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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.

 

 

 

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.”

“You Can’t Take Command” is the sort of finale that, as you’re watching it, is pretty damn entertaining. But the second it’s over (and, really, during any commercial break or even just a pause in the episode’s action), and you think about any of its components in any sort of detail, the whole thing threatens to fall apart. It coasts along on momentum, but then, at a crucial narrative peak, the momentum comes crashing to a halt. The show stops and forces you to think about what it’s doing—and all that anyone can be expected to think is, “wow, that was stupid.”

None of that is to say I hated “You Can’t Take Command.” In fact, I found much of it way more tolerable than the past several episodes of the season. (I certainly didn’t hate it as much as The A.V. Club’s Joshua Alston, for instance.) The episode coasts along a lot more smoothly, and in more entertaining fashion because it actually has an endgame to play out. We are past the point of endless table setting for a foregone conclusion, and that helps the show tremendously.

For instance, take the way the episode immediately drops the other shoe. Leave aside that Rowan’s fake name is Damascus; we, at this point, can take for granted that everyone on Scandal is a fucking idiot. The shit-eating grin on Joe Morton’s face as he hands Mellie the photos of her and Andrew, along with the Remington file, is pure gold. And how great that Mellie is finally, if against her will, placed smack center in the middle of all this B-613 shit. In other words, she is finally granted a role in the show proper, rather than shunted off to some narrative offshoot reserved just for her. (Like, just spit-balling here, an extremely improbable run for Senate in a state in which she does not reside.)

The script even does one better by drawing parallels between Mellie and Olivia, a concept that is always extremely welcome. Cyrus and Maya each tell them, respectively, how self-centered they are; how they construct dramas surrounding themselves, and other people are merely actors in those dramas. Never mind that everyone lives in her own drama.

This, ultimately, is the undoing of Olivia’s grand scheme to take down her father. No one knows who Rowan is. You can’t take Command, the logic goes, because there may as well not be a Command. Eli Pope is a doddering curator at the Smithsonian, full stop. “You Can’t Take Command” goes full-on “darkest before the dawn” here, as Rowan, in short order, murders the entire grand jury and even the stenographer too; threatens David Rosen with Abby’s life, leading to Jake and Olivia’s imprisonment (actually Cyrus does this, about which more in the strays); and systematically eliminates every person on earth who can name him as Rowan, even going so far as to offer Maya her freedom in exchange for her silence.

What a setup, right? The CIA is fully aware of B-613, and while Director Lowry seems to have been unaware of how out of hand it’s become, she’s powerless before Rowan and Cyrus to do anything about it. Like that, Rowan appears invincible.

And then Olivia and Jake just kind of win. They trace the money from the Smithsonian that Eli Pope has been funneling to B-613, and they nail the doddering old curator for embezzlement. They even visit him in jail and gloat.

I probably don’t need to explain why this is stupid. This is where the episode screeches to a halt, and it never quite recovers. To the extent that Rowan is actually eliminated here, what an anticlimax! All of this season has led to a financial technicality? He’s in regular-people prison, for a white-collar crime? There isn’t even the decency of a final showdown between Olivia and her father? Maya doesn’t have more of an interesting role to play? From the pretty effective groundwork laid in the first half of the episode comes almost nothing of interest or import, and that’s a bummer. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the finale of this season were a disappointment—but to have it come some close to salvaging something worthwhile, and whiff at the last minute, is the real scandal. (Sorry.)

And then there is of course the fact that Rowan hasn’t gone anywhere at all. So this is a false ending, and a disappointing false ending at that. It’s a matter of when, not if, Rowan returns and this whole sloppy mess rears its head once more. If nothing else, this finale and this season might have been an exercise in deck-clearing, freeing the show of the shackles of the B-613 storyline, but they haven’t managed even that.

