Well. With just one episode left in season two, we finally find out who the mole is—and I can honestly say I did not see that coming. Then again, that’s because the mole turned out to be a character I thought was killed off in season one, so maybe I haven’t been paying close enough attention. To the recap!

After FLOTUS’s announcement last week that El Prez had been stamping his presidential seal on another woman’s envelope, Cyrus is desperately trying to do damage control. He holds a press conference in which all he says, over and over, that the state of El Prez’s marriage is a “private matter.” He’s filled El Prez and Olivia in on the situation, and once they actually get out of bed, she’s in fixer mode, but El Prez tells her to stand down. “I made a decision, and I will deal with it,” he says. He wants to handle everything on his own, and she seems charmed by his forcefulness, and they’re both as giddy as adolescents. It’s kind of cute.

Mellie, meanwhile, is interviewing a fixer of her own, a creepy guy who looks like a less attractive Tom Cruise. He asks her for total honesty, but she tells him she’s going to do whatever is in her best interest—which includes keeping the name of El Prez’s mistress to herself for the time being.

Cyrus goes nuclear on Ira Glass Lite for doing the interview with FLOTUS, and James is all, How many scoops of the century do you want me to give up? “This was my big break,” he says, and Cyrus laughs in his face and calls him naive. He brutally says that FLOTUS got IGL that job to hurt both him and El Prez, and James is too stupid to understand that. He leaves IGL alone, eyes full of tears. Divorce him, IGL!

Olivia gets back to HQ, where the Dream Team are still trying to figure out who the mole is. Olivia first goes to her safe to make sure the memory card from the Cytron voting machine is still inside, and Abby finally admits to Jerk Jeremy that she stole it, to which he’s like, Duh. They think the mole is VP Sally for, like, one minute, but then hacked into her computer and saw someone logged on looking at Albatross files while she was doing a televised press conference, so they know it’s not her. JJ, who announces he’s part of the team now, keeps making cracks about how the President “banged someone,” and everyone else has awkward face. Harrison tries to convince Olivia she needs to let him take care of her. “You’re not the fixer here—you’re the problem,” he says. Instead, Olivia, who’s weirdly calm and happy, just tells him to focus on the mole investigation.

Next up on the list of things giving Cyrus a hernia: El Prez’s announcement that he is not going to seek another term (which at this point seems like a pretty good idea). Cyrus appeals to him, and when that doesn’t work he tries Olivia. He meets her in their favorite park and tells her if VP Sally (who pops up briefly to misquote the bible and verbally spar with Cyrus) gets her claws into the Republican party their rights will be impinged upon. “If I really thought this is what he wanted, I would fight to the death to give it to him,” he says. But Il Papa is unmoved. As she leaves, Ballard’s creepy boss comes up. Turns out Ballard’s whole mission was to get between El Prez and Olivia, and now his boss wants Cyrus to show El Prez the tape of Olivia and Ballard having kitchen sex. He also wants Cyrus to have no further contact with Charlie, whom he says used be one of his guys.

Read More

One thing Veep has excelled at this season is timeliness, from its North Korea plot points to its Rain Man/Nate Silver-esque numbers guys. In last night’s episode, “The Vic Allen Dinner,” Selina went to a charitable dinner not entirely unlike last week’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner where there were no awkward celebrity appearances but attendees were expected to do enormously uncomfortable things to entertain the crowd. Initially she was going to sing a song written by Mike and Dan, but after Kent ruined her week she targeted him instead with a catchy ditty called “50 Ways to Win in Denver.” So it wasn’t quite Obama singing Al Green, but we’ll give her points for trying.

Winners

Reddit and Tumblr: “Take these meaningless syllables with you and just get out!” screeches Selina at Jonah after the team analyzes Selina’s new viral online presence as a meme. The flattering situation room picture was scrapped because POTUS thought he looked jowly, so now the world thinks Selina stares at her BlackBerry during very important hostage rescue missions, or at the crucifixion of Christ, or at the 2004 tsunami, but on the plus side, it’s very Texts from Hillary.

Observational skills: Dan may be a lot of things (and a douchebag is one of them), but he doesn’t miss a trick, noticing Sue’s high neckline, flats, and Corner Bakery coffee cup and deducing she’s been to one of the K Street lobbying shops on a job interview. Sue is faintly terrifying this season, so good luck to whoever decides to lure her away.

