Scandal Review: “The Last Supper” (4×08)

The worst thing about the current structure of television dramas, which emphasize winter finales that require series plots to simultaneously escalate to a climax, while also forestalling any real progress until that climax happens. Such is “The Last Supper”, which makes much ado about the Winslow conspiracy, further complicates it by adding both Elizabeth North and the Vice President into the mix, all the while backburnering it in favor of Olivia’s war against her father. Everything ends in a last minute reversal that is meant to be a shocking twist, but really is a reversion to status quo, so that the real climax can come in an episode that normally would just be episode nine, but now carries the extra weight of being a “finale” that has to manufacture the type of urgency that normally would build naturally over thirteen (or fifteen, or eighteen, or twenty-two) episodes.

Is this preferable to the mid-season doldrums of a traditional (read: antiquated) twenty-two episode season? Probably. But this method of storytelling has an unfortunate tendency to reduce episodes to a series of OMG moments, scenes that are practically reverse engineered from an E! listicle. (Go ahead: Google “Scandal + shocking” and maybe throw “moments” in for good measure.) And so much of “The Last Supper” is composed of these moments. There’s great stuff in this episode, but there’s also too much that goes beyond the show’s normal heightened tone into purely ridiculous territory.

When the show remembers to treat these characters like people, and to ground everything with at least a toe in reality, it can be really good. Olivia and Rowan have a handful of exchanges this week that are mesmerizing. I love that the biggest piece of evidence is not the deceit or the murder—which are about on par with doing the laundry grocery shopping on this show—but the abusive, paternalistic way that he views Olivia, as not a woman with any agency, but as an extension of himself, as a possession he controls. Everything he accuses Fitz and Jake of is true, but he’s so much worse himself. This is a smart way to keep Rowan out of mustache-twirling territory, because at its core, the story is of a girl fighting for independence from her father. Everything else is just trappings.

There is another really great scene this week, this one between Cyrus and Olivia. Jeff Perry has been playing a broken man since James’s death in season three, but for the past several episodes Cyrus has fooled himself into happiness again. Now that the illusion is gone, he’s even more damaged than he was before. There are some particularly great shots here, through Olivia’s office door, that cause the image to literally fracture and duplicate. This isn’t the first time the show has employed this visual device on this set, but it’s a particularly nice one here.

I even liked Huck’s story this week! After a few weeks of random scenes that played almost as afterthoughts, Olivia finally learns that Huck has been catfishing his son, which brings the story into the rest of the show’s orbit a little more, as well as underscores the growing divide between the two characters. Ultimately the show is using Havi to question the morality of OPA’s work—after all, Huck kills a guy in pretty gruesome fashion while on Olivia Pope’s dime—and while this isn’t exactly new territory for the show, it’s still a question worth raising.

But then so much of this episode is a slog. The team-up between Jake, Fitz and Olivia takes all of three minutes to come back around, once again, forever and always, to Jake and Fitz measuring their dicks. When Olivia finally does take some initiative and comes up with a plan to entrap Rowan, the plan is so obvious that playing it as a fake out is a pointless waste of time. Ditto the closing double cross, which, while emotional affecting, is equally unsurprising. It’s another OMG! moment.

The client of the week is Elizabeth North, and while at first blush the idea of using the case of the week to draw the show’s many disparate threads together, in this case the disparate threads are Cyrus’s spy whore boyfriend, something about West Angola, and the Winslow conspiracy. Bringing all these things together to be about the same thing, and roping the Vice President into it as well, is just complication for its own sake, and worse, it’s complication without any clarification. I don’t know anything more about these stories. There is no additional mystery, no pressing need to know what happens. It is just a mashing together of a bunch of questions that I was lukewarm to the answers to in the first place.

So, I mean, whatever. Is it exciting on a soapy level? Maybe. But Scandal at its best can achieve those soapy heights, the verve of melodrama, without evincing such a tin ear for quality as is on display tonight. Scandal should never feel like a formula—in fact it can’t, if it wants to be the type of show it thinks it is—but this is Scandal by numbers.

Stray Observations:

• Help me with the twist that all of the B-613 files (which are actual files, because of course) are all blank pages. David Rosen has viewed the files, so somehow Rowan swapped them out without anyone catching on? Okay.
• Now I’m probably way too attuned to this, but this week, Cyrus gets vengeance on Michael by, you know, fucking him. Because something something bottoms. I’ll direct you once more to Bryan Lowder, who criticizes this nonsense way better than I can. (Also it’s pretty strongly implied that maybe Cyrus just killed the guy, so there’s that too.)
• Quinn whines all episode about how boring watching Kobiak is, which is perhaps not the best choice on the script’s part.
• Mellie sleeps with Andrew and does basically nothing else this week. That sucks.