start. Instead, it’s revealed that no one even bothered to check to see if there were legal obstacles to Mellie’s ambitions. Oh, the laughs to be had!

At any rate Cyrus goes onto Sally’s show to try to convince America that there is nothing wrong with Mellie being First Lady and a senator at the same time. Sally is literally insane, though, and she turns the interview on a dime, suggesting that Cyrus is bitter over Mellie’s run and that he covets the Virginia seat for himself. Cyrus dovetails away from that pretty well, by raising the specter of the husband Sally killed, but it doesn’t do enough. Liz North’s last, desperate suggestion is that they say the Grants are on the rocks, or hell, past on the rocks, just flat out divorced. They’ve come a long way—Mellie dismisses the idea outright. They’re a team. But Fitz calls Olivia for advice anyway. Her advice is terrible, by the way—the conflict of interest is not a selling point, it’s just a conflict of interest. The term exists for a damn reason. It may get Mellie elected, but it’s going to tank the Grant presidency.

But it works! Mellie’s popularity skyrockets in Virginia, though Cyrus is rightfully angry that it’s going to destroy his life’s work (something, remember, he’s sacrificed more than too much for already). “First Lady Sings the Blues” tries to frame Mellie’s trials as about feminism. It’s not about feminism. It is utterly unrealistic for a sitting First Lady to run for Senate, the same as it is for a sitting First Gentleman to do the same. If Mellie would like to do literally any other job in the world, she can knock herself out. But a Senator can’t live in the White House. That’s common sense. Even Hillary Clinton waited until she’d moved out first. Knowing this plays up the ridiculousness of this whole endeavor, and takes the wind out of the episode’s sails.

Maybe I’m just burnt out on Scandal’s formula—but it seems more to me like the show itself is burnt out on its formula. Last week it seemed the show might use the crash-and-burn ending of the B-613 storyline to radically change the status quo. Now, it seems just as reluctant as ever to change anything at all.

 

Stray Observations:

• “So you’re saying women should be paid in fried chicken now? Are you being paid in fried chicken to host this show?” Such witty repartee from our friend Cyrus Beene.
• “In this instance misogyny is our friend, is that what you’re saying?” In fact, Abby is still on fire too.
• #WhatIsFoxtail. This interactive-viewing, let’s-all-hashtag thing is an awful trend that needs to die. Also I could not care any less what Foxtail is.

I have very little to say about “I’m Just A Bill,” because frankly, it’s more of the same. More conversations between Rowan and Olivia that, however well acted, are tedious and repetitive. More cases of the week that lead the OPA team to make questionable moral decision, only to turn around and rail about justice and white hats. Basically the only thing even remotely engaging this week is Vice President Artemis, who continues to be a beacon of sanity in a show that by now is nearly finished swallowing its own tail.

How can an episode that features the murder of the mayor’s wife, by the mayor himself, in order to frame his electoral opponent, be so deadly boring? Because that kind of convoluted scheme is Scandal Paint By Numbers by now. It’s the case of the week here to suggest some sort of parallel with Olivia’s quest to take out her father, on the nature of Justice with a capital J, as an absolute. But the “fuck your white hats” mentality is well in place here, and either the show is cannily setting us up for one hell of a fall (which, maybe?), or it’s completely tone deaf to the fact that, with the exception of maybe David Rosen, none of its heroes have any business talking about justice, capital J or otherwise.

It’s also just flat out not that interesting of an explication. Scandal is a soap opera at the end of the day, and while for a while the notion of the Republic was a fun one, we’ve long since outlasted any capability the show has to raise questions on that high of a level. Joe Morton is great, but his long speech at the beginning of the episode covers well-trodden ground.

My problem is the same that I’ve had for a while now in the back half of this season. Everything is just running in circles in the season arc, and the episodic stories aren’t engaging enough to make up for the fact that the needle isn’t moving at all. And I mean, I’m saying about an episode in which a series regular is violently murdered! But even Jake’s death at the episode’s end doesn’t pack the shock value that it should, because Jake is boring as shit, and the reveal that Russell, too, is a secret B-613 just induces nothing more than it does a healthy eye roll.

Like, how many times now have Olivia and company resolved to take down Rowan? Just get on with it already? There are still three episodes left in this season, and at this point I wouldn’t be surprised to see us go around this bend at least two more times. I’ll grant that this B-613 thing has amounted to a narrative corner to end all corners, but enough is enough.

Over in the White House at least things are entertaining, if not entirely consequential. The so-called “Brandon bill” is poised to be a centerpiece of the Grant administration, but as Artemis’s investigation reveals, the bill is a dud, a gesture in the direction of racial equality that is totally unenforceable. This fact doesn’t bother Cyrus, who sends a whole parade of people to convince Artemis to just go split the tie in the senate already, but it does end up bothering Fitz, who ultimately agrees with Artemis, scraps the entire bill, and sets to work with her on a new one.

And therein lies my issue with this story: it’s another way to prop up Fitzgerald Grant as a Great Man (and just in time for him to take a fall as B-613 eventually starts to unravel), but it otherwise has basically no bearing on the rest of the episode. Olivia and Marcus played a fairly significant role in the events that resulted in the Brandon bill—and they, what, have no comment on it at all? With Olivia’s kidnapping, it made sense to diverge the White House and OPA settings, at least for a time. But now they’re happening in totally different spheres; in fact they may as well be different shows entirely.

This is the biggest problem facing Scandal as it heads into what’s looking to be a pretty significant re-tooling: it’s currently a show without identity, when it used to be one of television’s most distinctive offerings. The sooner it can start to show signs of what it plans to become, the better.

Stray Observations:

• The episode starts with Rowan asking Olivia if she’s ever heard anything so ridiculous as B-613. I know I have! Shonda Rhimes has been shoving it in my face for going on three years now!
• Taken totally in isolation, Joe Morton and Kerry Washington’s scenes together are always great, and that’s the case here, too.
• Cyrus is so disgusting in his excitement that they’ve also incidentally captures the black vote, but at least he readily acknowledges it, I guess?
• Ethan is sent to retrieve Artemis from spelling bee duty, but she’s so upstanding that she won’t leave even that job undone. His fidgeting as the kid takes forever to spell “onomatopoeia” is hilarious; he looks as though at any moment he may just finish the damn word himself.

Show of hands: who here still actually cares about B-613? Even a little, I mean. Because do you remember how sorta fun last Scandal was? Well we’re back to B-613 big time now. Everyone get in on a collective UGH with me.

UGH.

To fully explain how lame this episode is I’ll have to give away the twist right at the front. Rosen, Quinn, Huck and Charlie round up a bunch of (former? current but laying low? who knows?) B-613 agents/known associates of Jake, who is decidedly not playing along with their scheme to take down the evil organization once and for all. So all of the agents get killed, presumably by Jake, upon whom Charlie walks in as he’s surrounded by their dead bodies; this causes Rosen’s whole case to fall apart. Except that it turns out that Jake didn’t kill them after all, and Rosen’s assistant Holly is secret B-613 and has been on to them all the whole time. Jake knew that and he’s been working secretly with Olivia the whole time, and Rosen will just have to learn to trust him, which means literally never trusting him.

Folks, this is what I like to call “square one”. The plot of this episode is a misdirect, meant to call into question the audience’s loyalty to, and perhaps affection for, Jake Ballard, before another OMFG twist pulling the rug out from us while simultaneously reaffirming our loyalty to, and perhaps affection for, Jake Ballard. This narrative bait-and-switch is lazy, but we can forgive lazy. But it also assumes an undue amount of interest in Jake, who is such a milquetoast character by now, pliable to whatever needs the plot has of him, that it’s not even that unbelievable or shocking that he would turn coat at the last minute and decide that B-613 is maybe worth keeping around after all.