Parenting: “Who the hell was religious as a teenager? Smoke some weed, for chrissakes.”

Beatboxing: Chung is back, and he’s surprisingly good at beatboxing, or as Selina puts it, “just spitting.”

DC Coast/Gary: You know what happens to most executive branch staffers who hate their low-paid jobs? Nothing. No one takes them out to lunch, no one offers them a raise, and no one gifts them a new man bag with hundreds of inside pockets to store their boss’s eye drops and Tampax. They just keep going to work every day and stifle their misery with cheap vodka and Lexapro. So you win, Gary—and so do you, DC Coast, for getting free advertising.

Read More

As Shonda Rhimes shows are wont to do, Scandal is picking up the pace (which I didn’t even think was possible) as the season draws to a close. We get new development about the mole—sort of—but the main event this week, of course, is the fireworks between El Prez and Olivia and FLOTUS’s subsequent explosion. To the recap.

After Olivia gets released from the hospital, El Prez decides to have her followed—by his old Navy buddy, Jake Ballard, a.k.a. the guy Olivia slept with that one time before he gave her a concussion. AWKward. When he shows up at her apartment, she phones El Prez and tells him, “Call off your puppy.” He refuses, and tells her FLOTUS moved across the street. “You don’t want to talk about how my wife moved out and I’m alone at the White House?” he asks, while surrounded by staff. Guess it’s not a secret anymore. She hangs up, frustrated, and Ballard gets a call from El Prez telling him to stay put. Scott Foley looks way sunburned in this episode—not a plot point, just saying.

Meanwhile, Cyrus is practically spontaneously combusting as he shuffles between the two petulant children who are the First Couple, begging first one and then the other to reconsider. El Prez tells him he can’t indulge a tantrum and FLOTUS will fold eventually. FLOTUS, meanwhile, wants an apology and some commitment in 36 hours, or else she’ll go on national TV and tell the world about her husband’s cheatin’ ways. Cyrus is so distracted by all this drama that when Ira Glass Lite comes to his office to say he got offered a job as an anchor for BNC, Cyrus acquiesces without even thinking.

Meanwhile the Dream Team—with the help of Jerk Jeremy—are reviewing the footage from the storage facility where Huck was attacked. Huck comes in, still in rough shape, and immediately IDs the baseball cap guy as Charlie. When Olivia arrives at HQ, tailed by Ballard, whom she won’t let inside, they reveal what they found out. “We think Cyrus Bean may be the mole,” they tell her. Olivia is horrified, pointing out she’s known him for a very long time and he’s one of her best friends (most of the time). Before they accuse him, Il Papa says, they need proof—especially since “the last guy we accused ended up dead.” Just then she gets a call from El Prez, who tells her to come to the White House. She refuses, to which he says he’ll just come to her and say hello to the whole team. So she goes to the White House, Ballard in tow, and goes into the Oval Office, slamming the door in Ballard’s face. She asks El Prez what he wants, and he says, “You.” Olivia points out she told him they were over, and he says, “I am never going to be over you.” Then in another one of those fantastic Il Papa speeches Kerry Washington is so good at, she tells him, “Please stop getting my hopes up. I am not a toy you can play with when you’re bored or lonely or horny. I am not a fantasy. If you want me, earn me. Until then, we are done.” She storms out. Ballard is all curious, but she tells him nothing.

Huck is taking point on the Charlie investigation. He knows Charlie likes breakfast pastries, so Quinn and JJ go to the best bakery in town, and Quinn manages to find out from the cashier that he goes in every Thursday to buy a dozen cannoli. In a subtle, funny cut, the next scene shows the Dream Team chowing down on said cannoli while they discuss the case. Where’s Charlie in all this? Oh, just hanging out in Ballard’s apartment, drinking Ballard’s soda and watching the tape of Ballard and Olivia having sex. He calls Cyrus and tells him, “I think we have all the proof we need.”

Read More

“I know you better than you know yourself,” said Claudia/Grannie to Elizabeth in last night’s season finale of The Americans. “And you don’t know me at all.” It’s been easy to doubt Grannie over the course of the season, given her prickly affect, her habit of stalking people, her odd love for arcade games and breakfast meetings, and the time she kidnapped and tortured Philip and Elizabeth (oh, yeah, that). But as the season finale revealed, she’s actually been a loyal supervisor to the Jenningses all along, voicing her own doubts to her KGB contact (revealed to be Arkady) about the validity of a meeting with the Colonel and taking matters into her own hands when her friend General Zhukov was killed by the CIA.

