The fourth season of Scandal debuts Thursday, September 25. According to showrunner Shonda Rhimes, it will be a bit of a return to form for the show after Kerry Washington’s pregnancy forced them to spend more time with other, less-central characters last season. And speaking of last season, hoo boy. My original intention when sitting down to write a season preview was to get people all caught up, or at least provide a refresher of everything that happened in Season 3. I quickly realized this was impossible. So much happens on this show so fast that trying to explain it in exhaustive detail would take pretty much the entire week between now and the premiere. That seems like a less-than-efficient use of everyone’s time.
So, instead, here is a list of the 10 most insane things that happened. It doesn’t even scratch the surface.
10. A sleazy politician was brought down because of sexy toilet pictures.
Scandal did a ripped-from-the-headlines story based on the Anthony Weiner “Carlos Danger” sexting scandal, and somehow managed to make it more ridiculous than the original. How? Simple. They cast Professor Lasky from Saved by the Bell: The College Years as a sleazy politician who used the pseudonym “Redwood Johnson” (REDWOOD JOHNSON) to sext multiple women, one of whom testified that he asked her for sexy pictures of herself sitting on the toilet. This is number 10 on my list. Think about that.
9. Whatever the hell was going on with Huck and Quinn.
Lovable torture pervert Huck and awful burgeoning torture pervert Quinn started having a torrid and gross love affair that saw them lick and/or spit on each other and hump in or near pools of other people’s blood, and all of this happened after Huck removed one of her teeth with pliers for turning on Olivia Pope & Associates to up and become an evil spy almost literally out of nowhere. This was all quite disgusting. I’m not entirely sure how they got away with doing it on network television.
8. Lisa Kudrow and her secret sisterbaby.
Lisa Kudrow had a guest arc as a straight-shootin’ hotshot Democratic presidential candidate from Montana, who, SURPRISE, had a secret baby who was raised as her younger sister and eventually became her campaign manager. And then that sisterbaby campaign manager tried to frame another candidate for a Watergate-style break-in before the Iowa caucus. As I said at the time: “In real life, this would be one of the biggest political stories of the past 5-10 years. On Scandal, it was like the 10th most notable thing that happened in a single jam-packed episode, behind the part where the show finally let Harrison play kissyface with someone.”
7. Eli Pope’s dungeon speech.
There were a bunch of great, AB-surd-LY dra-MAT-tic Eli Pope speeches last season, but this one, which he delivered right into Fitz’s big stupid face while detained in some sort of government-sanctioned dungeon facility, was the best by a mile. It’s the delivery, really. I’d love to see him and James Spader’s character from The Blacklist in a scene together. Hell, give them their own show. #TrueDetectiveSeason2Hashtag on so on and so forth.
6. There were two separate and distinct episodes in which someone had a bomb.
This can’t be overstated. In one (1) season of television, there were two (2) episodes that centered on a bomb going off in Washington D.C.. In chronological order:
- A distraught mother brought a bomb to the Capitol building because her congressman, played by Duck Phillips from Mad Men, blew off her requests for information about her son’s mysterious death in the Middle East, which, it turned out, was a result of him doing secret CIA things.
- A terrorist plot put in place by Olivia’s mother — more on this in a minute — resulted in a bomb going off during the funeral of a prominent American that was attended by many politicians. In fact, the president himself was supposed to attend the funeral, but Cyrus, his devious Chief of Staff, who had intelligence about the bomb, stalled him in his office in the hopes it would explode and kill the vice president (along with hundreds of innocent civilians!), who was mounting a challenge to the president in the next election.
This show and 24 should get married.
5. Sperm girl.
The vice president’s campaign manager was working on a hot tip that the president’s oldest son might not actually be his, and so, in his hunt for evidence to back the claim up, he turned to this little monster. That’s the president’s son’s girlfriend, and that’s his sperm she’s holding, which she BROUGHT TO FIELD HOCKEY PRACTICE IN A LUNCH BAG LIKE IT WAS SLICED ORANGES OR LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN SPERM, and is now trading for guaranteed admission into Harvard. This was the only time we saw her last season, but I hope she ends up becoming a regular on the show. She’s practically a supervillain.