This is, after all, the man who killed James Novak. A fact that David Rosen fucking knows yet is still ready to pardon Jake for. And yes, everyone is a terrible person, blah blah blah. But given this and given also the fact that Huck still killed an innocent girl two weeks ago and we’re still totally unperturbed by this fact and in fact are cracking jokes about, I’m a little wary of the show’s moral scales vis a vis taking down terrorist organizations and where exactly black and white fall on the landscape. Put more simply: Fuck your white hats.

A slippery moral scale doesn’t damn a show in and of itself, but it can be the final nail in the coffin of an otherwise dull or poorly made episode, and “Honor Thy Father” is both. Never mind the B-613 plot winding us in circle so that we can end up at exactly the damn place we started. Because we also spend the an inordinate amount of time with Mellie’s half-sister Harmony, who is dug up from the bogs of some southern bayou for vetting by the ever-wonderful Lizzie Bear. Harmony is a walking cliché who injects some obvious drama into Fitz and Mellie’s new working relationship, and the upshot is that Ftiz needs to learn to start playing the role of First Gentleman. Never mind that he is an acting president. Never mind that Mellie is planning a Senate run for a state in which she does not currently reside. These are minor obstacles. (At least Cyrus is open about the fact that she doesn’t have a shot in hell—but then Cyrus is openly bitter about most things these days.) Their dinner scene itself is entertaining in the way that we’ve made awkwardness its own form of entertainment in our modern lives, and the central idea of what Mellie’s doing is particularly interesting given Hillary Clinton’s now-official run for the Whie House—but it doesn’t exactly have the makings of a B-plot, especially not in an episode that’s in desperate need of a lively one to anchor the duller season-arc proceedings.

There is also of course the case of the week. This time Olivia works for Congressman Nicholas Reed, whose father is on death row for a murder that Nicholas doesn’t believe he committed. (Spoiler alert: Nicholas did the murder and his father is taking the fall.) There is a moment of unintentional (at least I hope it’s unintentional…) hilarity here, when, despite the fact the elder Reed does not act even remotely like an innocent man, Olivia decides for no good reason that he is and goes HAM on the case. Something something Olivia is trusting her gut. She turns out to be right, but based on literally no information that was available to her, and in service of a perfunctory, Law & Order style twist.

I don’t know, guys. Maybe I’m just burnt out on the network season model. But “Run” was so inventive and engaging, and an indication that Scandal is still capable of some awe-inspiring television. So why am I so bored?

 

Stray Observations:

With a title like “Honor Thy Father” one expects Rowan, and sure enough he shows up at episode’s end. Here’s hoping Joe Morton gives the show the kick in the ass it needs, a task that he’s generally up to.

Seriously though, Mellie and Harmony’s relationship is dredged right out of some imaginary book called “101 Television Clichés For When You Don’t Know What to Write Next.”

This has been a sort of formless, shapeless season, and it has in “Love Songs (In the Key of Gallagher)” a finale to match. And yet this episode achieves a sort of formal grace, a specificity of vision, that I wish had been more present in the season as a whole. It’s like a tone poem of grief and fucked up relationships. Or at least, it has this specificity of vision as its goal, and occasionally achieves said goal. In practice “Love Songs” is kind of a mess, leaving no clear direction for the next season of the show, and not really commenting on the preceding season beyond to say, “well that was pretty fucked, right?”

And maybe that’s the point. Over twelve episodes we have watched Fiona fall in love, again, twice, and by the end of the “Love Songs” she has managed to implode both nascent relationships, before she’s really given either of them a chance. The thing is, Fiona is so oblivious about romance much of the time, she doesn’t even realize that she ruined any chance she had with Sean ages ago, when she decided to marry Gus; so now, she’s throwing away her marriage for something that doesn’t even exist. Not that Fiona would find happiness, or at least lasting happiness, with Sean anyway. “Happy is overrated,” he says. “Grow up, Fiona.” He might be in love with her, but he knows her, and he knows better.

It doesn’t help that Debbie spends much of the episode throwing Fiona’s indecision back in her face. Debbie’s story is slight (even if it does feature teen pregnancy, about which more in a moment), but it serves to contrast Fiona’s in a key way. Fiona has only ever defined herself in one role, that of mother hen, and that’s a role that has been denied her since she went to prison. Lip filled it, then Sammie. She’s never really come back, not the way she was before at any rate. And she can’t figure out what she wants to be now. Debbie, with all the self-assuredness of a teenaged idiot (not that there is another kind of teenager), knows exactly what she wants right now. She hasn’t yet led the kind of life Fiona has, where seemingly simple decisions like who to love, and how, become hopelessly complicated.

“Love Songs” also goes a long way to suggest a particular Gallagher “charm”, if you can call it that. Lip’s relationship with Amanda has been nonexistent for much of the season, but it rears its head here in a big way. She’s been falling in love with him in the background and he hasn’t even noticed. Now granted, they had a pretty strange dynamic, and a pretty explicitly open one—but there’s no accounting for love, and to hear Amanda tell it, Lip didn’t have to do much of anything. Just by virtue of being him, he “made” her fall for him. It’s another facet of the charmed life Lip’s been leading lately, and we see it in Helene too, who combines both aspects: she falls head over heels for him, or appears to be, because he is Lip Gallagher and of course she does; but she also represents the economic and academic gifts that await him in this new world he’s carved for himself.

And then there’s that final love song, as always, that of Frank and Bianca, which takes a turn for the tragic here. They made it to Costa Rica after all, and the few sun-drenched days they share there are, somehow, the most normal and romantic thing happening in the episode. At least until Bianca plays Russian roulette with herself and then accidentally shoots Frank in the other arm. Now the Gallagher-ness of it all comes into play. The whole thing is so fucked that Frank can’t help but laugh. What is Bianca, if not Monica all over again—a series of manic highs, undercut always by a melancholia, Bianca’s brought on by cancer rather than bipolar disorder, that promises nothing but sadness to come. Would Bianca have drowned herself if she hadn’t met Frank? Or found another way to end her life on her terms? Or would she have conceded to her family’s pleas, gotten treatment and gone through chemo and watched her body fail her and her hair fall out until she died anyway?

Would it have made any difference in the end? “Love Songs” gives us the original article in Monica, so that we can compare these two loves of Frank’s life. Monica is just as awful as she’s always been, a toxic influence on all around her, one that can’t be excused even by her illness. The audience can give a no doubt audible sigh of relief when Ian comes to the some conclusion and ditches her to return home—but he does so to break up with Mickey. Not because he doesn’t love him, but because Ian doesn’t want to be cared for. It’s akin to Bianca’s decision in a lot of ways—a kind of romantic self-immolation, because Ian knows that he is no longer the boy Mickey loves, and can never be again.

Anyway if “Love Songs (In the Key of Gallagher)” were more thoroughly the episode I talk about above then we’d be in business. But like I said, “Love Songs” is sort of a mess. So these season capping developments—which aren’t really developments at all, but more codas, summations of themes that have been percolating weakly under the surface of a scatterbrained story—are muddled by forays into weird comedy, such as Kevin and Veronica’s strip to the free clinic or Debbie’s encounter with a pervy convenience store clerk.

And then there is the ending itself. I don’t know what on earth the writers of Shameless were thinking with Sammie’s eleventh-hour (really more fifty-fifth minute) return here, nor with the sudden heel-turn into slapstick comedy that Ian and Mickey’s otherwise lovely break-up scene takes. Yeah, we get it, they’re Gallaghers. But everyone chuckling about how Sammie is chasing Mickey around with a gun is not a capper to the season that anyone could have wanted.

