Scandal Review: “The State of the Union” (4×02)

This week's episode is aptly titled, as the show continues to take stock of its characters and where they stand in the wake of the carnage that closed out season three. The episode is very much painting a portrait of broken people, and now we are watching them attempt to piece themselves back together, with varying degrees of success.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the scene on the balcony where Cyrus confronts Mellie, who refuses to attend the State of the Union address. She's been photographed in her bathrobe, eating potato chips, at her son's grave, and now the media is speculating that she may not have it all together. (The media has obviously not been as privy to Mellie's antics as we have all this time.) Now, Mellie has frequently been villainized on this show, and she's a character that tends to be written in the broadest strokes. As with the reveal of her rape last season, Jerry's death is fairly transparently functioning as a device to generate sympathy for her.

It's down to Bellamy Young, then, to ensure that there is at least some depth to this over the top, clichéd display of grief. Fortunately for the show and for us, she delivers. She approaches the material seriously, and when she plays out the maniacal laughter, the hysterical munching of chips, she plays it as though Mellie herself is putting on an act. There's an additional layer to the performance that, in some ways, suggests that Mellie's demeanor has always been an act, and that she's always just been one screw loose from becoming completely unhinged. We get that at the end of the episode, when she collapses in the portrait room, with all the First Ladies surrounding her (fortunately, this time there are no zoom cuts to the portraits themselves). This meltdown is, perhaps, overwrought, and the scoring certainly doesn't help; it's a disappointing capper to what's otherwise the best story of the night.

Second best is good old Cyrus Beene, who is, in his own way, equally wracked with grief. His actions led directly to his husband's murder. He cannot turn back from that now, and he knows it. So he casually blackmails Olivia. He spends the night with a sex worker. He tries to convince Mellie that his grief is equal to hers. Jeff Perry doesn't slouch this week, either, even when the writing surrounding him is a little lazy (of course Portia de Rossi is blackmailing him!). In a show full of broken, soulless people, Cyrus is perhaps the most soulless, or at least he has done the most damage to his soul in the name of his country and his ambition.

So, when the two of them stand on the balcony and compare notes on their grief, it's an excellent and much needed reflection upon the carnage that ensued last season. Last week brought us up to speed with the plot; this scene, and several others this week, bring us up to speed emotionally, and it's this that is much more important for the show to work. Scandal is drama writ large, Greek mythology by way of the Washington beltway. These are bad, powerful people, and their actions have wrought chaos and gotten people they love killed.

The question is even raised by David Rosen, who states, correctly, “Olive Pope just gets whatever she wants, and sometimes you're just collateral damage.” The white hats are long gone, even after the show she made of putting them back on last season. So it's interesting that this outburst occurs in an episode where “Fitz and Olivia” rears its head again in a massive way. Sure, she just helps him deliver an impassioned speech; but her idea is to use his child's death as a catalyst for that passion, to essentially turn Jerry into a political talking point. It's Olivia's idea that sends Mellie into hysterics later that evening. And of course, Fitz is still obsessed with her: “Can Ms. Pope and I have the room?” is laden with sexual tension. He's not just asking a favor.

So that's what's happening with character work this week. But, in the opposite of what's usually the case with Scandal, the plot it hangs on is uninspired, dull, and occasionally just outright bad. The couple that the White House is trotting out for gun control, a former POW and a paralyzed woman who saved a group of kids at a school shooting, is a living cartoon. I'm still cringing this morning from how thinly and poorly the characters were written, and how terribly the actors over-performed each cloying, obvious line. The episode requires everything to ride on Olivia's success in getting these two idiots to attend the State of the Union, but it is impossible to care about something so stupid. Any narrative tension at all deflates the instant these characters appear on screen. And they end up not mattering at all, since it's Olivia's addition to the speech that ultimately saves the day. In addition to being a horrible, dumb distraction from the episode, they're also an entirely unnecessary one. Boo.

This, then, is a good Scandal episode, buried within a terrible Scandal episode. Too much relies on the gun control couple for me to truly say that I enjoyed it as a whole, but there are strong moments nestled within here, such as another brief encounter between Olivia and Huck, or Abby's scenes in the White House. But you still have Jake, who is seemingly still in competition with Fitz to see who can be more grossly protective; and in these scenes, the writers seem to be in competition with each other to see who can make Olivia more grossly submissive. Shondaland's idea of romance has always been just slightly off, and the love triangle here accentuates that a lot. Jake himself is also tied to the biggest piece of dead weight this show has, B-613, and from this week, it seems we haven't laid that or Harrison's death to rest just yet.

We're not quite there yet with this season. But we're getting there, and the scenes in this episode that do work are more than worth the time. My hope is that season will get a good serial storyline going, one that hopefully involves minimal B-613, and then we'll be able to begin the scheming, double-crossing antics that give the show the energy it desperately needs right now.

Stray Observations:

– Putting Abby in the White House has been a great narrative move, and the character pairs well with both Cyrus and Mellie. I hope we keep her in this role for a while.

– Is Quinn dressing like Huck on purpose or what? Their weird thing continues to be a weird thing, but as it functions tonight, as a conduit for more Huck-Olivia heart to hearts, it works pretty well.

– “Singing the Army song what the hell are you doing?” is perhaps Huck's best line to date.