It’s time once again for Laura’s rundown of this week’s episode of Scandal!

Fitz and Mellie finally got divorced, Fitz and Olivia almost got married, Jake once again lost a woman he loved, and Papa Pope returned. Sounds like a Thursday! The Scandal crew also had to contend with a Senate hearing and walking the fine line between truth and perjury, while keeping Fitz and Liv safe. So let’s dive into all this, shall we?

To Say I Do or Not to Say I Do?
A good portion of the episode dealt with whether or not Fitz and Olivia should get married. Cyrus essentially proposes to Olivia on Fitz’s behalf as the three of them talked in the Oval Office, explaining that if they’re married she can’t testify against him. Olivia, as we might expect, reacted in horror: “A shotgun wedding on the heels of a quickie divorce? You may as well turn the Oval Office into a drive-thru wedding chapel.” Of course, that’s not her main issue with the entire situation.

She confided in Abby, who characteristically rambled on without thinking as she freaked out over being in the president’s bedroom. She speculated about how hellish being First Lady must be until Liv told her that Fitz wants to get married. Liv, naturally, feels the same way Abby does, hence part of her hesitation in getting married. So instead of a wedding, she’s decided to lie on the stand, “because otherwise Fitz will be impeached and I love him too much to let that happen.” Abby, thankfully, asked the question on many viewers’ minds: If you love him, then why not just get married?

Olivia: We’re not ready to get married. It would just be a last minute get out of jail free card. I don’t want that for us.
Abby: If you take the stand, you could end up going to jail.
Olivia: And if I get married? What in the hell do you think this is?

She clarified her point by looking around the president’s bedroom, as did Abby. It’s lavish, but as First Lady, it would be a kind of elegant prison, just as Mellie told her.

Fitz thought if he redid the proposal in a more romantic way then he’d get Olivia to say yes—that it was simply the circumstances of Cyrus discussing their marriage like a business transaction that got in the way. He put together a romantic setting—rose petals, candles, him in a tuxedo, and getting down on one knee. But Olivia stopped him; that’s not what she wants. Since he admitted he didn’t want to do the elaborate proposal thing either, she asked why he bothered.

Fitz: Because I love you. Because you are what I want. But obviously you don’t feel the same.
Olivia: We’re not ready.
Fitz: You’re not ready. And you know what I think? You never will be.
Olivia: That’s not fair.
Fitz: Then answer the question, Olivia. What is it that you want? (She doesn’t say anything, just looks at him) That’s what I thought.

Poor Fitz. Even though I don’t think the two of them should get married, I felt for him in that scene. His actions later in the episode made me less sympathetic, but we’ll get to that. Eventually, Liv agreed to marry him, but she clearly started regretting her decision in the moments before the wedding when her new Secret Service detail explained how her life will now work. She was saved at the last minute by Mellie and her father, although instead of telling Fitz directly, she had Abby return the ring to him.

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It’s time for Laura’s take on the latest episode of Scandal!

I have to start off by complimenting the writing of this episode, because it was brilliant. The speech that Olivia Pope gave during her talk show appearance, magnificently delivered by Kerry Washington, was beautiful. And the final scene between Fitz and Cyrus—at turns dramatic, heartbreaking, and somehow even weirdly heartwarming—also had award-caliber writing and acting. The realism of a mother sending her son books with index cards that completely spoil the entire story make me wonder if someone in the writer’s room has a mother who actually did that for them.

I now want to touch on one of the more serious aspects of the episode: the lax rules surrounding impeachment. In the episode, David quoted President Gerald Ford as saying, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of Congress considers it to be at a given moment in history.” Considering President Clinton essentially got impeached for lying about engaging in a sexual act with an intern, that seems to be 100% accurate. Shouldn’t our constitution have a more strict law regarding what constitutes an impeachable offense? I realize our Founding Fathers probably never foresaw the mockery our current batch of lawmakers would make of the institution, preferring to close down the government rather than reach across the aisle to compromise, but it seems a president’s political enemies could find almost any reason to impeach him. David’s absolutely right when he told Fitz that “Congress is prosecutor and judge and jury.” That’s the way our system currently works. Anyone else have a major problem with that?

Okay, now that I’m done with the rant, let’s get back to the much more pleasant topic of Scandal, where the president did in fact commit the very impeachable offense of going to war to save his mistress. Not only could it ruin his presidency, it could send him straight to jail, no passing “Go,” no collecting $200. That’s where the phenomenal scene between Fitz and Cyrus comes in. In exchange for once again being made Chief of Staff (along with various other demands like Fitz firing Elizabeth North), Cyrus will return to work at the White House and keep silent about the fact Fitz saw the tape of Olivia while she was a hostage.

The bulk of the episode, however, was devoted to the question of how to fix Olivia’s reputation in front of the world. At first, things didn’t exactly go as planned. As Cyrus said, “I don’t even know how the hell they found out about that ring. But she’s managed to go from being a slut, to an Everywoman, to your sister-wife in under 48 hours. I didn’t even know that was possible.”

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NGN Team member Laura is back today with her thoughts on the last two episodes of Scandal!

Thanks to a bout of strep throat, you get two episodes of Scandal in one blog post: both last week’s episode “Paris is Burning” and this week’s “Dog-Whistle Politics.”

By far one of the funniest dialogue exchanges occurred in last week’s episode, when Quinn asked Huck, “You were gonna turn off the Internet?” And he calmly replied, “Well, no, I was going to erase the Internet.” If only dealing with a scandal like being the president’s mistress was that easy.

So let’s take a look at how Olivia’s simple “Yes” has changed things for everyone, and what this might mean for the upcoming season.

Olivia Pope and Associates Has a New Member
Jake forced Quinn and Huck to face reality with his brilliant arrival at O.P.A. last week, reminding her two associates of exactly who Olivia is and always has been: “Liv did not ask for your help. She does not want your help. She did this. You know why you don’t know about any plan? Because you are not part of any plan. The plan already happened. The plan was Olivia Pope standing on that sidewalk and with one word obliterating any life she’s ever known. The plan was Liv requiring the same thing of herself that she requires of her clients. Standing by the one thing, following the only rule that matters to her, and what is that? Do not lie. That was it. That was her plan. The plan is done. Liv finally stood on her own, and we are done.” When they ask him what he plans to do next, he says with his usual calm demeanor, “My plan is to sit here and drink the majority of this vodka and get remarkably wasted and watch the world end. Care to join me?”

This also led to one of the cutest moments in the two episodes, when Quinn confessed to her love for martinis, and Jake reassured her, “Every new spy does it. I did it.” It’s always nice when the super spies show their human side, especially after some of the more violent rampages we’ve seen them all embark on.

This week, with Jake off fighting a different battle, Quinn and Huck tried a different tack: hiring a new gladiator in a beautiful mirror of the pilot when Quinn first joined the team. Only instead of eagerly accepting the job like Quinn did, Marcus Walker adamantly refused and walked away, at least at first.

Fortunately, Marcus proved his worth before the end of the episode, refusing to listen to marching orders and instead fighting back with his “dog-whistle politics” strategy, leading to…

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