There are the tags, as well. The first reveals Carl and Chuckie to have become the leaders of their respective gangs, interrupting an otherwise friendly game of juvie dodgeball to stage some sort of brawl. It’s broad and over the top and is another attempt to end the season on a high comedic note, despite a finale that begs a more nuanced touch. The second tag, at least, is lovely, a long overdue conversation between Ian and Lip, interrupted by Frank’s return home. He takes their joint and says only, “she’s gone, boys,” leaving his boys to laugh about how fucking strange their lives are.

So the writers know what they’re doing. They can hit that high water mark pretty consistently. But so often this season they seemingly chose not to, and the last couple minutes of “Love Songs” really are abysmally bad. A finale should sum the preceding episodes and give an indication of what’s to come. “Love Songs” does the former to an extend, but it leaves us scratching our heads as to the latter.

 

Stray Observations:

The new setting in Costa Rica (I’m not sure where they actually shot it) gives some lovely shots that otherwise wouldn’t be possible on Shameless. Frank on the beach at sunrise after Bianca has drowned herself is a particularly great one.

The episode opens with a montage of sex scenes, in case the title didn’t tip you to the themes here strongly enough. In said montage Mickey is having sex with some chick, presumably to get past Ian. It doesn’t work. Later he goes to the park and picks up some random dude, which is a weirdly triumphant moment for the character.

Speaking of Mickey: rumors abound that Noel Fisher may not be back. That would be a shame, especially given the note Mickey leaves on here.

By the way, Monica is selling meth for her meth cook boyfriend who can’t be older than Lip. So yeah.

Debbie is actually pregnant, as another tag reveals. I would reflexively say that the plot won’t go through with this, but honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if another Gallagher is on the way soon.

Do we think that either Sean or Gus will return in season six? It took a while for me to warm to Sean but I have, so I’d like to see more of Dermot Mulroney when we come back. Gus I can take or leave.

As always the grade below is for the season as a whole. The episode grade is 7.5/10.

Love is a complete sham in the world of Scandal. Or at least that’s the takeaway of “Put A Ring On It,” which, despite this rather bleak worldview, manages to be a thoroughly enjoyable time, and which even wrests from the wreckage of all these romances something vaguely resembling a happy ending. This is an episode that play on one of the show’s greatest strengths, taking its case-of-the-week structure and turning it inward upon one of its own characters: in this case, Cyrus Beene, who has been neglected this season and takes a well-deserved moment in the spotlight. It also employs another of the show’s greatest strengths, sparingly used, which is the flashback.

But there is a curious thing about “Put A Ring On It” as well, which is that it feels dreadfully out of place in the season as a whole. For a moment I wondered if ABC had somehow rearranged the air dates of some episodes, but there’s enough frame of reference here to confirm that that’s not the case. So why are we completely ignoring that Huck killed a girl last week, and that Quinn and Olivia are well aware of that fact? What of B-613, who at any minute will kill any number of these people who are angling to take them down?

Please don’t mistake my questioning of this for an actual desire to have the questions answered. I am more than happy to pretend that B-613 never existed on this show, and for much of “Put A Ring On It” we can do just that. (The flashbacks to James do force us to remember exactly why he is dead.) The bottom line is that this episode is much stronger for cutting the overwrought baggage that has accumulated in these stories.

Really, I just wish Scandal would strip down to this level more often. There’s any number of things to laud about this episode. The focus on Cyrus’s impending sham wedding allows for a flashback structure that investigates his evolution over all these years. His time with his first wife, Janet (played by Shameless’s Emily Bergl, which is no doubt pleasantly distracting for viewers of both shows) reveals a man who has always been externally at odds with his internal self. He marries her not for love but for a leg up in the election for comptroller, of all things. She is a means to an end, and that callousness towards his own personal life eventually chases her away.

When his honeymoon with James rolls around, Cyrus has not really changed; if anything he has become more callous, more calculating, colder than ever. He asks James to use his influence as a journalist to bury a story that would otherwise require him to cancel the honeymoon. It’s the one thing he was never going to ask, and it means that for the remainder of their marriage James is a tool first, husband second. (See Leo and Abby’s arguing about the “separation of church and state” for a counterpoint to this.) And it’s this attitude that got him murdered. More than anything, “Put A Ring On It” parades in front of Cyrus and in front of us just how much of a monster Cyrus has become. The fascinating this is that he did so slowly, without ever realizing it, but also, really, it happened all at once. In a way he has always been this way.

Obviously the other big flashback is to Olivia and Fitz on Cyrus’s second wedding day, when Fitz literally gave Olivia a ring, one she wears at episode’s end to Cyrus’s third wedding day. The look of wistful hope that Olivia gives Fitz at the end of the episode is sad more than anything, because we’ve just spent forty-five minutes explicating the idea that marriage isn’t something that will work for any of these people or for the lives that they’ve built. But damn it if separating these characters hasn’t revitalized their romance in a major way. When Olivia visits Fitz in the Oval, pointedly not wearing his ring, there’s a real weight to her decision (and some great decisions by director Regina King to show the naked hand multiple times—Fitz may be an ass, but he notices right away).

And yet rom all that comes a mostly pleasant, mostly hopeful episode. Cyrus’s speech to Michael at the end, after an episode of calling him “whore”, is oddly sweet, in a way that only Cyrus can be. Of course he feels sympathy for Michael after meeting his heinous (if cartoonish) parents, but it’s not that he changes his opinion of the man. He still won’t love him. But he doesn’t have to hate him. He can engage him on his own terms, as a tool, as a means to an end, and they can build a life from there.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the friendship between Olivia and Cyrus, so often taken for granted, but which is so excellently highlighted in this episode. Even with the horrible things they’ve done, for each other, to each other, with each other, they still communicate with a wordless efficiency. They still understand each other, and their world, fundamentally. It’s why Cyrus can call Michael “whore” and still marry him and still fashion a version of happiness. It’s why Olivia can hate Fitz for saving her life. They just get it. They are one and the same. If ever there was a time to highlight this, it’s now, when the characters are still so scattered from each other in the wake of Olivia’s kidnapping.

“Put A Ring On It” is another one-off episode to be sure, but it’s a hugely enjoyable one. Stripped down, character-focused Scandal is ultimately the one I prefer. As we continue to figure out exactly what this show needs to be, now and going forward, I hope some of this episode’s DNA stays in the mix.

Stray Observations:

• OF COURSE Sally Langston is a Faux News (pun not entirely intended) correspondent. Cyrus: “No one’s going to take her seriously, she’s a grown woman who thinks angels are real.”
• That said, I don’t believe that Olivia, or Fitz, would name Sally as Secretary of State for any reason, ever. Sally is nuts.
• Bellamy Young is on fire this episode. Mellie gets some choice moments, whether it’s her catty dismissal of Liz North or her brilliant mimicry of Olivia in the wedding war room.
• I’m still furious about the way James was dispatched, in the midst of one of the stupidest stories Scandal has done, but Dan Bucatinsky’s reappearance here tugs at the heartstrings nonetheless.

Well, wouldn’t you know it? It’s another great episode of Shameless! The show isn’t necessarily firing on all cylinders even now, but in all honesty, even at the heights of the fourth season there were still missteps here and there (and one pretty big misstep named Matty…). So while not everything in “Drugs Actually” is exactly the best Shameless has to offer, so much of it does hit that mark that it’s useless to kvetch.

I think the very best thing about this episode is that, for the first time in a while, it bends its structure to portray Fiona and Lip once again on parallel journeys. The storytelling is at its best when it draws lines between different characters and highlights the ways that they end up on very similar trajectories, even when they’re in rather disparate situations. In this instance, Fiona and Lip are each being helped, in some way, by entirely inappropriate benefactors—and yet that inappropriateness doesn’t negate the good that’s being done. The fact that the episode finds a way to wind even Frank—Frank!—into this schema is nothing short of astonishing.

