Erin Watches: Scandal s6, liveblogging episodes 10-12 June 30, 2017

Posted by Erin Ptah in Erin Watches.
Tags: Scandal
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Welcome back to Scandal, where the morals aren’t real and the votes don’t matter.

Our story so far: Two mysterious Someones, who were reportedly supposed to be Russian agents until the reality of 2016 forced the writers to think of something more original, arranged a murder-and-framing-spree around the President-elect. Mostly through surrogates that they’ve threatened and/or slept with, including about half of our main cast.

The heroes are dealing with this through a strategy of random guessing, dramatic confrontations, torturing people for inaccurate intel, forgetting to frisk people at key moments, and angsty self-reflection about that time when they rigged a presidential election.

Seven episodes left. Who will win? Not America, that’s for sure.

—

Episode 10 (of the season, episode 100 of the show) is a whole Imagine Spot about what if Olivia hadn’t voted to rig Fitz’s election way back when.

For some reason AU Pope and Associates can’t afford the swanky office. I thought she got there on her own amazing skills and reputation — is this implying that her business was somehow propped up by Fitz’s presidency? Or is it that she turned a moral corner with the election-rigging? Maybe the show wants us to see this as “she got more ruthless in doing whatever it takes to support wonderful deserving people,” so down this fork-in-the-road she’s not as good because she’s held back by silly things like ethics.

Also, she’s wearing her hair natural. Found a post that unpacks that a bit.

Fitz gets divorced, marries Olivia. Cyrus won’t sit with his not-yet-husband at the ceremony, and, uh, ends up making out with Mellie for some reason? (No word, not even a mention, of who gets custody of their kids.)

We do get a couple of sweet details. Huck walks Olivia down the aisle, looking super awkward in a nice suit, while Abby is the maid of honor. Shots of various smiling friends and allies in the refreshingly multiracial audience.

Fitz gets a cheesy TV pundit spot. Also, for some reason it’s a year post-wedding and they’re not living together. Abby and David are namechecked as happily married.  Cyrus and Mellie…are…married and pregnant? Quinn didn’t even get roped into the firm, so she’s being cute and giggly on a Bachelor-type reality show.

…oh my god, the Bachelor says to not-Quinn “You really love torturing me, don’t you? Is that your thing?”  (And Huck is clapping! He’s rooting for her!) This is beautiful and they’re so innocent and it hurts that they don’t live in this universe.

Final score: Cyrus stays closeted and career-driven and miserable. Mellie is also pretty glum, but she’s a better human being who cares about others. Fitz and Olivia have a lot of stress and fighting, including the revelation that she could’ve stolen the White House for him…but they pleasantly surprise me by both ultimately realizing that politics is soul-sucking and they’re better off without it.

Totally should’ve gone with this reality.

—

Aaaand we’re back to the merry-go-round of people yelling about who the Electoral College should vote for, based on whose kink for power they’re most interested in indulging.

Mellie yelling at Olivia: “Get off your high horse! Like you never killed anybody? Like you never stole an Oval or two?” Look at all that sense and logic.

Olivia’s response: “I know you. You are better than most. You are inherently good.” Have you never seen your own show.

…She switches to Team Cyrus later in the episode, for reasons, and there’s a lot of back-and-forth between Team Cyrus (he knows he’s not worthy, but he wants to do it for Frankie!) to Team Mellie (Cyrus was a terrible husband and also she deserves it!). Until the point where Mellie meets the Someones…and one of them murders not!Veronica in front of her. Dammit, I liked Veronica!

Also, remember how the FBI director and the President are doing it? Yeah, that comes up again.

Fitz accuses her of being jealous of Olivia. She responds: “Boy, I am the director of the FBI, not some chick who got dissed at prom.” Federal Director of Sass. And currently holding the mantle of Only Likeable Character Left Alive.

The EC votes! Mellie is in! Possibly in a landslide! Wonder how many of the electors were flipped via murder.

—

Episode 12 finds Dad Pope in protective presidential custody, although he’s cranky because he sees more murder on the horizon.

…and we finally get one of the Someones confronting Olivia in person. Threatens her to replace Mellie’s VP candidate. She goes to him and says “you should try being head of the NSA instead,” as if our mysterious enemies would be totally chill with that.

