Scandal recap: 'The Last Supper'

Let’s all raise our comically large goblets of red wine to the fact that finally, something is happening on Scandal! It’s past time for a return to the high-tension, operatic juggling act that made earlier seasons so gripping.

After clearing Jake’s name last week, the triumphant trio meet in the secret presidential bunker—and promptly begin bickering. Jake was so good at taking the high road when he was imprisoned. Well, the medium road at least; he did like to needle Fitz on his principles. But in this case, he’s actively picking fights with Fitz, demanding he be allowed to kill Rowan, and asking Fitz to refer to him as Captain Ballard. “Jake is what my friends call me, and you’re not my friend, Mr. President,” he snaps. Fitz lets him know that all his fulminating aside, he’s stuck in the security bunker until they figure out what they’re doing.

Olivia, in all these arguments, tries to play the mediator between the Bicker Twins. “We stand in the sun, Jake, that’s what we do,” Olivia reminds her recently released paramour. (“That’s one of our catchphrases,” Jake can’t resist sniping at Fitz. “It’s from our time on the island together.”) It’s just barely enough to get Jake cooperating. Of these three, exactly one of them has proven themselves capable of truly standing up to Rowan Pope, let alone actually beating him, and that’s his daughter. The other two are dragging her down. Which, of course, is exactly what you’re meant to think when Olivia calls her father mid-bunker bicker session.

Of course, that is also a ploy, an attempt to set Rowan up. Finally, a season and a half into knowing what her father really is, Olivia seems to finally understand where some of his motivations lie. I’ve been noting, it feels like endlessly and repetitively, that Rowan has been hitting the parental notes very hard in his speeches at Olivia. Even tonight, he’s still saying all the right things, even when she fails to show up for family dinner and forces him to drink a bottle of 2005 Contador Rioja all by himself. (She’s a MONSTER.) “I will be here for you long after these boys have revealed themselves to be who they really are,” Rowan tells her. “You will always have a place at my table, whether we fight, whether you hate me. Whether you show up or not.” This is what you want to hear from your dad! It’s a credit to Joe Morton that while he’s offering this unconditional love, he makes it sound so, so dire. He imbues this supportive rhetoric with a tone that is so portentous, so threatening.

And that threat becomes fully realized, though not in the way you would think. Despite the episode title’s Christian overtones, this week’s Scandal has more in common with a classic Greek tragedy. Olivia is warring with her father and attempts to remove him from his throne. Rowan, being Rowan, obviously is way ahead of her. His speech to her over dinner about what she meant to him is high drama, juxtaposed as it is with the stealthy takedown of the SWAT team meant to capture him. “You have forsaken me. Your father, your family,” sighs Rowan. “You wanted to stand in the sun, in the bright, white light. It blinded you.” That’s almost as straightforward a mythological parallel as last week’s Helen of Troy symbolism. Olivia has tested his fatherly love to it’s limit, and Rowan is done.

We also get one of those rare moments where Scandal addresses, obliquely, how race colors Rowan’s view of Washington, and conversely doesn’t always color Olivia’s. “Those people that you’ve chosen over me? You do not see how they see you,” Rowan tells Olivia. “Those people are not your people. They never will be, and you never will be one of them.” Of course, for Olivia, they are her people. She’s been raised with elite educations, to move seamlessly in D.C. society, and to expect that she can attain whatever she wants. Her catchphrase (sorry, Jake) is “It’s handled.” But Rowan, being older and having done the striving to make sure she can be this comfortable, can’t help but see that’s she’s different. Can’t help but worry that she will be discarded or turned against.

NEXT: All our subplots begin to converge.

Liz North comes to Olivia this week as a client (rocking a fantastically awful cravat-bow), worried that her phone has been bugged. It has, and by Cyrus, which prompts Olivia to promptly betray her client in favor of her old friend. Liv’s moral compass hasn’t always been the strongest, despite what she might say about wearing white hats, but this is a pretty startling shift even for her. Of course, Liz is spying and Liv is therefore essentially in the right, but it’s still a little messy. Ms. Pope happens to also reveal that Michael might have non-money-related feelings for Cyrus, so that’s nice.

The big get is that Liz has a secret love nest, which Huck sets out to monitor with his estranged son. I hadn’t commented much on Huck’s To Catch a Predator-lite relationship with his son (coaxing him out via the internet? really?) in the hopes that it would go away. Instead, Huck brings his son on a stakeout with him. And he wonders why his ex-wife doesn’t want him around? Huck manages to usher the kid out of the van before he sees any sexytimes, but not far enough away that he misses his father slitting a dude’s throat on a broken window. (I like how this inadvertently and clumsily reflects the American approach to violence vs. sex on television.) Huck, if you want to start down the good father path, get the kid a therapist and never call him again.

The Veep also returns this episode after being off… shaking hands? Doing morning talk shows? (What does Joe Biden do when he’s not planting his foot firmly in his mouth?) To be fair, he’s still shaking hands here, this time after a speech about West Angola, when a car bomb goes off. It’s blamed on the West Angolan Liberation front, but its real narrative purpose, apparently, is to get Mellie all hot and bothered for a hook-up.

Frankly, Andrew’s return is dealt with poorly. After his subplot of an affair with Mellie last season, he dropped off the face of the earth. Jerry died, true, but there was no table setting for this sudden resurgence of passion. Our vice president wasn’t looking longingly at a grief-addled Mellie, or attempting to help her, or really appearing in any substantial way this season. His complete absence from stories this season means that the reveal of his conspiring (and conjugating—okay, sorry, that was a bad verb choice) with Liz North didn’t have quite the same gut impact that it could have had.

I’m so glad that Scandal is up to its old curve ball tricks, but I think this particular twist would have benefited from letting us see just a little bit more of Andrew in the lead up. We had enough Liz North that I am totally on board for her being a political mastermind and for Liv to take her down. With next week as the winter finale, things should click into an even higher gear, and for Scandal, that can only be a good thing.