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.
Michael Wampler is a graduate of The College of New Jersey, where he completed both B.A. and M.A. degrees in English literature. He currently lives and works in Princeton, NJ while he shops around his debut novel and slowly picks away at his second. Favorite shows include Weeds, Lost, Hannibal and Mad Men (among many more). When not watching or writing about television, he enjoys reading, going for runs, and building his record collection.