Olivia Pope Isn’t a Hero—And That’s Been Scandal ’s Point All Along

Scandal, which wraps for good on ABC April 19, has always been a well-dressed primetime contradiction: a high-octane thrill ride and a smorgasbord of inconsistent plotting, an anthem to black female empowerment and a modern harlequin romance. Though it had all the trappings of a procedural—even seven seasons in, clients of the week kept coming across the Gladiators’ desk—the heart of the show lived in its longer, seedier arcs. The stakes could be as large or as small as the writers wished at any given moment; just one episode after being held captive and auctioned off to the highest bidder, Kerry Washington’s immaculate Olivia Pope could comb her hair and join a mourning father for a Black Lives Matter-themed arc. The show has always lived by its own rules—and when those rules became inconvenient, it simply tossed them aside.

In the end, we may not remember the gruesome torture scenes, or the intricacies of the season-long Rashomon murder mystery that was Season 6. But viewers will certainly remember two things: Scandal’s signature shutter-flicking cutaways—and the sight of Olivia Pope storming into a room, immediately rendering everyone there powerless.

She’s an iconic character and a subversive one, not because she had an affair with a white president but because she’s an unapologetically greedy black woman in a culture that rarely casts people like her as a protagonist. All along, the show’s whiplash-inducing twists and stylish mien were working in the service of an antihero in chic clothing. But while TV’s Golden Age antihero boom gave rise to plenty of characters like Walter White and Claire Underwood, whose descents were simple and straightforward—without intermission, and without a need to justify their behavior to an audience rooting for them to “just be nice”—Olivia has had to grapple with the expectations of being a black woman, of a black audience cheering for a black woman, and of those viewers who, at the end of the day, still want her and President Fitz to ride off into the sunset together, even if the cost is a trail of carcasses behind them.

This will be Olivia’s legacy: how she, and the show, have grappled with the pressure to balance everything and to look flawless while doing so. How they’ve both managed to be simultaneously political and apolitical, to inspire without rocking the boat too much—and the messiness that results from all these conflicting pulls.

Scandal always luxuriated in the greed and political aspirations of its central characters, none more so than its protagonist: an impeccably outfitted black woman given to glorious orations that have become a canon of their own. The if-you-want-me-earn-me monologue. The bitch-baby monologue. The twice-as-hard-half-as-good monologue. The I’m-the-boss monologue.

They’re key indicators of Olivia’s fierce competence, which, in Scandal’s first few seasons, was always presented as a force for justice. While the ultimate D.C. fixer was occasionally willing to skirt the lines of morality, she always earned a metaphorical white hat in the end—and sometimes, a literal one—by serving the greater good.

But as the show got twistier, Olivia’s résumé darkened, and her competency became more self-serving. She fixed a presidential election; she bludgeoned a paraplegic (and very evil!) man to death with a metal chair; she infamously chose to have an abortion simply because she did not want a child, an enduring television taboo. In the middle of Season 7, she blew up a plane full of innocent people in order to kill the president of a fictional Middle Eastern country—a tough choice for her, though one she carried out with little to no remorse.

Some of the audience that was first drawn in by Scandal’s original scandal—the forbidden romance between Olivia and Fitzgerald Grant, the married then-president of the United States—has been understandably turned off by this gradual slide into increasingly outlandish moral murkiness. But what those audiences expect from Olivia and Scandal might have less to do with the show itself than with our preconceptions of what it takes for a black female protagonist to be empathetic.

Olivia Pope isn’t simply glamorous, eloquent, and confident, an impeccably tailored mix of Batman and Carmen Sandiego. She’s also a character who constantly hungers—for power and influence, and the freedom they might provide. Pragmatic and cold, she’s unafraid to say that she’s not just good at her job—she’s “better than anyone else. And that is not arrogance, that is a fact.” The show makes it seem like it’s her right to be greedy; according to Scandal, there’s something fundamentally correct about the smartest, most efficient person on the screen running the country.

This is the Olivia we were always meant to admire: a brilliant-but-ruthless anti-heroine who more than earned her seat at the table of power-hungry political players. For further proof, just look at the way that impossible “Olivia & Fitz” romance, the dynamic originally at the heart of the show, has gradually rotted into obsessive dysfunction. While the chemistry between Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwyn remains strong as ever, Scandal seems completely uninterested in wrapping everything with a kiss; just this season, the idyllic Vermont home-away-from-politics that Fitz had built for himself and Olivia morphed into Olivia’s prison, as Fitz and her friends uncovered her machinations and moved to push her off her perch.

Despite all its fantastical leaps, Scandal has wisely never attempted to promote the fiction that Olivia—a black woman, publicly known as the president’s mistress within the world of the show—could ever be president herself. Olivia instead became a power broker, propping up a more acceptable mother of three and jilted American sweetheart in the form of her former romantic rival, Mellie Grant. For Olivia, true control meant puppeteering a shadow regime under Mellie’s nose as the next President Grant’s chief of staff. What many have bemoaned as a slide into the dark side can also be seen as Olivia stepping up to the level of the men around her. It’s evidence that Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes never wanted Olivia to be a matronly black woman guardian angel for the power-hungry white guys of Washington; she was writing a power-hungry black woman all along.

As the show inches toward its finale, a contrite Olivia is once again being placed in the more expected role of savior as she teams up with her old crew to neutralize Cyrus Beene, her former mentor and long-term frenemy, who has his own designs on the White House. In the show’s penultimate episode, she urged her associates to speak out against Beene even though revealing his crimes will implicate them as well by saying that they must act for the greater good: “This is bigger than us,” Olivia said. “This is about the country. This is about patriotism: the end of politics, the beginning of leadership. It all has to come down, no matter the cost. . . We are not the heroes of this story. We are the villains. This is your chance to be a hero. This is positive change,”

But the idea that a neutered Olivia will end the series by redeeming herself, even in this roundabout way, ultimately seems antithetical to Scandal’s legacy. It’s impossible to know how the show will wrap up its last hour, especially given how unpredictable Scandal can be—but either way, it’s still safe to say that a competent black woman who dreamed too big, reached too high, and ultimately got put in her place is not the stamp that Rhimes set out to leave on television.

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