Previously on Scandal: Professor Lasky from Saved by the Bell wants your sexy toilet pictures. Quinn is the worst.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaand we got a secret baby.
Actually, first I should probably mention that I have changed the title of these recaps from “We Need To Talk About Last Night’s Episode Of Scandal” followed by the episode’s title to “Scandal Recap: Something Something,” because the former was really limiting my ability to put things like “SOMEONE HAS A BOMB” or “SEXY TOILET PICTURES” or “SECRET BABY” in the headline, and that just won’t do. There’s no reason to be understated when you’re recapping Scandal. I don’t know what I was thinking.
But back to this secret baby business. As we learned last week, Lisa Kudrow’s character went into a Montana clinic when she was 15 and just pregnant as all hell, and came out a short time later unpregnant and sans baby. Cyrus and Mellie and their cabal of evil minions know this, so they sent someone up there to investigate, but Lisa Kudrow hired Olivia and company to handle her potential campaign and explained the situation to them, too. BOOTS ON THE GROUND IN MONTANA. Everyone starts throwing bribes around left and right (in the form of black suitcases full of cash, because that is exactly how people on Scandal would bribe someone), which ends up kind of being a wash. The long and short of it is that we find out that the baby she supposedly put up for adoption was actually kept in the family and raised as her younger sister, who now works on the campaign and is completely in the dark about all of this. Tl;dr secret rural sisterbaby.
Since they couldn’t get the dirty laundry aired out through the press, Cyrus and his team decide to leak the info to one of the other Democratic challengers so he can spring it on her in the debate. This plan (a) is horrible; (b) backfires hilariously, as she is then able to give an uninterrupted, fib-filled 90-second rebuttal about making mistakes and learning from them that makes her “America’s sweetheart” even though she claims she put the baby up for adoption which will DEFINITELY NOT COME BACK TO BITE HER IN THE BEHIND LATER; and (c) results in her sister/daughter figuring out the real story about her sister/mom during a nationally-televised debate instead of, like, in a private family discussion, because, again, everyone on this show is terrible.
A few other notes:
– It’s total hogwash that Olivia’s team of fancy, fast-talkin’ city folk went up to Montana to do some investigating and we didn’t get A SINGLE SCENE where they all walked into a local bar full of hardscrabble men and women in cowboy hats who all turned to look at them as a record dramatically scratched and the music stopped. It’s like I have to do everything myself sometimes.
– Two episodes — and, what, like a week, real-time? — after drunkenly stumbling up to the mountaintop to proclaim that she would stop at nothing to RUIN her husband and his precious mistress, Mellie summoned Olivia up to her hotel room after the White House Correspondents Dinner and straight-up begged her to come back and run the reelection campaign because the president is super-sad without her. This is either part of a sinister plot, or Mellie is schizophrenic. Those are the only two possibilities I see here.
– So the Vice President is thinking about running for president? Against an incumbent president? And she wants to do it as a third-party candidate, because somehow a Tea Party Christian conservative won’t be able to win a primary against a moderate, philandering Republican, but she will be able to siphon off enough votes to win a majority in a general election? Oooooooooooooookay.
– Huck and Jake are snooping around and looking into B6-13 and Olivia’s dad and the president. In the last moments of the episode, Huck tells Jake that he thinks he figured out the deal with the secret mission everyone’s killing each other to keep secret: Apparently the president, back when he was in the military, on the orders of his superiors, shot down a passenger plane containing … Olivia’s mom. The episode ended with Huck and Jake at her door, presumably about to reveal all of this to her. I pray to God they do, and I pray to God it results in Olivia cutting off ties with the president once and for all, because Jesus Mighty I am getting sick of that part of the show. (NOTE: There is no chance this will happen. It will just lead to another conspiracy, which will lead to two more conspiracies, which will lead to a sex cult full of domestic terrorists who are blackmailing the Queen of England with pictures of her and a palace guard in the throws of passion. And then I will be 100% back in.)
– OH LOOK QUINN BOUGHT A GUN HOW EXCITING AND INTERSTIzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
*****
Speaking of secret sistermoms, you’re all aware that this happened to Jack Nicholson in real life, yes? From Wikipedia:
Nicholson was brought up believing that his maternal grandparents, John Joseph Nicholson (a department store window dresser in Manasquan, New Jersey) and Ethel May (née Rhoads, a hairdresser, beautician and amateur artist in Manasquan), were his parents. Nicholson only discovered that his “parents” were actually his grandparents and his “sister” was his mother in 1974, after a journalist for TIME magazine who was doing a feature on Nicholson informed him of the fact. By this time, both his mother and grandmother had died (in 1963 and 1970, respectively).
I can’t even imagine what a weird day that must have been for him. I would have gone straight to bed and stayed there for a week.
*****
One more thing…
I am really happy that last night’s episode basically turned into White Men Can’t Jump for a few minutes in the middle. I am not exaggerating when I say that I would have happily watched the full, unedited one-on-one game between Jake and the president, even if it took up over half of the episode. That would have been hilarious. Especially if Harrison, Huck, Abby, and Olivia showed up halfway through spinning basketballs on their fingers and were all “How ’bout a little three-on-three?” What I’m saying is that I want to see a Scandal streetball tournament. I bet Olivia’s dad would cheat spectacularly.
Next week on Scandal: DID THE PRESIDENT DO THAT THING???????????
[Photos via ABC]
