Scandal Review: “First Lady Sings the Blues” (4×20)

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.