It was business treachery as usual in the nation’s capital when ABC’s cult hit Scandal returned for its third season last week. This time, however, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) was the one who needed fixing as someone leaked her affair with Fitz (Tony Goldwyn) to the press. Let’s review the righteous f*ckery sent down from the ratchet TV gawds!
Olivia is whisked away by her dad Rowan (Joe Morton) to an airplane hangar after chiding her in the limo ride (that started in the final moments of the season two finale), and basically telling her to get the hell out of Dodge because she will be read for filth if she doesn’t! Of course, what’s a little fatherly protection without a very pointed, and slightly debasing, attack on your daughter’s sexual habits, amirite? He scolds her for spreading her knees for the Prez, and asks her to repeat the mantra/motto he instilled in her when she was a kid; that she had to be twice as good as “them” just to be on the same level.
Now, if you’re not a minority, you may not get what this means. However, being a minority, I got the same speech as well. It was such an awesome scene (Shonda, I see what you did there) because Olivia stopped being the top Gladiator in a suit, and was a little girl all over again. Her head was still held high, but not quite as high as before. Her dad has the ability to really bring her down a peg. Yet, we also see where she gets her badassness from.
It looks as though Liv has given up the good fight, and we see her on the plane ready to go to the myriad of locales Dad has prepared for her. She calls Cyrus (Jeff Perry), who tells her to get off the swanky private jet, promising that he won’t betray her. Liv decides that running is not the answer, and despite her dad’s entreaties to hightail it out of there, she gets in the limo back to her office. Girl, you’re such a survivor!
Olivia’s team watches in horror as she tries to get back to business, and despite their efforts at wanting to help her, she tells them nothing’s changed. How wrong! All of her clients try to distance themselves from her, and the team ultimately opts to take things into their own hands. Believe me, she’s trained them very well.
Meanwhile, back at the White House, Fitz and Cyrus are trying to put out the fire in Fitz’s pants and Mellie (Bellamy Young) is not making things easy. Fitz tries to to put everything on her, but she’s not an idiot. She’s smarter than your average spurned wife. Still, she can’t have something like this getting out, so she rushes to Cyrus to have him concoct a plan to switch the narrative from Olivia to someone else. It just so happens that it was the perfect time, because after more video surfaces of Fitz leaving Liv’s apartment in the middle of the night, Cyrus instructed his staff to create a burn file on Miss Pope If You’re Nasty. With her gladiators looking to find a way to save Liv’s reputation, the opportunity for real treachery begins… And they frame a mouthy, sexually frustrated when drunk, member of Cyrus’ own staff.
Olivia is NOT happy with this, especially after her scheme to sort of lie, sort of tell the truth about their affair to the public was confirmed and agreed to by Mellie and Fitz. She has enough clout to call them into a sort of panic room at the White House so they can “conspire to deceive” the people… Now, being the fact that she’s a fixer, she tries to do the right thing by the young staffer who was framed by her gladiators and Cyrus. Now we know Liv and Fitz are going to butt heads in the second episode tonight. The both of them don’t want this girl to be sacrificed, but nobody’s really willing to go through hell with the media (and Mellie) again.
I would feel sorry for Cyrus’ staffer, but she was too keen on painting Olivia as a “slut” and “sugar baby”. How does it feel, boo?
That’s what you get, boo!
It seems like everything is going to work out fine until Mellie let’s the bomb drop–the hydrogen bomb of the episode, mind–that she knows who leaked the affair to the press when she talks with Fitz in the Oval Office. In one of the biggest standoffs of the show (no Waco), she gets into Fitz’s face and tells him she knows that he leaked Olivia’s name to the press in order to slink out of the White House and back between Liv’s legs by being forced to step down. Mellie bears those teeth, and tells him she is NOT going out like that. Fitz loses it, and baring his teeth, tells her she may have won this little skirmish in a series of battles, but they are officially at war, and he’s not planning on losing or raising the white flag of surrender.
Oh, snap! He said, “Bring it on, bitch!” Okay, so he didn’t actually say that, but in MY head, it sounded better… Moving along, now…
The episode ends with Cyrus being dragged into a dungeon of sorts to meet with Joe again. Joe is not going to have his babygirl be used by Fitz at all. Not gonna happen. It wouldn’t be prudent. So, after clearing Cyrus, he asks him how much he knows about Operation Remington. Cyrus says he knows that Fitz was a pilot on that mission, but other than that, the rest is unheard of. That’s when Joe hands Cyrus a black folder. Whatever was in there is some next level shit, because Cyrus’ face goes pale and his jaw drops.
So we’re left on the edge of a cliff, hanging on for dear life until Scandal returns tonight with the second episode of season three.