Fiona’s continued dalliance with Sean takes on a new dimension this week, as he helps her through her visit to the military prison where Ian’s being held. She tells him things she doesn’t tell Gus and leans on him in a way that she won’t lean on Gus—not because she can’t, but because she seemingly just doesn’t want to. She fears stability because “stability” is a foreign notion to her. (Remember South Side Rules?) I mean, they literally toast to self-sabotage. They’re cut from the same cloth, which makes them so well matched to each other, and yet which spells doom for this romance before it even gets off the ground.

And this all happens as Gus is getting ready to come back, so he and Fiona can work on their (admittedly reckless) marriage. Really, Fiona is a monster—she’s going to trample all over Gus’s life, and while, yes, he maybe shouldn’t have married this obvious train wreck so impulsively, he’s also a nice, well-meaning dude. He deserves better. The twist of the knife here is that Fiona knows that too. It’s Fiona’s own self-doubt and her inability to believe in her own ability to be faithful, to be stable, that fuels her infidelity, that feeds her chaotic inner self.

Compare that to Lip, who goes to a party in the newly gentrified South Side, along with Helene and her husband. She takes him there to meet Norbert, an aerospace engineer that she thinks can line up a job for him down the road. Helene finds Lip an interesting curiosity, a project, someone she can mold. But Lip is engineered to resist that sort of thing, and he fits in terribly at the party, whose host basically lays out Lip’s own worst fear of the situation. Like Fiona, he doesn’t believe that he deserves the success life has granted him. He doesn’t want to be viewed as a success story, a South Side kid gone good. He doesn’t want to acknowledge that, hey, good can be a good thing.

And then, turning all this on its head, are Frank and Bianca, who basically swap roles here. Bianca is completely off the rails now, having wholeheartedly embraced Frank’s philosophy to an extent that even he can’t keep pace with. It’s amazing to me that Shameless has somehow managed to, again, revitalize the Frank character with such effectiveness. Somehow, Bianca smoking crack with him becomes a sweet, romantic moment. Their sex on the train tracks is dangerous, and yet the audience actually sympathizes with Frank, who gets exactly what he wanted but in a manner that even he realizes is problematic. He ends up betraying Bianca by virtue of trying to help her, by calling her family to convince her to go to the hospital and get treated. Instead, she’s off to Costa Rica, or something, and Frank is going right along with her. It’s a complicated, messy situation, but that Frank can acknowledge this, and seems to genuinely want to spend time with Bianca and improve her quality of life, is an amazing development for a character of whom I was quite tired of not five episodes ago.

But the biggest bombshell of all is the usual Shameless ace in the hole: Monica, who turns up to visit Ian after the rest of the gang has already given their testimony regarding his mental state. She is a toxic, horrifying woman, a terrible influence on all of her children’s lives but especially on Ian’s, who not only has to suffer with her genetic curse, but is now suffering her wholly inappropriate life advice. She tells him exactly what he wants to hear, though, and in this case that’s enough. The military releases Ian into Monica’s custody, and they hop on the back of a truck headed anywhere south of here. The ghost of Monica, as I said earlier in the season, has loomed large over this story, and now she’s here in the flesh. As ever, it’s a major narrative kick in the teeth. I can’t say enough good things about Cameron Monaghan’s performance throughout this episode—he’s almost completely silent the whole time, but his entire demeanor has changed from earlier depictions of the character. You can see just how totally his disease has enveloped him, and it’s heartbreaking.

As I said there are missteps. Kevin and Veronica make up in a pretty anti-climactic fashion, and the whole bit with the Alibi Room springing a leak is, maybe, a little on the nose. And as for Debbie and Mickey’s runner regarding whether or not to torture Sammie is fine, until they accidentally kill her (or so they think), hide her body in a storage crate, and then just kind of forget to mention it for the remainder of the episode. A tag at the episode’s end confirms that Sammie is actually alive, just stuck in a storage crate, but ,hey, Debbie and Mickey killing someone isn’t that funny.

But the major stories of this season have emerged to be Fiona’s, Ian’s, Lip’s, and Frank’s, and these four stories are on point here going into the finale. That’s more than I expected, frankly, from the early going of this season. And that’s more than enough for me.

 

Stray Observations:

– As you’re reading this, the finale has already aired. The holiday got the best of me, but the final review will be up shortly. For this reason also the Stray Observations are mostly just a list of the episode’s (several) funny one-liners.

– “We want people to think we lead reasonable lives,” Sean says to Fiona. Truer words.

– “There’s always room in the Caddie.” Sean is actually full of wisdom this week.

– “The roof’s a nice place to drink.” “Most places are.” Frank is also rather full of wisdom, between this and: “They won’t have crack, they’re winos!”

– “Top shelf here is the cheap shit, just on a different shelf.”

About halfway through this week’s Scandal I came to a realization that surprised me for a couple of reasons. It’s never been clearer than with “It’s Good to Be Kink” that Scandal is having real trouble balancing the fallout of Olivia’s kidnapping with its desire to return to business as usual. And I never really thought that Scandal would be the type of show to 1) stray so far from its formula in the first place or 2) make such an abrupt return to said formula that I would miss it straying. But here we are, desperately trying for a sort of character study on Olivia Pope, while Lena Dunham blackmails every literal dick in Washington.

To wit: “It’s Good to Be Kink” is chock full of wacky hijinks of varying levels of tastefulness. Many of these hijinks are funny: David Rosen tried out super kinky sex once because he was feeling down on himself; Charlie fakes being a torture-porn aficionado a little too well (because he is not faking); Lena Dunham’s wig. It’s all hilarious.

Also to wit Huck slashes Lena Dunham’s throat in a most chilling and pragmatic fashion because he is a dangerous psychopath and she is a loose end. Said dangerous psychopath continues to be presented to the audience as a sympathetic character despite having done very little to earn the audience’s sympathy, and having done a hell of a lot more to not earn it.

I cannot square this throat-slashing psychopathy with wacky hijinks. Just can’t do it, and in fact won’t do it. “It’s Good to Be Kink” left me with such a terrible taste in my mouth; it has soured me one a season of Scandal that until now I’ve been pretty sweet on. I mean, I don’t know. Where do we go from here? What is left to say in terms of Huck’s characterization? Because he hasn’t changed, and this act makes it clear that he never, ever will. Huck is already a flimsy, tedious character—I felt empathy for him last week on the strength of a particularly well-written and -acted scene, and that’s it. But this is finally the bridge too far. Stop asking me to feel for this character.

The funny thing is that this is a question raised throughout the show. Everyone has done terrible things, but the other characters have other, non-psychopath aspects to them. The other characters tend, usually, to show some damn remorse. Huck does no such thing. Huck sits there and silently signs the paperwork guaranteeing his freedom from B-613’s wrath while David Rosen prattles on with guilt over Lena Dunham’s death. Fuck Huck, you guys. Fuck this redemption arc, since the path to Huck’s redemption seems to be a loop straight on back through the behavior he’s supposed to be redeemed from in the first place.

Like I said: my taste is soured now. The rest of the episode is honestly fine, if a little wheel-spinny. The plot is a little too goofy for me, and the idea that a pending sex scandal is what throws the B-613 takedown into crisis mode is more than a little ridiculous. But Lena Dunham really is perfectly cast, and hilarious in every scene of hers that does not involve her throat being slashed. (“I mean define ‘violate’, for you.”) There’s a lot of showing going on—Mellie and Liz are going to team up; Cyrus keeps trying to bring Olivia back into the Washington fold—but it’s all promises of things to come, and nothing much in this episode itself. The sex book scandal would have been fine as a standalone episode, a pretty entertaining case of the week. It’s the attempt to tie it into the show’s ongoing (and misguided) arcs that cause trouble.

