Scandal Review: “Run” (4×10)

Say what you will about Scandal, but Shonda Rhimes and her team know how to do a mid-season opener right. “Run” is energetic, tense, revelatory, and downright pulse pounding for early every minute of its running time.

Seriously. “Run” is definitely a season best and mostly a series best episode. I didn't get to watch it live, but it was impossible to avoid the cavalcade of accolades being heaped upon Kerry Washington across social media throughout the night. None of those people was wrong. Washington is a powerhouse in this episode, commanding every scene she's in even as Olivia Pope is backed into a situation of near total helplessness. She is phenomenal, carrying the episode so forcefully and effortlessly that you won't notice until they show up about two-thirds of the way in that the supporting cast has been largely absent from the episode. “Run” is essentially an Emmy reel, and one that deserves to pay its star dividends come September.

The episode is structurally strong, and often even inventive. The opening is hugely energetic, playing through the winter finale's excellent closing moments multiple times, with an ever increasing sense of dread. After that, the episode maintains a tight focus, eschewing the typical trappings of a Scandal episode for some pretty gripping psychological drama instead. The structure here is so atypical for the series, and yet nestled within it is an extremely typical Olivia/client relationship. Throughout the episode she is “handling” her own damn kidnapping, and her slowly deteriorating resolve is something to behold.

“Run” words so very well entirely because of its restrained scale. It is close, focused, unconcerned with conspiracy or with explanation, and it mostly rocks as a result. Given its strengths, it is somewhat disappointing when the episode's final twist rolls around and brings us right back to the oblique conspiracy theorizing that has come to define the series at its worst.

I'm not inherently interested in the identity of Olivia's kidnappers, or what their relationship is to Lizzie Bear and company back in DC, who are thankfully completely absent from the episode What I am interested in is Olivia herself, and how she reacts to these extreme circumstances. So when “Ian” is murdered to punish Olivia, it's a rare moment of failure on her part, an acknowledgment and rebuke of her hubris, of her total conviction that because she is Olivia Pope and for no other reason, she will triumph. The reveal that her cellmate was playing her all along robs the earlier sequence of some of its power.

That hardly ruins an otherwise stellar episode, though. “Run” sets the stage for an exciting back half, and even if the question of Olivia's kidnapping may not be the most exciting about the show at this point, the fact of her kidnapping is fertile dramatic ground. Al that “Run” really needed to do was get us all pumped for Scandal again, and it achieves that in spades.

Stray Observations:

• “Batty dream sequences under duress” is a bit overplayed, but Olivia's rescue fantasy at least reveals itself as such more or less immediately, and also provides the impetus for her getting out of the prison by her own damn self, rather than waiting on either of her men. (Of course, freedom is short-lived, but the moment is still a triumph in itself.)
• “You make jam for a living now? Do you know how to use a Dutch oven? Do you know how to turn on a regular oven?” Even in improbably dream sequences, Abby is the best.
• That said: I'm not sure how funny the dream is actually meant to be, but some of the lines and deliveries in the Vermont sequence especially had me laughing out loud, not least Washington's enthusiastic declaration of “boysenberry!”
• Echoes of “Bitch Baby” probably were not meant to make me laugh out loud, but they did kind of deflate that moment for me.
• So that these aren't all about the dream: Jake calls Huck and Quinn for help tracking Olivia. Quinn immediately suggests she has simply run off to an island with another man, and is clearly angling for a role as New Abby.