FINALLY, a ploy with some strategy! Our heroes send one of their own drones into WH airspace, giving security an excuse to drag all attendant Someones into a secure bunker with phone signals blocked. Time for a secure war council.

(Or at least, I hope it’s secure. Mellie’s office was bugged for months and they never noticed. Have they learned a lesson from that? Time will tell! And there’s a mention of Mellie’s kids being in Secret Service custody — are we taking it for granted that the Service hasn’t been compromised?)

…so, okay, there was not a lot of actual council-ing in the secure council. Lots of angry yelling about various bombshell secrets that Subset X was hiding from Subset Y. (I remembered Dad Pope killing one of Fitz and Mellie’s kids, but I forgot that Fitz knew. Mellie…finds out here.)

Then they split off into subgroups for a bunch of one-on-one conversations. Pairs up people who haven’t interacted much all season, and I appreciate the character moments that come from exploring underused dynamics…but is this really the time?

By the end it seems like the only decision they’ve made is picking Mellie’s replacement VP. No progress in figuring out who, exactly, is blackmailmurdering their way into the US government? Do we have a long-term safety strategy? Because that was not mentioned.

—

True fact: I am genuinely impressed by the VP reveal. I didn’t see it coming at all, and yet in retrospect it’s perfectly suited to the themes this season has brought up over and over — how decent people usually aren’t the ones who run for office, how they can honor the voters who chose Vargas by giving his position to someone he trusted, how political wives (and husbands in Cyrus’ case) deserve more credit for all the sacrifices and compromises they’ve made to support their husbands.

It’s Frankie Vargas’ widow. She’s consistently been a Good Person in all her appearances, and yet I haven’t even been mentioning her in my tally of likeable characters because she’s so mild and unassuming and respectable. Which I suppose was probably the point.

Scandal being Scandal, I give it 50-50 odds that it’ll turn out she was the evil mastermind behind the Someones this whole time.

But if she isn’t…possibly the American people will end up kinda-sorta winning? Or at least not totally losing?

Nicely done, show.

Erin Watches: Scandal s6 continued (episodes 6-9) June 25, 2017

Posted by Erin Ptah in Erin Watches.
Tags: Scandal
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Our story so far:

PEOTUS was shot and assassinated on election night. Olivia Pope is on the case! So far she has accused three (3) people of ordering the killing, and been explicitly proved wrong about two (2). Meanwhile, the Electoral College is left to decide between the horrible, self-serving, politically-soulless VPEOTUS or the horrible, self-serving, politically-soulless runner-up ticket.

Onward!

—

Episode 6 gives us campaign-era flashbacks of Olivia’s dad reconnecting with an old girlfriend, who turns out to be a lure under the control of…someone.

Different flashback: Olivia asking her dad for advice on how to handle Mellie. Hey, remember when Olivia’s dad orchestrated the murder of Mellie’s son? (The grief put her for months into a near-suicidal depression.) I’m sure his advice will be great.

Olivia: “She’s from California. Why don’t they like her?” Dad: “I can’t answer that.” Ooh, ooh, pick me! Because Californians hate Republican policies, and she’s a Republican!

They keep talking about “calling San Benito County” as if the voting within states is calculated the same as national voting, as if you’re guaranteed a certain number of points (and no more) once you win a county. Even if Mellie got every vote in San Benito (pop. 58,000), that doesn’t mean she couldn’t fall behind once all the ballots are counted in San Mateo (765,000), or Contra Costa (11.13 million), or, I don’t know, Los Angeles (10.2 million).

Dad Pope was behind the Vargas shooting! Although not on his own initiative, it was pushed by the Someones, who had the girlfriend hostage. And then they went to far in taunting Dad Pope about his compromising attachment to her, so he shot her in front of them. Good grief.

—

Episode 7 finds Olivia telling Huck to kill her father. For the second time. He helpfully reminds her that the first time didn’t end well.

Huck confronts Dad on a subway platform, openly aiming a gun at him, and there’s a lot of yelling, which echoes beautifully. For some reason there are zero other people on the platform, and nobody is concerned about metro security cameras capturing this shouted confession of killing Vargas.

Accusations of a mole in Olivia’s company lead to Huck and Quinn aiming guns at each other’s faces. What a team.

Investigation by Huck leads to him threatening his current girlfriend with a syringe of something nasty, all while going “this is hard for me, but you’re making me do this!” Just in case you were starting to feel sympathetic toward him.