This week is as good a time as any to also address that I really, really wish the show would get its cast under control. Cyrus, Mellie, and even Fitz have all faded to the background of late. It’s not a question of having too little to do, but of the scripts giving us too little reason to care. Even Olivia has taken a back seat, though this at least is intentional. And considering that her scenes are the best of any given episode, it tends to be worth the wait to see Kerry Washington on our screens again.

Speaking of Olivia: I’m loving Washington’s portrayal of her PTSD. You can see Olivia going through the motions, whether in talking with Cyrus or in trying to intimidate Lena Dunham; and the latter sees right through her. There is a spark missing in Olivia Pope. She seems like she might have gained it back at episode’s end, taking to bed a stranger from the bar in her own apartment. And, after Marcus questioned her blackness in “The Lawn Chair,” I do think it’s significant that it’s a black man she takes home. Something is brewing here, in terms of race and identity, and how Olivia’s involvement with the establishment has made her lose track of the “black” part of herself. I don’t know that Scandal is equipped to do much more than skim the surface of this, but we’ll be tracking it for the rest of the season for sure.

Stray Observations:

• How much did Abby rock this week? So much, is how much.
• Fuck Quinn, too. Her bullshit distinction between justice for Lena Dunham and Olivia’s “family” made me almost as angry as the actual throat slashing.
• Mellie, a sitting First Lady, is planning to run for Senate in Virginia. Good luck with that, Mellie.
• Cyrus has become such a dick lately (well, more of a dick), but since we’ve seen literally none of his internal life in weeks, we’re lacking necessary context. Next week’s episode looks like we’ll get at least some of that context.

Even the title of “Carl’s First Sentencing” encapsulates perfectly the waggish sense of irreverence that permeates Shameless. That rebel attitude is on full display in the episode, for better or for worse. But hey—for once, it’s not Frank acting as the dead weight dragging the show down, and for that reason alone I’m pretty taken with this episode.

I’m still not quite sure how I feel about Carl’s storyline, which is the obvious focus of “Carl’s First Sentencing,” but it’s perhaps for the best that the tack they’ve taken with it is one of full-on comedy (if dark comedy). Take it seriously and the whole endeavor becomes too dark, too wholly depressing for a show that is still ostensibly a comedy (at least if the Emmy categorization panel is to be believed). But give it just the lightest of touch and suddenly CHUCKIE’S IQ IS 71 AND IT’S THE BEST SCORE HE’S EVER GOTTEN I’M DYING—verbatim from my review notes, but seriously, Chuckie as a perennial punching bag is undoubtedly the best joke this show has in its bag of tricks. “Even if he is functionally retarded, he’s getting time,” says the public defender given the thankless task of defending poor Chuckles. That’s a tricky line to walk as far as punch lines go, but all of the chokes at Chuckie’s expense undoubtedly land.

An eight-year-old getting a four-month sentence for something that is pretty clearly not his doing is a tragic situation. That “juvie” in this instance is an experience on par with something out of Oz, and that Sammie gives her child not comfort or sympathy but advice on avoiding brutal prison rape (the advice is to simply accept less brutal prison rape) and a shiv, should ramp up the tragedy exponentially, but instead, by dialing every aspect of this story to a ludicrous eleven, “Carl’s First Sentencing” gets the laughs it’s going for, instead of the groans that could (should?) have accompanied this plot.

And then there’s Frank, who spends the episode gallivanting about Chicago with Bianca the ER doctor. She breaks down in the middle of checking up on Frank’s wound—she’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and has little time left to live. Meanwhile Frank shouts at God and lives to fight yet another day. It’s cosmically unfair, and Frank is such a vile character that this feels like a twist of the knife. And yet I don’t hate it! Somehow, against all odds, there is some real power to the time Frank spends with Bianca and the strength he gives her to get through her diagnosis. The lake location they’ve found, and to which Frank returns again to contemplate his and Bianca’s mortality, is gorgeous, and wonderfully shot again here—I’m beginning to think it will never run out of mileage.

Something that has run out mileage: Kevin and Veronica. I’ve been very patient with this story, hoping with each episode that we’ll get to explore the substance behind their fight. But we haven’t gotten to do that. There is no substance here. Instead we have Kevin roaming the halls of Lip’s school, having started his own business venture as a “Rape Walker”, escorting drunken girls safely to their dorms. This of course turns into Kevin having sex with sober girls, because sure. And it all leads to a coalition of dorm dudes ganging up on him, to assert their dominance or their property or some shit, and the Kevin realizes that he truly loves V and puts all that Rape Walker stuff behind him. It’s insulting and stupid, a contrived character assassination intended to put V and Kev on equal footing in time for a reconciliation; each scene spent on it is an increasing waste of time.

At least Lip at college is more entertaining. He gets to stay in school thanks to the kindly financial aid officer, who gets an unexpected donation for Lip from his friend who started that topless maid service. It’s the latest in a series of good things to happen to Lip—deus ex boob maid, if you will. I’ve seen grumblings, on reddit and elsewhere, that the continue cavalcade of good fortune is unearned and undramatic, but I think there is definitely a tension here, a tendency for self-destruction that underlies too many of Lip’s actions. He was going to cheat his way back into school, the Gallagher way. He’s fucking a woman who was, then wasn’t, and now is again his professor. He’s the RA of his dorm and he’s selling pot to pay his bills. Carl’s proud of his rap sheet; Ian won’t admit his mental illness; and Lip can’t escape that terrible Gallagher genome, no matter how hard the world pulls him away from it. That’s interesting to me—even if we are waiting to watch it all blow up in Lip’s face.

Like so many episode’s this season, it’s a little uneven. As always, too much focus on inconsequential characters and jokes, and too little focus on characters who should be at the fore. Ian’s one big scene, where the doctor informs him he will be on medication for basically the rest of his life, is great—but doesn’t the character and the story merit more? And Fiona does, I don’t know, stuff? I guess? She’s used here to prop up Sean and not much else, and there’s no real excuse for that. But also as always, what works, works. And at any rate, at this point I’d watch fifty minutes straight of Chuckie doing hard time, so the show must be doing something right.

Stray Observations:

“You’re a robotics engineer, do you own a fucking robot?”

I’ve been calling Sean “Sam” for a few weeks. I have no clue why, but apologies. (He does look like a Sam to me.)

Chuckie falls in with neo-Nazis at juvie (because of course) and he has a swastika tattooed on his forehead, which shouldn’t be funny, but is tremendously hysterical anyway.

Let me start by saying that while I largely enjoyed this episode, I found it to be sort of all over the place. Take the opening shot, a goofy look at Susan Ross (henceforth Artemis) as she’s prepped to become Vice President. Never mind the outlandish cartoonland politics that are behind this appointment in the first place—outlandish cartoonland politics are Scandal’s bread and butter. What is not generally Scandal’s bread and butter is slapstick humor, and this VP plot is laden with it.

Contrast that to a scene like Huck’s deposition, or any of Olivia’s interactions with Rose—all high drama and devastating sadness. I’ve used the term “tonal whiplash” before in my television writing, usually about Showtime’s Shameless, but man, does the term ever apply here, on an episodic level as well as on a more macro, season level. Consider: besides a token reference to Olivia’s kidnapping and planting the seeds of Artemis, “The Lawn Chair” took place in isolation from the rest of the season.

Meanwhile, “The Testimony of Diego Munoz” entirely ignores the events of “The Lawn Chair,” except where it continues the saga of placing Artemis one heartbeat from the presidency. (By the way, I was right last week—that development could absolutely have begun in the episode and brought us to the same exact place, and would have strengthened both episodes.) And within the episode, we are bounced back and forth between Artemis’s wacky hijinks to B-613 Part Two: The Quickening to Olivia and Rose’s veritable sobfest. With this a cast this large and this many plot balls in the air, it’s inevitable that individual episodes may contain more disparate threads than is appropriate, but rarely has an episode of Scandal veered so wildly within itself.