One of the reasons Grannie is so effective as an agent is her motherly demeanor, which allowed her to con her way into the suspicious CIA agent’s house before slashing his jugular with terrifying efficiency. “Victor Zhukov was my friend,” she told him. “We met in Stalingrad in 1942. The first time I saw him he was standing over two dead Nazis.” As speeches go, this one was Tarantino-Type-A-tastic. Philip and Elizabeth might have requested Grannie’s reassignment, forcing her to fill out 27 different forms (bureaucracy killed the Cold War, apparently), but we have to hope as viewers that she’ll be back next season.

With Grannie, and with each of the other female characters, one of the things The Americans has suggested in a remarkably subtle fashion is how much more independence women seem to have east of the Iron Curtain. Compare Martha languishing as an FBI secretary with Nina rapidly ascending up the KGB chain of command, or Elizabeth and Philip working alongside each other as partners with the alienation between Stan and Sandra. The finale crystallized all this when it showed Nina wearing an apron in the studio and washing dishes as she pondered her new exfiltrated American life—a world away from the power suits she sports in the Rezidentura.

Read More

Since Scandal debuted last April, Shonda Rhimes’s show has just continued to get buzzier and buzzier. The actors (and fans) routinely live-tweet the details of every episode, and Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwyn were the undisputed stars of Saturday’s ABC News party for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. (Sadly, try as we might, we couldn’t get a single spoiler out of either of them.) So as its second season begins to wrap up, we thought we’d take a look back at the twisty journey the show has taken—and some significant plot points that got dropped along the way.

Amanda Tanner: One of the central conflicts in the first season: El Prez sleeping with his aide. Sort of makes it hard to root for Fitz and Olivia’s epic love when you remember she’s not his only extramarital affair.

“Sweet baby”: And on that note . . . apparently this was enough of a thing El Prez used to do that Shonda named the pilot for it—but we’ve never heard him call Olivia anything but her name or variations thereof.

Poor, dead Gideon: Last week, Quinn waxed nostalgic about her shattered life as Lindsey Dwyer and her murdered boyfriend Jesse. But what about her OTHER murdered boyfriend, intrepid cub reporter Gideon, who suffered a slow and painful death by scissors on the floor of his own apartment?

Stephen: Hey, remember the British guy who served as Olivia’s right-hand man and had a penchant for sleeping with coroners in morgues? Yeah, us neither.

VP Sally: Whither El Prez’s crazy-right-wing, fundamentalist Vice President? On an extended “diplomatic trip,” perhaps? Because if she were anywhere within the vicinity of the White House while FLOTUS was moving across the street, you can guarantee she’d be out for blood.

Read More

It’s a bad week in Washington when Sean Penn is doing more about an actual issue than the leaders of the free world are. This week’s Veep, titled “Hostages,” saw Selina come into her own while attempting to force the President to do something about the hostages being held somewhere (the actors on Veep spit out jokes so fast it’s impossible to figure out the nuances of plotlines most of the time). Anyway, Kent did his polling, and the people were in favor, and the hostages were rescued. Selina swore in some new senators, and Sue was forced to testify to Congress on a boring and totally pointless committee on executive waste. Also, Clay Davis popped up as secretary of defense George Maddox, a man who hates Selina and occasionally fires guns in anger. Behold, the winners and losers.

Winners

Hostages/Hormones. Kinda. They were rescued, which was good, but one Marine lost a leg, which moved Selina to the kind of sadness only a giant almond croissant could alleviate. Is this the first time we’ve seen the Veep have feelings that weren’t frustration or rage? She seemed a little teary at the swearing-in ceremony, too. If this leads into a big old story arc about menopause, I’m going to lose my mind. Selina’s two-minute-long pregnancy was bad enough.

Noodles. “Noodles need to be heated at 800 watts for three minutes and 35 seconds. Any more and they’ll dry out. Any less and they’ll be damp and flaccid like a lady’s hair in the rain.” I actually know people who make speeches like this and have the same kind of Rain Man-esque dedication to microwaveable ramen. Either way, Kent’s timing was perfection.

Politico. Because it was mentioned on Veep, and you know everyone over there was freaking out about it. That’s when they weren’t coming up with terrible questions to ask Julia Louis-Dreyfus in real life.