4. The Ballad of Mellie.
I have never done a 180 on a character faster than I did with Mellie last season, and it all started with her moonshine-aided sermon of threats in the White House dining room. She went from being an evil, manipulative Cruela de Vil to, well, an evil, manipulative delight. I found myself rooting hard for her and straight-up hating Olivia and Fitz (who have been parading their affair right in front of her for years now, and are really being super-sh*tty about it if you look at it as an impartial observer), and waiting impatiently for her to spit fire through clenched teeth in yet another of her patented drunken tirades. Mellie is the greatest. You will never convince me otherwise.
3. The thing where the White House Chief of Staff tricked his husband into having an affair with the Vice President’s secretly gay husband, and then both of the parties in the affair ended up getting murdered, because Scandal.
Yup, that happened.
It’s also a nice reminder that the presidential election that took place during the third season featured three candidates and all of them had committed a homicide. The incumbent president, Fitz, killed a Supreme Court justice in her hospital room because she tried to have him assassinated; the vice president killed her husband with a letter opener after she found out about his gay affair; and the Democratic candidate, Samuel Reston, killed his wife’s lover and got away with it because they sold the press a fake rape story. This show is 100% sex and murder. And wine. Sex, murder, and giant glasses of wine.
2. Olivia’s crazy wrist-eating mother.
One of the big themes of last season was Olivia’s search for her mother, who she originally thought was dead and ended up being a cross between Bin Laden and the Joker. Just about everything Olivia’s mom did was bonkers, but none of it could possibly top the time she chewed through half of her wrist as part of a suicide attempt she staged to escape from the off-the-books detention facility her husband had kept her in for decades. It was … it was really something. You kind of had to see it. Although I would also recommend definitely not watching either, because it was unsettling as hell. The squirrel-like chewing sounds will haunt me forever.
1. Everything that happened at the end of the season.
Just gonna go ahead and blockquote this section of the Season 3 finale recap.
The President of the United States almost lost his bid for re-election — to the current Vice President, who was running against him a few months after stabbing her secretly gay husband to death with a letter opener — because his campaign manager slash mistress’s terrorist mother rigged a bomb to explode during his eulogy at the funeral for a dignified, important American, but the president wasn’t there because his chief of staff knowingly put hundreds of lives at risk by stalling the president in the hopes the bomb would kill all his opponents right before the election, and the whole thing ended up backfiring because the vice president was able to run around at the scene patching up wounds like politically savvy Florence Nightingale, much to the delight of news outlets and the American voting public.
BUT.
The president ended up getting the sympathy vote back and winning the election because his son died under mysterious circumstances, on stage, during a campaign event, which everyone thought was the work of his campaign manager slash mistress’s mother, so his campaign manager slash mistress’s father — the recently deposed head of a powerful, hyper-secretive government spy agency — promised to track her down and kill her, in part because she — his former wife — had just stabbed him and left him for dead a few days earlier, which is how he and the president were able to meet in the hospital and set this plan in motion.
BUT.
It turned out that the president’s campaign manager slash mistress’s father was actually the one who poisoned the president’s son, with the help of a trusty Secret Service agent, because (a) his daughter wanted the President to get re-elected because she loves him, (b) he wanted revenge on the President for stringing his daughter along like some side-piece whore (to quote the president’s wife, who was raped by the president’s father, which also was revealed last night, because Scandal), and (c) by securing another four years for the president, and making him think that he killed the woman responsible for murdering his son (which he didn’t technically do), he was able to get himself re-appointed to the position of Top Murderin’ Banana at his beloved hyper-secretive spy agency, and the only person who figured this out was an employee at his daughter’s crisis management agency — which is now disbanded because his daughter is on a plane to God-knows-where with the guy who replaced her father as the head of the spy agency after her father kept him locked in hole in the ground for years — who now may or may not be dead.
Scandal is crazy.