But concerns about the episode’s structure aside, this is actually pretty entertaining. Like, for as outlandish and out of place as Artemis is in the White House, she’s hilarious, and it’s nice to see the White House crew get to have a little fun for once, rather than being mired in constant drama and espionage. Artemis Pebdani is obviously a gifted comedian, and she steals every scene she’s in. Abby and Leo’s fling gets some play this week too, and while it’s a by-the-numbers office romance plot, it’s still a pleasure to watch. In fact it feels right out The West Wing’s playbook, which is not bad at all.

If super espionage-y Scandal is more your speed, then the writers have you covered this week with Huck and the return of the return of B-613. Remember those files Huck left his wife Kim? She takes them to David Rosen and a whole ordeal ensues. Long story short, David Rosen has decided, white hat planted firmly on head, that he’ll be taking down Rowan’s organization once and for all. But the meat of this story isn’t really the titular testimony (which is delivered in the exact same, overdone cadence that Guillermo Diaz uses in every single scene on this show), but the emotional hit of watching him try to lie about B-613 while moments of his life with Kim flash before his and our eyes. It’s heartbreaking, and manipulative? Sure. But it works, and at the end of the day that’s all that matters.

And then there’s Olivia, who is so walled off from the rest of this show still. She spends the episode trying to locate Lois’s body for Rose, the “where’s the black lady?” lady from two weeks back. This is an interesting plot for Olivia—a case of the week to which she already knows the answer. Instead what’s to be handled is finding a body and providing an appropriate lie for poor Rose, who had been Lois’s secret lover across the decades of their lives. Maybe this episode isn’t so removed from last week’s—the more I think about it, the more Olivia’s story with Rose feels like a further examination of her black identity, as well as her feminine identity. This whole idea of Liv as an outsider, in any of the ways one can imagine her as such, is a key component of the back of the season. Rose’s fate is in many ways a glimpse into the future for Olivia—loving someone from a distance only to lose them abruptly and without reason? Check; Olivia can barely even look at Fitz in the White House, until suddenly she’s yelling at him instead. He finally proved he loved her, but he didn’t do it in the right way. He should have let her die, she doesn’t say, but you can tell she wants to. And just as Lois was killed by a random bullet, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, so it goes for anyone in Liv’s orbit. With the life she lives, everyone is a potential casualty. It’s not her own safety she fears for, at least not solely; it’s everyone else’s.

So it’s a scattered episode, sure. But it’s one that eases us further into a back half that (hopefully) will permanently rid of us of B-613. More importantly, it’s a back half that’s treating Olivia seriously as a character independent of her romances, something that’s long been missing from the series. We’ve had a bit of a pause; now I look forward to getting back into high gear.

Stray Observations:

• Let me chime in on Lena Dunham’s wig, which is completely insane looking. I’m looking forward to watching her play a character that will hopefully be more separated from herself than Hannah Horvath is.
• Kim is so fucked, you guys. Somehow or some way she is going to be violently murdered before we’re done here. Bets on whether it’s Rowan or Huck himself?

Gallaghers, right? Our favorite beleaguered South Side family decides their inherited family name is a diagnosis unto itself, or at least it should be, and they’re not wrong. They come to this conclusion while in the jail waiting room; this time they’re waiting on Carl, who has been caught attempting to smuggle, let’s call it way too much heroin, across state lines. Carl has no formal diagnosis to explain his gallivant; then again neither does Fiona. Or Lip, or Debbie. (Liam is yet too young to be quite so fucked up. The jury is probably still out on Sammie.) This idea of “crazy” as a relative thing (pun intended) permeates the episode, and makes for a continued treatise on the idea that this family, maybe, just doesn’t have its shit together because its members are fundamentally incapable of doing so.

The ghost of Monica hangs over “Uncle Carl,” as Ian returns home a shell of his former self. But he refuses to take his medication, and flushes the entire prescription almost immediately. Ian doesn’t see himself as another Monica. Fiona’s been to jail and Carl’s on his way there; what makes Ian the crazy one? To the audience, of course, the answer is obvious—Ian is cursed with Monica’s specific brain chemistry, whereas his siblings are simply products of their upbringing. But there’s considerably more grey area from Ian’s point of view, and one can hardly blame him for seeing things that way.

Here’s the thing: Frank and Monica did a number on these kids, genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder notwithstanding. We have seen since day one the effects of Frank’s particular brand of parenting, and in fact he’s still fucking things up for his kids even now. Chuckie and Carl are in jail in large part owing to Frank, who views Carl’s drug dealing as a good work ethic (something Frank wouldn’t know if it bit him in the ass), and who even still essentially called the cops on his own kid when his plan went belly-up. But “Uncle Carl” sheds some new light on Frank as well, as his kids continue to reenact the various aspects of his own youth with Monica. As Mickey drinks himself into depression over Ian’s current state, Debbie informs him that Frank reacted the same way to Monica. It’s not a statement meant to generate sympathy for Frank; rather, it’s a warning to Mickey, that he needs to be there for Ian rather than feel sorry for himself. Despite their horrid childhoods, the kids are (or at least have a shot at being) all right.

“Uncle Carl” has a lot to recommend it. As Ian’s story calls back to the Gallagher’s collective past, it serves as a lynchpin for the various other adventures the characters are on. The episode strikes a strong balance among its various components through this conceit. Fiona struggles to communicate with Gus because her case study for married life is not a very good one. She can do passion, spur of the moment; getting married on a lark is nothing for Fiona Gallagher. But everything that comes after is hard. Commitment is hard. Complacency is hard, and Fiona isn’t used to that sort of challenge. Even after a big speech and a declaration of love, Gus is still heading off on that tour bus, and Fiona still isn’t going with him.

Or take Lip, who has so much potential—more, if we’re being honest, than anyone else in his family. But he is so ready to self-sabotage, even in his attempts to stay in school. His decision to turn the dorm for which he is responsible into, basically, a pot dispensary is colossally stupid. But he breaks free of his Gallagher-itis by, at least, being able to acknowledge his propensity for poor decision-making. He knows that if he doesn’t stay at university, he’ll fall right back into his old life. If Ian can grow up like Monica, there’s nothing stopping Lip from growing up like Frank. Jeremy Allen White gets a huge scene with Lip’s financial aid advisor this week, capturing Lip’s perceived helplessness and imbuing the character with a newfound sense of tragedy.

The specter of their parents hangs over all the Gallagher kids, but at the same time they find it impossible to escape their parents’ influence. As a result, they find themselves constantly in situations that on the one hand, they bring upon themselves; but on the other hand, these situations are more or less inevitable. The difference is that the Gallagher kids feel guilty about their nature, and seek to fix the messes they create (mostly—Carl is either too crazy or too young). Compare to Sammie, who attempts this episode to “train” Frank, but has so far done so by shooting him in the arm and proceeding to manipulate him emotionally—in other words, the usual tricks of the Gallagher trade. It all boils down to the classic nature versus nurture debate that, in some way or another, has run beneath Shameless’s surface this whole time.

The Gallaghers weekly find themselves in one mess after other, many of their own making. Otherwise we wouldn’t have a show. But the Gallaghers we actually like struggle to make good on their promises, to clean up their messes and fix their mistakes. How long do we have before we’re no longer allowed to fix the things we’ve fucked up? That’s a question the Gallaghers seek to answer, and there’s quite a bit more seeking left to do. By episode’s end, Carl is speaking with a state attorney and the Gallaghers all strongly advise him not to give anything up. Bad advice, maybe, but typically Gallagher. But also by episode’s send, Fiona has re-committed herself to Gus (at least verbally), and Mickey has gotten into bed beside Ian after all. They’re trying.