Puns on the word “west.” Now that the Veep has an office in the White House, the writers have a stable of new puns to use. “Kanye West Wing.” “Fastest gun in the West Wing.” In the hazy recesses of my brain, I seem to recall the writers using “Wicked Witch of the West Wing” last season.

Garyoke. Dan tried to replace it with his Dannyoke, but that led to Selina making cracks about filmmaking instead of fishing to a newbie senator while Dan mimed reeling in a rod. Super awk.

Read More

Welcome back, Scandalians! It’s been a couple of weeks since we last checked in with Il Papa and company, and we left things on a tense and scary note. But those looking for huge plot movements forward were out of luck: Although there are only a few episodes left in the season, Shonda devoted the hour to filling in Huck’s tragic backstory, to which we say: More Huck! Always! To the recap.

We begin with a flashback to five years ago. Huck, in his ZZ Top beard and hair, sits in a Metro station, not so much begging for change as just accepting it when people hand it to him. Olivia (with bangs) waits for the train, and Huck rain-mans about when the next one will arrive. When it does, right when he said it would, she hands him a dollar. “Are you here tomorrow?” she asks. He says yes, and she promises to buy him some coffee.

Flash to the present. Olivia, still in the hospital for her concussion, is being checked out by the doctor while El Prez stands in the corner. The doctor says she should be fine to leave soon, and El Prez thanks him for taking such good care of his “friend.” When he leaves, El Prez sits on the bed and tries to kiss Olivia, who immediately jerks away. “I hate you,” she tells him. “You left me all alone.” He says he was hurt and wrong, but she’s not ready to forgive and forget. “I love you,” he pleads, but she bites out, “I don’t believe you anymore.” El Prez walks out of the room, which is heavily guarded by Secret Service, and sees Captain Ballard, who again lies to him about how Olivia got her concussion. He tells Ballard to find out who attacked her.

Meanwhile at HQ, Huck is still basically catatonic, huddled on the floor rocking back and forth while Abby and Quinn watch. Harrison comes in to say he finally found Olivia, and they assume Baseball Cap Guy (Charlie) attacked both Olivia and Huck and is on to their investigation. Then Huck starts to choke out some sounds: “Seven-fifty-two,” he says, over and over again, voice broken.

Flashback to 14 years ago. A pretty woman (aww, it’s Astrid from Fringe!) is reading a book to a group of young children. Huck comes up behind her in a military uniform, and begins acting out the story she’s reading as the kids giggle. Finally the woman (I don't recall her name, so I’m going to call her Sasstrid) turns around to see what they’re laughing about, then jumps into his arms. They kiss as the kids eww, and it’s adorable, and the countdown begins until they’re both crushed into a million tiny pieces because nobody is allowed to be happy on this show for more than 30 seconds. Sure enough, in the next scene they’re in bed, and Huck explains his tour of duty was cut short because he took some tests and now is supposed to meet with people in DC, possibly for a job.

Said meeting takes place the next day, with a craggy-faced guy and Charlie. CFG offers Huck an absurd amount of money, but Huck, who’s not sure what the job is but has surmised it’s with the CIA, declines it. CFG tells him he takes the job or goes back to Kosovo. He fills in that Huck was raised in foster care and has no family left, then asks whether he has a wife or kids. Huck says he doesn’t, and CFG says, “Just the way we like it. We’ll be your family. We’ll take care of you.” He welcomes Huck to B-613.

Read More

To misquote Sir Walter Scott, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we disguise ourselves as CIA agents then commit bigamy in order to get an FBI secretary to plant a secret bug in an agent’s office.” Philip and Elizabeth have done a fair few terrible things for Mother Russia on The Americans—poisoning then threatening to smother Grayson with a pillow being my contender for least ethical—but for some reason it was Philip’s flagrant abuse of Martha’s trust in the penultimate episode of the season that really made him seem callous. To shoot someone in the head when you can persuade yourself they’re an enemy is one thing; to toy with a person’s emotions and convince them that they’re heading for eternal happiness and commitment is another altogether.

It implies a degree of sociopathy—or at least extraordinary detachment—in Philip that he’s able to divorce his real life from his fake ones so comfortably, and that he’s also been able to close off the lengthy chapter of his life he spent married to Elizabeth now he’s settled in a cozy bachelor pad instead of a motel. One minute he’s horsing around with Paige and making her mother jealous; the next he’s proposing marriage to an FBI employee he’s tricked into becoming a mole. This episode, which gave so much face time to vows and their ultimate significance, showed how shockingly easy it is to deceive someone and compel them to trust you even when they have a long physical list of reasons not to. Even Elizabeth doubted Philip would be able to compel Martha to plant the bug in Gaad’s office, but he, with ample experience of her pliant and faithful responses to him, knew better.