That’s a shame, because the new status quo suggested by the episode’s final act is an intriguing one in many places, but it’s significantly less intriguing when all indications are that any shifts are temporary, awaiting reversion to the template. Consider the notion that the two most electric scenes in the finale are only tangentially related to B-613, and in fact grow out of the fallout of B-613’s “destruction.” Quinn’s confrontation of Huck, upon realizing that he (totally nonsensically, it should be noted) is still operating under Rowan’s orders, and killed the grand jury, is a unexpectedly cracking payoff to the season’s most frustrating plot thread. “Of course you have a choice. You always have a choice.” Leave it Quinn of all people to be the moral arbiter on this show. “You’re not thinking anymore, you just want to kill.” Katie Lowes’s performance is gripping here, and it’s about damn time the narrative grapples with the fact that Huck is essentially a monster in the employ of Olivia Pope. Fuck your white hats. The only negative about this scene is that it’s such a small part of the episode, and is left on a cliffhanger—one both hopes that Quinn shoots him dead, and yet doesn’t want to put that burden on Quinn. It would have been nicer to see this one laid to rest.

The other great, great scene is Fitz’s confrontation with Mellie. I think he ultimately is being a bit unfair to her, given all that he has done, but the idea that Mellie gave up that grand jury is too much to take for him. The whole last act of this episode is shit hitting in the fan, and it works on that level, allowing the episode to regain at least a little of the momentum it lost in the resolution of the Rowan business. Tony Goldwyn is on fire here, too, which helps tremendously. – “Do you think I’d let you be President after what you did? Pack your bags and get out of my house. Before I throw you out.” There’s a lot of talk on this show about what a great man Fitz is, and while I hate to see Mellie villainized solely to prove that point, it’s not unreasonable to see this as a breaking point for Fitz. That point is further emphasized by the fact that he summarily fires Cyrus, recognizing him finally for the snake that he is. Fitz has been a pawn for much of his life, this season included; perhaps he just has finally decided, no more.

And then there is, of course, that ending. Olivia Pope and Fitzgerald Grant making out on the White House balcony. (In a truly terrible VFX shot, but nonetheless.) The season has teased out their romance in fits and starts, but really this story hasn’t been the focus of the show for some time, and this seems like an odd time to revisit it. That said, it’s impossible not to get giddy at the sheer energy of the scene, and at the song choice, “Here Comes the Sun,” which evokes the metaphor of Jake and Olivia’s arguably more hopeful relationship just as it is abandoned in favor of Fitz and Olivia’s arguably more epic love. As we prepare ourselves for Scandal season five (and beyond, because as we know, Shondaland shows never end), it’s finally time for Fitz and Olivia to stand in the sun.

How long will it last? Other than “not very” the answer is left vague. For all the show’s talk of being the good guys, wearing the white hats, what “You Can’t Take Command” confirms if nothing else is that the very idea of white hats is unattainable. The bad guys will always have one up on our heroes, which is that no matter what awful things our heroes do, there is still a line that they won’t or can’t cross—and the heroes who do cross that line, for whatever reason, are summarily cast out.

This season was a mess, and the episode was too. But there are strands of good ideas, little ideas here and there to explicate. There is fertile ground for future stories, which is half the job of a finale, and is the half that “You Can’t Take Command” is much more successful at. For now I’ll pretend that Olivia just shot Rowan or something, and deal with him again when he inevitably shows up. Out of sight, out of mind.

 

Stray Observations:

• Cyrus Beene. What a dick this guy is, right? I don’t even recall if his partnership with Rowan was previously known or not, but it wouldn’t have been surprising anyway. His little quip, “I can’t have a soul. If I had one I would never accomplish a thing,” says so much about what he has become, and to an extent what he has always been. (Suddenly that wedding flashback makes more sense in context of the season.) He’s a monster, which we knew already, but certainly for me his threatening of Abby’s life was a bridge too far. It’ll be curious to see what his role his next year—does he go full black hat? Team up with Mellie? Something else?
• Verbatim from my notes: IS OLIVIA POPE ABOUT TO BECOME THE FIRST LADY
• “Susan is a national treasure.” You’re damn right Vice President Artemis is a national treasure.
• Jake tells Olivia that she’s in love with Fitz and he leaves, hopefully for good. The men on this show are always telling Olivia how in love she is with the other men on this show.
• That wraps another season of Scandal. I’m undecided whether I’ll be writing about it again in the fall—I had previously been reluctant to write about this one weekly simply because I don’t think the show is that fertile ground for weekly criticism, and I still feel that way twenty-two episodes later. But we’ll see. As always, the grade below is for the season. The episode gets an entirely too generous 8/10—the whole is certainly less than the sum of the parts here.

 

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.