Stray Observations:

• Svetlana extends her fulfillment of wifely duties to Veronica as well, and gives the same explanation practically verbatim, thereby bringing this joke back from creepy all the way back around to hilarious. In general, Svetlana is a font of practical marital wisdom, and I’m enjoying her increased presence on the show.
• “In my younger days I slept with every member of the Guns n’ Roses cover band Buns n’ Hoses.”
• So many phenomenal Chuckie gags this week, it’s impossible to pick a favorite. That he sleeps on the floor in a dog bed? Sitting in the middle of a bus stop with pounds of heroin taped around his tummy? Standing in a jail cell, excited that Uncle Carl will be his storytelling neighbor?
• Debbie and Derek are pretty adorable together.
• The gentrification runner returns this week after a couple weeks off. The Lisas are building a community garden next to the Gallagher house, and want Fiona to join them for just a two thousand dollar buy in. First of all, that sounds fucking terrible, and second of all, what the hell kind of a garden are they building?
• Sam’s back too, intentionally throwing wrenches into Fiona’s marriage. This character is all over the place to me, and I’m not convinced the writers have a handle on him either.

Here we have what might once upon a time have been marketed as a Very Special Episode of Scandal. And yes, “The Lawn Chair” is primarily concerned with delivering a message, but I don’t think that it falls into the same traps that so many message episodes can. For instance the message does not come at the expense of the characters. It does come at the expense of the overall series arc, but we’ve just had a long and involved, multi-episode arc—a one-off episode here makes sense, structurally, and why not use it to say something worthwhile?

That’s the big thing here: “The Lawn Chair” is saying something worthwhile. This is an important episode of television, socially conscious and emotionally gutting; its message is one that Scandal is uniquely suited to deliver in the current television landscape. The fact of Olivia’s blackness has rarely ever been front and center on Scandal. Instead it has been a given, as worth mentioning as Fitz’s whiteness (which is to say, basically unmentioned). But thrown into a situation like the one in this episode, Olivia’s race suddenly becomes the most important thing about her. She might be a black lady (as we were so frequently reminded two episodes ago), but she’s so entrenched in the establishment that she might as well not be, as activist Marcus reminds her here. And so “The Lawn Chair” is more than a moment on the soapbox for Shonda Rhimes (though it is that, and that’s fine); it is a test of character for Olivia Pope unlike any she’s been through before.

Olivia begins the episode with a new client, who just so happens to be the D.C. Metro police department. They’re in need of Olivia’s services because one of their officers has shot a black teenager dead, in self-defense of course, and they need to control the optics, given the alarming frequency of such incidents across the country. It’s an unsettlingly familiar notion, and it puts Olivia, one would think, into a difficult position. The moment where, mid-way through the episode, she abandons her client and joins the growing group of protestors just outside the crime scene is a moment in which Olivia validates her identity as a black woman, and values it above her identity as Washington’s fixer-in-chief. Good for her.

Even the structure and craft of “The Lawn Chair” feels just slightly different from previous episodes, because the case of the week here is so intensely personal not just for Olivia, but (one hopes) for the viewers at home. It’s the kind of “ripped from the headlines” story one might find on Law & Order, but it’s not so by-the-numbers formulaic as those episodes tend to be (at least, not at first). At the end of the day, this is a fantasy situation, taking a too-real moment from our world and filtering it through Scandal’s distinctive worldview. But it’s also a call to action. This is an important episode of television. It’s a necessary thing for people who watch ABC on Thursdays at 9 to see, especially if those people have already welcomed Olivia Pope and Annalise Keating into their homes but still don’t “get the big deal” with Ferguson and Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and the nameless, faceless others.

Even in Scandal’s fantasy, there is no clean solution here, no simple answer. “The Lawn Chair” presents the issue as morally complex; even if the officer who shot Brandon does turn out to be just a vile racist, his boss is not, and most of the police on the force are not. He is an exception, not the rule, and one we need to work together to weed out. On the one hand I wish the episode erred more on the side of moral complexity—the scene where the offending officer explains his thought process, in which he shot an unarmed black boy because the boy was “disrespecting him”, and then proceeded to cover up his crime and frame a dead black boy for attempted assault, is an over-the-top, cartoonishly racist screed. But fuck it. Read any comment on any news story. Hell, maybe read any comment on any review of this particular episode of Scandal. Perhaps a racist screed isn’t so cartoonish.

There is no happy ending for this episode, which ends still with a shot of Brandon dead and being zipped into a body bag. His murderer is behind bars, but murder is not among the charges. His father is still left alone. But it’s a happier ending than we are afforded in our America, where the murderers of black boys walk free and their crimes go unpunished and even our black president is not permitted to embrace the grieving fathers and mothers.

I wish that an episode of Scandal could fix our world. It won’t. But it’s one hell of an important start.

Stray Observations:

• The episode is ungraded, but suffice to say that I found it to be an incredibly strong, potent episode of television in the Norman Lear tradition.
• Throughout the episode is a B-plot of Fitz trying to navigate the situation but being unable to say what he really wants to due to his office. This gives way to the search for a new vice president, but since he’s “promised” the next presidency to Mellie, the goal is to find someone totally unelectable. So he and Mellie scheme together, which is a fun new dynamic for them, and they land on none other than Artemis! This story is a minor part of the episode, and there to provide levity even as it connects back to the A-story time and again—I’m just not sure how well the juxtaposition really works, and it may have best been left until next week.
• I will never not be immediately distracted by the presence of Perd Hapley on this show.

After a much needed kick in the pants, it’s nice to see Shameless mostly keeping up the momentum. “Tell Me You Fucking Need Me” is perhaps more interesting in concept than it ultimately is in execution, but the concept is so strong, and goes so far in uniting the several disparate elements of the season to date, that it’s sufficient to make a for a satisfying episode.

Obviously the episode is named for Sammie’s plea to Frank, right after she shoots him in the arm in the middle of the Gallagher living room and starts literally pouring salt in his wounds. This is quite the scene, to put it mildly. On the one hand it is outrageous in the way that Frank stories so often are, but on the other it taps into the unbridled, unabashedly crazy pathos that also often runs beneath the surface of the show. Sammie’s assault on Frank comes after a particularly galling speech in which Frank admonishes Lip on the nature of adulthood and responsibility, which nicely sets up the audience for wanting to see Sammie put a bullet in her dad. Her place on the show has been somewhat extraneous for a while now, but with this latest, absurd development, she brings into relief many of the other conflicts in the show, too. All of the other Gallaghers have moved away from Frank, emotionally speaking, but the same basic needs continue to drive them in their new relationships.

“Tell me you fucking need me.” Who has been more driven by the need to be needed than Fiona? Until very recently she was the lynchpin of the Gallagher clan, the only thing keeping them together, but now she’s rarely even home, and Sammie has basically usurped her role. Subsequently Fiona is floundering a little bit. To her credit she immediately comes clean with Gus, and they give it an honest attempt at mature discussion. Sure, instead Gus punches Jimmy in the face, but it turns out Jimmy deserved it. The episode ends with Fiona rejecting Jimmy, and, presumably, deciding she’ll finally make it work with Gus in a real way. Has she realized that Gus needs her? Does it feel good for her to need someone else, for once in her life? These are the questions that are worth investigating; they’re the questions that made this latest (and hopefully last) go-around with Jimmy worthwhile.

