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Scandal: The Key

But Daddy, why won't Jake call me back? *pout*
“I didn’t kill your son!”

My new Scandalometer scientifically measures every episode on two different metrics: how good the episode is and how much the episode annoys me. This episode was actually very good and pissed me off slightly less than usual. So bravo, Scandal.

Fitz and Jake…I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m against torture and I was disgusted when they waterboarded Huck two seasons ago. This feels different. Maybe because it wasn’t Fitz signing some order, it was actually Fitz doing the hitting. In addition, they have a personal relationship. They were friends who knew each other well. And Fitz thinks Jake killed his son. That’s…if your former best friend slept with your girlfriend and killed your son, you’d have some pent up feelings too. If Fitz had allowed Cyrus to call in a professional “interrogator” like he wanted to, I would have been incredibly disappointed in him. As it is, I’m only mildly disappointed in him. And I’m not super happy with Jake either. I know him throwing Olivia in Fitz’s face was just a defense mechanism, but it was really objectifying. He was talking like he had taking another kid’s toy on the playground.

For his part, Cyrus seems convinced that Jake really did kill Jerry. Which is understandable. Logically, it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, but Jake DID kill James and Cyrus still has some feelings about that.

Rowan is trying to convince Olivia that Jake killed Jerry and Harrison, attributing his own motives to him. I hoped and prayed Olivia wouldn’t believe him, wouldn’t let her father’s manipulation control her yet again. But she did. Oh, Olivia. What am I going to do with you?

Kim is acting totally reasonably. Your crazy eyed ex-husband shows up out of nowhere and tells you the only reason he hasn’t been around is that he worked for a super duper top secret government agency and that government agency would have killed Kim and Javi if he hadn’t abandoned them…it’s reasonable to assume he’s straight up insane. She actually showed remarkable patience and compassion with him, trying to get him the help she believes he needs. From Huck’s perspective, it must be incredibly frustrating to come clean about everything and then be told he’s imagined the whole thing. Especially since Huck has a history of mental problems. I like it when Scandal shows us situations like this, objectively, without taking the side of one party or the other.

Onto one of the standout scenes of the episode: Mellie and Fitz. She went a little crazy he judged her. and got really angry. Mellie is relieved to know that her son died for a reason. That it wasn’t a random, everyday occurrence, but that it was done deliberately, for a purpose. Alcohol-infused as she was, she expressed this less than elegantly making it sound like she was happy her son died because it earned her four more years in a shiny white mansion. There is no way that’s what she meant. Mellie’s an ambitious woman with questionable morals but it is unbelievable that she would have knowingly sacrificed her son to her ambition. Because he’s holding it together so well, it’s easy to forget that Fitz is grieving too. The idea that Mellie could be happy over anything that has to do with Jerry’s death is repulsive to him. Again, it’s a situation where both sides are presented, leaving the audience to decide whose side (if any) to take.

The Abby and David stuff was one of my favorite aspects of the episode. As one of Scandal’s last remaining moral characters, David is suffering the emotional fallout from his role in a man’s suicide. He’s dealing with it (like so many in the Scandalverse do) with alcohol and late night calls to his ex. I’m glad the episode didn’t resolve with Abby and David getting back together. I love them together and I think they’re good for each other but both have extremely stressful, time-consuming jobs right now and the idea that they could make a relationship work right now is a little far-fetched. Clearly, they both still have a lot of love for each other. Abby is David’s first call when he is upset, and Abby (rather sanctimoniously) marched straight up to Olivia Pope’s door and declared that she had ruined David Rosen.

Which leads me to another part of the episode I enjoyed: Abby and Olivia’s reconciliation. Abby’s been angry with Olivia all season (helped in no small part by Olivia still calling her with demands). I think it was David saying that people shouldn’t want to be Olivia Pope that finally softened Abby to her bygone bestie. Whether consciously or not, Abby’s been channeling Liv, shutting down her emotions and being unnecessarily cold. Now the realization that maybe being Olivia Pope isn’t such an awesome thing has hit and she’s gone back to being Abby Whelan. Hopefully.

Bits and Pieces

I really liked the scene where Mellie cathartically shed her robe and Uggs and took a shower. It looks like we’ve seen the last of Smellie Mellie.

The only characters left who are not responsible for anyone’s death are Abby and... Abby.

Quotes

Quinn: “Don’t you have a ball to go to or whatever?”

Cyrus: “She’s probably drunk and in a food coma from too much fried chicken.”

Olivia: “It’s me. Again. I’m just calling to say hi. Okay. So, bye.”
Actual twelve year old Olivia Pope

Rowan: “I have two different rare bird exhibits going up. Both at the same time.”
Olivia: “That’s a lot of birds.”

Olivia: “Even if we were normal.”
Rowan: “We’re normal.”
Olivia: “In what context are we normal?”
I really enjoyed this scene actually. Rowan doing something other than a gravelly, threatening monologue was a nice break.

Olivia: “I can’t decide if I’m turning into one of those people I hate who wanders around going ‘oh my boyfriend, why doesn’t he call me?’”
Olivia, I think you turned into that person long ago.

Huck: “I pinged all of Jake’s I.P. interfaces for the last two days, which landed me in his geo-location data stream. Then I ran that through my QR-9 knock-off, and from there, it was easy. He might as well have been wearing a cowbell.”
Olivia: “There’s not a single word in that sentence I understood except ‘cowbell.’”

three out of four docks of the bay

sunbunny, who is finally catching up these reviews

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