Preliminary note: Scandal recaps will not be weekly this season, in all likelihood. We will, however, be checking in throughout the season with updates. Please adjust your Friday schedules accordingly.
Roll call.
- Olivia Pope/Julia Baker – At the beginning of the episode Olivia is living on an island with Jake under the pseudonym Julia Baker. (Note: Julia Baker is easily the most boring fake name I’ve ever heard. Here are a few better ones, just off the top of my head: Cookie Madagascar, Miranda Avocado, Kelsie Wonderful. For the love of God. This isn’t hard, people.) She’s eventually tracked down thanks to her raging alcoholism and decides to come back to Washington for Harrison’s funeral. Once there she kind of stumbles into a case. This last thing is barely important.
- Harrison – Dead.
- Jake Ballard – The former head of B613 is now basically a finger-banging, moan-inducing beach bum, and is super-pissed about having to go back to Washington. Can’t say I particularly blame him.
- President Fitzgerald Grant – Doing pretty okay, except for the thing where he attempted suicide and refuses to talk about it and his wife is falling to pieces and his mistress just showed up out of nowhere after two months and it is turning his entire dang world upside down. Other than that, pretty okay.
- Mellie Grant – Oh, Mellie. We’ll get to you in a bit. Sweet, sweet Mellie.
- Quinn Perkins – Isn’t evil anymore, apparently? I don’t know. I can’t put a finger on this one yet. She appears to be the only reliable member of the team right now. Must have been an awful lot of personal growth and/or intense therapy in the two months since we last saw her.
- Abby Whelan – Somehow became the White House Press Secretary despite spending years as a very visible member of a famous agency that covered up scandals and cleaned up murders. Good for her, I guess.
- David Rosen – Just got nominated for Attorney General despite (a) getting his tail whupped in a number of high-profile cases, (b) making a number of powerful enemies, and (c) carrying on a relationship with the current Press Secretary, who, again, was a very visible member of a famous agency that covered up scandals and cleaned up murders. Where is the f*cking press in this town?
- Huck – Huck is Randy now. Randy likes video games.
- Cyrus Beene – Cyrus is the same but with new, weird hair.
- Eli Pope – Still incredibly evil, still travels exclusively by chauffeured car.
- Maya Pope – Dead(?)
- The President’s son – Still dead.
- The Vice Presidents (current and former), and that baby Fitz and Mellie had a year or two ago that we never see – Whereabouts unknown.
I think that just about catches us up. I really hope my funeral is attended by more than four people who all kind of hate each other. Poor Harrison.
*****
The best part of last night’s episode was Portia de Rossi’s hair. Look at Portia de Rossi’s hair. She looks like Brigitte Nielsen in Rocky IV. This is fantastic. I hope she shows up in every episode this season. I need as much of that in my life as possible.
Two other hair-related notes: First of all, this episode did a lot of that thing Scandal always does where it signifies the passage of time by changing everyone’s hair. We saw it last season in the flashbacks when Olivia had bangs and Cyrus had a gross beard, and this time around Olivia had curls — that she straightened on the plane? — and Cyrus apparently got butchered at a Supercuts. One day this show is going to flashback to 1988 and someone will have a blue mohawk. Mellie, I bet.
And second, maybe I’ve been rewatching episodes of Arrested Development too frequently, but I really expected Jessica Walter to show up in character as Lucille Bluth and say something awful about Portia de Rossi’s hair. Lucille would fit in well on Scandal. Always drinking and coming up with devious plans. It could work.
*****
Speaking of Mellie…
I suppose there is something to be said for the pleasures of eating cereal out of the box all day in your pajamas, going bowling on a whim, and day-drinking out of a giant juice glass on your balcony. If it weren’t for the thing where she’s horribly depressed over the sudden death of her child and lying down catatonic on his gravesite every now and then, and the thing where she had just found out for sure that son was her husband’s and not the result of her father-in-law drunkenly raping her, and the thing where her husband is an impulsive philanderous putz, that could almost read as a nice little staycation. But we have to take everything together, and when we do … yeah, Mellie ain’t doing well. At least she has the cereal and the booze, though.
Anyway, I love Mellie and would like to see her happy, but if her raging, filth-encrusted depression leads to more speeches that include lines like “It’s 1976 down there,” I say we ride it out for a few weeks.