Olivia is back for the third time to accusing her dad of Vargas’ murder, but she’s passionately insisting that it was all his idea, based on the admittedly reasonable evidence that he murdered the girlfriend who was being used to manipulate him. Huck counters by passionately insisting that Dad Pope has changed because he was in love and now he’s in pain and…listen, buddy, both him and you are still 100% willing to be violent-to-murderous the minute you feel threatened. You haven’t changed, and people, especially women, should stay away from you.

(I would say “random civilian women,” but this girlfriend turns out to have been planted to shoot a witness, which she gets away with because none of these geniuses thought to frisk her, and, wow, we are never going to get any case-of-the-week episodes this season, are we.)

—

The Someones got to Abby. That explains why she was pushing for Cyrus to get the death penalty ASAP, huh.

In flashback she asks Cyrus “how did you know Frankie was the one, how did you know he could go all the way?” We’ve seen this in The West Wing — Josh asking Leo how he knew Bartlett was his guy, because Josh had found Santos and was starting to think Santos could be his guy. But Abby isn’t thinking she’s found a candidate — she’s thinking she could be the candidate.

Anyway, the Someones offered her $3 million with no paper trail and no explanation beyond “we like you and want to support your eventual candidacy.” And she took it! What’s next, Abby, sending the money to a the next Nigerian prince in your email?

—

So Huck’s evil girlfriend shot the witness, and then shot him, but in a weird way that seemed designed to miss all vital organs. I figured she was deliberately not-killing him for some reason. (He was flat on the floor, she had lots of spare bullets, it’s not like she could miss the heart and lungs.)

Then she sticks him in the trunk of a car and pushes it into a lake. Apparently she’s just incompetent.

We get a nice hallucination-sequence where Huck is back in Pope HQ, with the mental images of his team members talking him through how to escape. And he does it! Not only did she not kill him, she didn’t even shoot him hard enough for the blood loss to slow him down!

…setting aside that part of my disbelief, I do actually like the bit.

Hey, was anyone worried that there hadn’t been enough graphic on-screen torture this season? Well, don’t sweat it. Quinn’s got you covered.

Olivia gets a pep-up talk about how she’s a “miracle worker,” from another of these people who hasn’t seen the show. And sure enough, they find Huck — by tracking the phone of the dead witness, which murder-girlfriend wasn’t smart enough to chuck in a dumpster on her way to the body disposal! That’s not you working a miracle, that’s your opponent being a complete moron.

Gonna wrap up this post here, purely because my head hurts from hitting this desk so hard.

Erin Watches: Scandal s6 continued, e02-05 June 24, 2017

Posted by Erin Ptah in Erin Watches.
Tags: Scandal
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Just gonna jump right into the liveblogging on this one.

Season 2 episode 2 starts with a flashback to when Mellie accepted the Republican nomination, making it even harder to ignore how unrealistic it is that the Republican party would vote for a woman to get their nomination.

Olivia yells at Fitz for sending “scrubs” to investigate a crime scene. The actual FBI Director steps out and informs her that, no, he sent her to investigate the crime scene. (This director is a black woman with giant hair. I want to like her.)

Cyrus invites Mellie to join him as VP-elect. This is all so terribly incestuous. There’s no discussion of what policy would be, because of course there isn’t — I’m not sure if Scandal buys into the fallacy that the two parties are Basically The Same, or if this is just a symptom of it not caring about government except as a dramatic backdrop for sexy power struggles.

Olivia has dinner with the FBI director with the hair. It starts as piercing commentary on the way they get treated, as competent black women in positions of power…and turns into Olivia asking if the director has a thing with Fitz. Turns out no, but not because it’s a terrible idea for the head of the FBI to bang the President, it’s just because she was worried about disrespecting Olivia.

At the same time as this is happening, Olivia’s people are stealing evidence from the FBI, and the White House is having a “confession” tortured out of a suspect who’s supposed to be under the FBI’s purview.

(The evidence is a hard drive, which, when recovered, has “over 5,000 hours” on it. By my back-of-the-napkin calculations, that would fill 17.6 terabytes. On a laptop drive. As of 2017, if you’re willing to shell out several thousand dollars, the most Amazon can get you is 4.)

