Recap:
Three months since the death of Gideon Wallace, the reveal of Billy Chambers’ plot, and Quinn’s arrest, Olivia and her team look for ways to prove Quinn’s innocence. Charged with killing an ex-boyfriend and six other people with a package bomb and then fleeing the state of California, Quinn, whose real name is revealed as Lindsay Dwyer, maintains she did not send the bomb and that she was attacked in a hotel room, drugged, and woke up in Washington, D.C. days later with a completely new identity left for her on the bedside table. U.S. Attorney David Rosen mounts a strong prosecution, all but convincing the jury of Quinn’s guilt.
Meanwhile, Olivia Pope & Associates is hired by a senator to squelch a soon-to-break sex scandal. Senator Shaw of Delaware discovered a camera in his office that recorded him having sex with a woman on his desk. Olivia’s crew discovers that a conservative political blog has purchased bandwidth in preparation for breaking the story and showing the video. They discover also that Shaw has engaged in a number of illicit relationships, something he dismisses because he is not married and they were all consenting adults. After failing to get an injunction to stop the blog from broadcasting the video, Olivia has Shaw release the video and own up to the impropriety publicly. This works to glowing effect for Shaw’s career.
At the White House, President Fitzgerald Grant is dealing with escalating hostilities in the Sudan, with many in his staff believing he should go to war. Fitz and First Lady Mellie learn the sex of their impending baby on a nationally televised news interview. During the interview, Mellie uses the opportunity to spout off her feelings on the Sudanese issue, using her pregnancy as a cover. Fitz chastises her in public but apologizes as Mellie asserts what she has given up for his career, including the fact he’d rather be with another woman. Later, Fitz makes a secured call to Olivia to talk about the interview. She offers advice on how to proceed and says that the choice to go to war should be up to him. He follows her advice to the consternation of Chief of Staff, Cyrus.
When Olivia learns that Quinn’s trial is going to jury and she is expected to be found guilty, she places a call to an unknown party requested something be done. In court, the defense asks for a dismissal of charges for a second time based on circumstantial evidence. To everyone’s shock, the judge grants the dismissal. David is furious and tells Olivia that he is going to prove that she had a hand in the dismissal.
Through all of this, Olivia’s crew has been trying to track down evidence of whoever brought Quinn to D.C. three years earlier and provided her new identity. Security footage of the hotel she stayed in doesn’t go back three years. Huck gets footage from security cameras across the street from the hotel. It is revealed that he is on the security footage. As Huck erases the evidence, a flashback reveals that he was working with Olivia to provide Quinn’s new life.
Review:
Finding out the truth of Quinn Perkins is a tad anti-climactic but it serves as yet another layer on the ever-expanding complexity of Scandal.
One of the hidden gems of late last season, in seven episodes Scandal managed to establish itself as an engaging political thriller mixed with some of the romantic drama flair for which creator Shonda Rhimes has become known. While there was a procedural aspect to the show — cunning Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and her band of outside-the-box do-gooders solve a scandal each episode — that really took a backseat to the affair dynamic between Olivia and President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn) that propels the main narrative forward.
What at first seemed like a rote story of two flawed people torn apart by circumstance — Olivia ran Grant’s campaign and served as one of his senior staff at the start of his term; Grant, of course, is married and the leader of the free world — that story served as only the nougat core upon which more and more layers of chocolatey political intrigue continued to be added. Claims of a different affair with Grant and an intern; a pregnancy; murder; a tape recording of Grant and Olivia together sexually that’s thought to be of him with someone else; the Vice President’s Chief of Staff trying to blackmail Grant out of office so that his boss can become President; a First Lady who knows more than most thought; a pesky U.S. attorney proving to be a burr in Olivia’s shoe; a peskier reporter who dates Olivia’s newest recruit Quinn, gets too close to the truth of the Grant scandal and winds up dead, his body discovered by Quinn, who has her own secret past.
It’s a lot to cram into seven episodes and yet the pace and reveals are one of the true pleasures of the series. It is pure political soap opera, to be sure, but it’s first rate. And that continues in this opening frame of the second season. Quinn (Katie Lowes) was arrested by David, the tenacious U.S. attorney played with expected aplomb by Josh Malina, after running her fingerprints and finding out she was wanted for the murders of seven people in California. Olivia and her crew must work to prove her claimed innocence.
The crux of the episode is less about what Quinn did and more about what happened after the fact. The crime she is charged with — sending a package bomb to the office of a former boyfriend who jilted her that ends up killing him and six others — turns out to be somewhat anti-climactic. After the set-up in last season’s finale, it was expected that Quinn was going to be part of some larger political conspiracy, an assassin or a key dignitary or hidden royalty on the lam. That expectation makes the payoff here, at first blush, a letdown.
Yet, that is one of the deceptive charms of Scandal, taking the small (or relatively small) acts and eventually letting the audience in on how they’re just looking at but one ho-hum piece of a large puzzle. True to form, they don’t drag out the reveal of the person behind Quinn’s new identity in D.C., capping the episode with it. To be honest, it’s not as shocking and surprising of a “twist” as they would have you believe it is in the way the episode is constructed. This is just the natural progression of what appeared to be Olivia’s clear involvement in Quinn’s prior life shown to close the finale last year. This is less about the who and more about the why. Again, the ways the show builds upon itself to grow its mysteries.
The cast is uniformly great throughout and it would appear to be the right call on the parts of Rhimes and actor Henry Ian Cusick to have let the Season 1 character of Stephen sail away. Much as there is to enjoy about Cusick, there really wasn’t much to Stephen’s character to leave a strong enough impression to feel like that’s lost here. Bellamy Young continues to impress the more Mellie Grant’s deviousness is brought to light. It will be interesting to see how far down the Sherry Palmer Expressway they take the character.