“Tell me you fucking need me.” Mickey fucking needs Ian, and he needs Ian to acknowledge that need, and reciprocate it. But Ian is in no shape to verbalize any of that right now, and that inability is crushing Mickey. The scene where Mickey and Fiona visit him is heartbreaking. It’s expertly shot, too, with the camera work mimicking Ian’s utter lack of focus, zipping around the room, zooming on the background, barely registering Fiona and Mickey. It ends with Ian announcing that he’s tired and leaving them, mere minutes after greeting them.

Sometimes need can be alienating, until we acknowledge it and begin to let it go. Lip has spent this season trying to rid himself of his need for his Gallagher identity, his need to be seen as a specific person, a hood rat made good rather than just a normal college kid with normal problems. He makes a major step in that direction today, after the Gallagher clan’s inability to even forward a simple piece of mail jeopardizes his entire college career, in a deceptively simple way—he opens a P.O. box. Lip is his own man, with his own (almost an) address.

“Tell me you fucking need me.” Veronica needs Kevin, doesn’t she? But she needs him in a way that she can’t vocalize, because, I think, deep down, she knows that it makes her a shitty person. She can’t deal with the fact that Kevin has prioritized her children over her, without acknowledging that it means she hasn’t prioritized her children over herself. It’s selfish, full stop. I’m still fascinated by the idea of this marriage dynamic, but I think the story has started to fail in the execution. How far can this feud really go? Does V really have no attachment at all to her children? Was she so uninterested in starting a family in the past, and we in the audience just didn’t notice? The obvious answer is no, and I think the show fully intends the answer to be no. But with that being the case, the huge extent to which their fight ahs consumed their relationship becomes pretty unreasonable as far as the narrative is concerned. Svetlana’s introduction to this whole mess exacerbates the issue—if Kevin will accept a blowjob from her, why not just fuck V in the first place? The idea is great, but it’s time to start bringing this story back around to a conclusion.

More than anything, “Tell Me You Fucking Need Me” slows down the pace a bit after last week’s breakneck caper, and it’s mostly to the show’s credit. I love these deeper dives into the character’s needs, the emotions that drive them and what they need from themselves and from each other. This is a solid character piece, with some questionable plotting but raising questions so engaging that it hardly matters.

Stray Observations:

• OF COURSE Chuckie has explosive diarrhea in the mornings. At any rate, Chuckie and Carl attending school together deserves a spin-off. Chuckie is the best visual gag Shameless ever devised, and he gets some choice dialogue this week too: “I painted this! And no one made fun of me! And Uncle Carl made me his slave!”
• “I got you nunchucks and condoms.” “I know, I got one on right now.”
• V and Kevin’s babies are fucking adorable.
• These scenes at the psych ward are ROUGH. Ian is completely out of it—why do we treat mental health patients like they’re in prison? The parallels that Shameless is drawing can’t be coincidental.
• I will never tire of hearing Mickey self-identify as Ian’s boyfriend.
• Debbie gets a boyfriend! This story has been slight, but the scene where he kisses her is super cute anyway.

By the end of “No More Blood,” Olivia Pope is back in Washington where she belongs, and everything has changed. Or at least this is the note on which Scandal would like to leave us at the end of this long ordeal.

“No More Blood” brings the kidnapping of Olivia Pope to a somewhat natural, mostly satisfying conclusion, but the path to the episode’s rather strong final act is circuitous and often repetitive, a sin that this arc has now committed multiple times. I have one basic pet peeve with serialized television and it is this: the false cliffhanger, followed by an immediate reversal and then several scenes that reenact the exact situations that preceded the cliffhanger. This sums up the first three-quarters of “No More Blood” perfectly. Before even the title screen, the Iran deal is undone, of no consequence despite last episode’s Shocking Twist. Then we endure more scenes of people watching an auction on a computer screen; more scenes of Andrew and Mellie trading barbs; and a near-identical prisoner exchange, this time with Russia.

It’s easy to call this an inescapable reality. There are a certain number of episodes to fill, and plot beats need to fall at specific points throughout the season. Sometimes you need to stretch, to pad, to double back or take the scenic route to the desired conclusion. But that doesn’t make the plotting not lazy—and besides, there are plenty of shows that do not do this, and even Scandal was, once upon a time, better at avoiding this sin.

Fortunately, the episode is peppered with more original and interesting developments throughout the early going, and once Olivia is delivered safely to (surprise!) Stephen Finch, the episode picks up the pace considerably heading into the next segment of the season. In many ways “No More Blood” is an investment in future episodes of Scandal, wrapping up Olivia’s kidnapping but also sowing the seeds for character and story arcs to come.

In that transitional capacity, this is a fine episode. Look to Cyrus’s conversation with Abby toward episode’s end to recapitulate the conceit of the series, and lay the groundwork for a fair amount of drama to come. “You almost killed her today,” Abby says, “and he has no idea.” “Not unless you tell him,” Cyrus replies. There has been no shortage of secrets between the cast up to this point, but this is by far the biggest one. Cyrus was seconds away from killing his best friend and betraying his most loyal ally, an act averted only by a fluke of Abby’s involvement. Meanwhile, Mellie has committed yet another unspeakable act without Fitz’s knowledge; Huck has yet another secret to hide from Quinn; and Olivia harbors a resentment toward Fitz that she can barely even vocalize.

What’s great about “No More Blood” isn’t the progression and resolution of the plot, which is frankly pretty by the numbers, but the suggestions of conflicts to come. I continue to be most engaged by Fitz, of all people. He comes to see Olivia safely home, only to walk into a fight he wasn’t expecting. “I saved you!” he said, but of course he didn’t. He started a war for Olivia, sure (something she wishes he wouldn’t even have done), but he didn’t save her; Abby having the foresight to contact Stephen did that. Throughout this episode, characters argue with Fitz for not performing to their expectations of him. Cyrus does it, imagining himself reaming Fitz out for his decision making, before instead deciding to, as always, yes the President to death and do the real work in backroom dealings. Olivia does it too, at what would seem the unlikeliest of moments, when one might think she’d run back into Fitz’s arms. But Fitz isn’t a person for Olivia or for Cyrus, he is an object, a symbol, an achievement. Fitz doesn’t want to be that—he wants to be a guy in love with a girl. It’s just that no one will let him. Who would have thought that Fitz would be so compelling at this point in the series, let alone the most compelling figure on the damn show?

When all is said and done, Olivia’s kidnapping was a cool adventure, but I’m happy to see the show back to normal—or at least, what passes for normal for our gladiators. The arc has featured some of the series’ most ambitious storytelling to date, and some truly excellent character work, but it’s also made some questionable decisions, taken a little too long, and wrapped up with the strangest of deus ex machina (dei ex machina? deus ex machinae?) in Stephen Finch, who drops in for a brief cameo and is gone again, just like that. But what it’s done with unquestionable success, and we already see the fruits of this labor in the closing moments here, is leave the kind of scorched earth wreckage that will have repercussions straight through to whatever crazy finale Shonda Rhimes has in store this time.

 

Stray Observations:

• Another neat, potentially deep direction: examining why Jake and Huck have had such different outcomes following their torture at the hands of B-613 and Rowan. Huck makes the titular promise to Quinn, but within mere hours he’s induced a stroke in the Vice President in an act of hired revenge. Perhaps he’s just taking his promise literally? But there’s something uniquely wrong with him that isn’t wrong with Jake (or maybe Jake is just better at hiding it).
• So all of these people risking life and limb to extract Olivia, they must know Fitz is doing it for love? Obviously Cyrus does, but now he’s barely even hiding his motivation from the rest of his staff.
• Fitz’s blinded-by-love decision making is particularly personal to Cyrus, of course, given that he inadvertently sacrificed his own husband in pursuit of “the Republic”.
• Joe Morton! Hadn’t realized how much I missed his presence, but his scene here—which is at its root an overwrought monologue about fishing, somehow—is magnetic.