…I got real worried because Olivia’s next thing is to snap at the WH that forced confessions are worthless as intelligence. Which is absolutely true — but the show has never seemed to realize that before, and also, it’s 23 minutes into the episode. (Thankfully, the next one seems to be backing her up.)

Flashback to Mellie’s romance with a campaign staffer, and, oh hey, it turns out Abby knows Olivia broke up her and David! (I don’t remember if we knew this already, or if this is the dramatic reveal.) Flash-forward to Mellie confronting Olivia over orchestrating her breakup with the staffer. “Why are you doing this? What is wrong with you?!” Good question!

—

Episode 3 retcons the video data to “300 hours of [tip-giving videographer]’s footage, 2200 hours of the security feed.” That would need less than 2 TB on the hard drive, which is more believable.

Portia di Rossi’s character is back! And she’s amazing. Partly because I can’t help seeing her as Veronica, all charmingly ridiculous, meant to be judged by comedy standards rather than real-world ones.

This episode uses flashbacks to unveil that, yep, Cyrus isn’t the murderer. I was definitely expecting that to be dragged out for longer. (There’s a secret video of Frankie yelling at him for being a terrible person who should be in jail, and, look, he’s not wrong, but for other reasons.)

Most obvious suspect is the hitman Cyrus was secretly having an affair with, because that’s the kind of show this is. Flash-forward to the present, Cyrus secretly meets with the (armed!) ex-boyfriend at night in a park, because that’s totally the kind of thing PEOTUS can do. Secret Service, what Secret Service?

Vengeful hitman ex throws a wrench in the works by “admitting” to killing Frankie on Cyrus’s orders. This’ll be fun.

Olivia: “With Cyrus in jail, the Electoral College will have no choice but to vote for you.” Orrr they could vote for the runner-up in the Democratic primary. Without knowing anything specific about these people’s policies, that seems like the most moral and honest choice re: the will of the voters.

—

Wow, almost nothing to say about episode 4. It’s all Cyrus’s Adventures in Jail. The narrative woobifies him hard, to the point where in spite of everything I actually feel bad for him by the third act. (Fourth act, he gets a guard murdered. So much for that.)

—

And episode 5 focuses on the drama around Jake Ballard — Olivia’s ex, former agent of Olivia’s dad, now Mellie’s VP candidate, in a politically-orchestrated marriage with a not!Kennedy who’s now going into an alcohol-fueled emotional tailspin as she slowly realizes (a) Jake doesn’t like her very much and (b) he’s a terrible person.

(To illustrate: he seriously considers strangling her in order to keep the angsty tailspin from damaging his career.)

Newly revealed in flashback: Jake blew up the cabin that held the laptop that held the video that came from the photographer that called in the tip that swallowed the spider to catch the fly. Don’t ask me why.

Olivia wrangles Mellie to have a heart-to-heart with the not!Kennedy wife, as part of the Women Whose Husbands Like Olivia Pope Better Club. This wrangles the wife back into urging Democrats to fall in line behind Jake’s ticket, based on him being a Good and Honorable Person who married someone from Massachusetts. What policies does he support that they should appreciate? Ha. Aha. Ahaha.

Then she spends the rest of the episode trying to get proof that Jake did the murdering, which of course means he didn’t do that, although she lets him drive her alone without her phone to an isolated location before she figures it out.

And, whoof, that’s about all the Olivia Pope always-rightness I can take in one sitting. (Still working on commissions, but I’ll have to switch to some other background TV for the rest.)

Erin Watches: Scandal, season 6: episode 1 June 23, 2017

Posted by Erin Ptah in Erin Watches.
Tags: Scandal
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The latest season is on Netflix now, so it’s time for me to work through more of this incredibly watchable show about terrible people.

For those who need a brief refresher:

Do you like The West Wing? Do you like Leverage? Would you like a series that’s cross between those two shows? How about a series that thinks it’s a cross between those two shows, but missed the memo that a big part of the appeal was the main characters being likeable, competent, and out to do good things? Well, Scandal is that last one.

Our heroine is Olivia Pope, a freelance fixer of political problems with a reputation for being supercompetent, brilliant, and heroic. Before canon started, she had already helped rig the US Presidential election to put her (Republican) (also married) boyfriend into office. The first few episodes follow a mini-arc where she is asked to defend the reputation of a woman who also had an affair with said President. Olivia yells at this woman for being a lying liar. Olivia is proved wrong.