It could just be that I watched Scandal late this week, and after a stellar night for HBO’s dramas, but color me underwhelmed by “Gladiators Don’t Run,” which is a scattered, confusing mess of an episode, one that twists and contorts the plots into braided pretzels so intricate that even the writers themselves seem to lose the thread by the end. (Not unlike this opening sentence…)

By the end of this episode, Olivia has been sold at auction to the highest bidder (Iran), Andrew Nichol has gotten away scot-free (due to his manipulation of Mellie), and I honestly have no idea what on earth the plot mechanics were to get us here. At the beginning of the episode Olivia is sharing champagne with Ian and negotiating her own auction. But in short order, henchman Gus shoots Ian dead and Olivia is back to being a prisoner (how she lost this status in the first place is a mystery to me, unless I missed something last week somehow). Who exactly is behind this whole thing? Who are the actors involved? How did Olivia get to the point of working with Ian? How did Andrew Nichol get boxed out of his own conspiracy? Where did this cabal of young hot hacker terrorist kidnappers even come from in the first place?

Scandal doesn’t see fit to answer any of these questions. Stuff just happens, and that’s that. Now, since the “stuff” in question is the kidnapping of Olivia Pope, the fallout at least has some inherent dramatic interest. But that gut, emotional reaction will only carry the show so far, and there’s no escaping the fact that if you stop to think about any one aspect of the show’s plot right now, the whole enterprise falls apart.

That’s a problem for an episode like “Gladiators Don’t Run,” which is concerned entirely with the progression and contortion of said plot. Who is on whose side, who knows what about whom at any given time—these are the sorts of shifts that the episode delves into, but since 1) it is impossible to keep track without some sort of flow chart and 2) any such flow chart would immediately reveal that none of this makes any sense, an episode with such a project just feels aimless and silly.

It’s a shame, because moments here really do land. Kerry Washington continues to be fantastic, though she has a noticeably diminished presence this week in terms of screen time. Olivia goes through so many situational changes in this episode alone, and Washington skillfully navigates her emotional state through each. Tony Goldwyn as well is inspired, imbuing Fitz’s search for Olivia with the sort of romantic passion that hadn’t been seen in the character for a while, until recently. This is also an uncommonly funny episode, with a few zingers and setups that had me laughing out loud. The obvious winner is Quinn (“It doesn’t matter how many times you re-invent your identity, Sallie Mae will find you.”), but pretty much everyone gets a good moment or two in.

But despite the moments of levity and some further attempts at characterization in light of Olivia’s disappearance (Abby shoulders much of this weight, being the literal last person in Washington to learn of Olivia’s current situation), this is an episode that is killing time until what will surely be a shocking reveal next week as to who, really, has won Olivia Pope at auction. (Might it be Harrison? It would explain why we spent so much time mourning him in the early season.) “Gladiators Don’t Run” is an occurrence of plot without story, incidence without import. Even Maya Pope’s return is essentially an excuse for a fetch quest, a way for Jake and Huck and Quinn to mark time until another aspect of the plot resolves itself. We spend most of the episode watching characters watching the auction, being unable to do anything about it, and then having none of it matter, because Iran swoops in from outside of the auction anyway. That’s entirely too much time to spend on what amounts to a red herring.

When you’re telling a heavily serialized story such as Scandal’s, there are bound to be bits and pieces of your story that will suffer from this. But there’s no excuse for basically an entire episode of it. “Gladiators Don’t Run” continues to run with what’s been successful this season, but it’s mired in boring, confusing, plotty nonsense from beginning to end.

 

Stray Observations:

• So Huck just happens to have $2 billion laying around, which is so improbable that they actually felt the need to flash back to Rowan explaining his ridiculous, Office Space scheme to siphon money from the treasury in order to justify it.
• The self-referential use of “gladiator” by the characters feels kind of twee to me, especially as ABC continues to use the term to refer to the show’s fans. I wish they’d stop doing it.
• What do the Grants want most in the world? Fitz wants Jerry alive again; Mellie wants to be president. If this is a long-term direction for Mellie, I’m intrigued.
• Runner-up for best joke of the episode: Fitz asks, rhetorically, “Who has more money than the United States of America?” Cy and Mellie shrug and start rattling off countries.
• I thought for sure the violent content disclaimer would involve Maya more directly, but the grisly violence we got sure was unsettling enough.

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.