This sets the stage for a pattern where, halfway through any given case-of-the-week, whoever Olivia is defending will turn out to be evil, and whoever she just shot down will be revealed as the true victim. She is aided by a motley crew of employees and allies, some of whom are already terrible people when the show starts, others of whom compromise their morals over the course of the series. They’ve covered everything from war crimes to murder to perjury to torture.

An illuminating example: One of the employees (Abby) idolizes Olivia for rescuing her from an abusive husband — now if only it stopped there. Later, Abby and a much-nicer love interest (David, also a legal ally of Olivia’s) come perilously close to uncovering Olivia’s Presidential-election-rigging. To get them off the trail…Olivia plants information that triggers Abby’s abuse-trauma, manipulating her into a panicky and tearful breakup. Neither Abby nor David finds out Olivia orchestrated this! Both of them continue to idolize and adore her! The writers still seem to think we should too!

At the end of season 5, there were maybe 2 characters that were likeable human beings. Senator-turned-VP Susan Ross, who pleasantly surprised me by flat-out quitting her job rather than sell her soul, and governor-turned-Dem-candidate Francisco Vargas, whose soul is still up for grabs.

Liveblogged the first episode. Might end up doing the same for the whole season, depending on how commentable it is.

Onward!

 

---

 

Season 6 opens on the night of a presidential election, and it all comes down to…California. That’s right, folks, in the Scandal universe, California is a swing state.

Also, Olivia is chastising her staff to vote if they haven’t already. I mean, hey, just because they’re reporting totals on the west coast, that doesn’t mean the polls can’t still be open! Our competent political-genius heroine in action, folks.

Frankie won. So now Olivia is berating her candidate (Mellie, also her boyfriend’s ex) to call and concede, which seems like the smart and reasonable move. Knowing this show, that means we will eventually learn it totally the wrong move.

(I like Mellie and Olivia being friends. For all that they’re awful, their fighting with each other was pretty evenly matched — not one abusing the other, they both gave as good as they got. And it all stemmed from their rivalry over Fitz, who is painfully not worth it.)

Dammit, they shot Frankie. He might escape becoming awful by dying.

Obnoxious agent: “Ma’am, I’m sure you have some security clearance…” Abby: “No. I don’t have some security clearance. I have all of it.”

Hits all the beats and all the right emotions of a badass smackdown scene. Logically, undercut by the fact that Abby didn’t show any security clearance. If you’re going to waltz into a hyper-secure operation (the hospital) and start barking orders, have your badge in hand! (Also, her entire order was literally “don’t let anyone in here,” which I’m pretty sure they were already doing.)

…yep, they killed Frankie.

Olivia yells at her father (ex-leader of the government’s Evil Secret Black Ops Division): was he behind the killing? Well, we’re 22 minutes in and she’s yelling at him, so I bet not.

Mellie just wants to go on vacation and leave this all behind. Now that would be the smart and reasonable move. (She never really wanted the job in the first place. She wants power in the abstract, but has no interest in doing anything in particular with it. Five minutes later she’ll forget all her reasonable plans and decide she wants it again.)

Now Olivia’s convinced it was Cyrus (part of the Fitz conspiracy, now VP candidate for Vargas) who had the candidate murdered so he’d be promoted to the top of the winning ticket. But we’re only 27 minutes in, so she’s probably wrong. After all, the Electoral College hasn’t voted yet, so Cyrus would be taking a pretty steep gamble on them not abandoning the Vargas-Cyrus ticket even with half of it gone.

Olivia storms into the hospital. The same hyper-secure hospital that nobody was supposed to be let in. And finds Cyrus in mute, trembling shock. Who could’ve seen that coming?

Fitz: “I wanted you to be right. You’re always right.” Dude…have you never seen this show?

He ultimately supports the EC supporting Cyrus, which is the right choice as far as the will of the people is concerned, although both he and Mellie are impressively awful choices who should not be trusted with this country.

Vargas’ widow is still in the hospital after a sleepless night, still covered in blood from standing next to the shooting, but for some reason her hair and makeup is still flawless. D- for realism, makeup department.

…So the last five minutes unveil a tip from a mystery person that it was Cyrus (no details on how the tipper came to this conclusion). Well, now that this twist has been un-twisted and re-twisted again, I’m sure the issue is settled, and will be quite shocked if the rest of the season isn’t completely straightforward.