While Philip was making vows he had no intention of keeping to Martha in front of God and her family, Elizabeth, decked out in her most hilariously frumpy outfit yet, was mulling over what it might have meant for her own marriage had she and Philip actually had a marriage ceremony instead of being assigned to each other by the KGB. Philip had already echoed her thoughts to Martha when he confessed that he’d been married once already, saying, “We cared about each other, but we didn’t know how to be married.” This, along with Nina’s sudden decision to risk her life and confess her role as an FBI mole to Arkady after swearing allegiance to Russia, suggests that vows have some inexplicable magic to them, even though they’re only words.

Read More

Into each life a little pork fat must fall. In last night’s Veep, Selina confronted the reality of flesh-pressing at a North Carolina hog roast. Pros: We got to see Air Force Two. Cons: The hat she wore made her hair resemble Pennywise the Clown in Stephen King’s It right before a very important teleconference about foreign hostages with military chiefs. Oh, and her daughter has a new boyfriend of Iranian origin. “That Rahim turns out to be a nice boy,” Selina tells her staff. “Let’s run a security check on him and his entire family and investigate their finances.” Here are the winners and losers from “Signals.”

Winners

Jonah. Selina might have called him “long tall Sally” and told him to do something very rude but he got to fly on Air Force Two and it was the happiest we’ve ever seen him. “Jonah, calm down,” said Mike. “It’s a plane with a logo, not Space Mountain.” Still, it made up for him having to bend over next to a roast suckling pig in order to keep Selina from discussing Israel in front of rotating pork.

Pilates. The scene where Dan tried to suck up to Kent by jumping on a machine he’d never used before was poetic in its truthiness, and only made more perfect when Dan himself was sucked up to by a more junior staffer.

Mike Allen. Said junior staffer told Dan he’d seen a reference to him in yesterday’s Playbook (the Google alert set up for Dan’s name alerted him to it). There was also a shout out to Charles Krauthammer’s column in the Post. In other words, a perfect DC moment.

National Enquirer. We knew Gary’s new girlfriend, Dana, was bad news, but we had no idea she’d leak the information about Selina’s “gesdictionary” to a friend, who’d pass it on to the supermarket tabloids. Poor Gary’s face when he found out was only marginally less sad than this.

Read More

Did you miss Selina Meyer? Was the sight of her bobbleheaded likeness floating around near the White House and gatecrashing the Presidents Race not enough? Did the pictures of JLD sitting in the West Wing with her real-life Veep counterpart Joe Biden offer any consolation?

Not really, because as last night’s episode proved, the real charm of this Veep lies in her unending uttering of profanities, strung together like twinkling holiday lights on a snowy front porch, and you can’t break out that kind of vocabulary while at a baseball game or sitting next to the second most powerful man in the country. The gap between season one and season two, during which Julia Louis-Dreyfus won an Emmy and was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role as Selina Meyer, gave us plenty of time to miss Selina and her spastic, self-involved team. Now they’re back, and the unthinkable has actually happened—the Veep’s stock is up (by 0.9 percent, but it still counts). What will this mean for season two? It’s anyone’s guess, but we’re grateful for the return of lines like, “There’s no ‘i’ in freedom. It’s not me-dom. It’s we-dom.” Here are the winners and losers from last night’s episode, “Midterms,” which interestingly enough was directed by elusive comedy genius Chris Morris.

Winners

Selina: Months of campaigning in dreary states such as Arkansas and Wisconsin have helped the Veep get her folksy schtick down pat. “I met a brave firefighter in a wheelchair,” she tells people on one stop. “Back then we didn’t know what HIV was, which meant he had to lose his kidney. He said, ‘You don’t remember me, but I am your grandpa.’” This is the kind of surreal but hysterical stuff Morris excels at (watch Jam and Brass Eye if you need more proof). Anyway, all this banter has actually seen a small bump for candidates in states where Selina’s campaigned, so the President’s giving her new foreign policy chores and 27 morning interviews to do on no sleep. This is what winning feels like.

Rape jokes: There is a way to do them, believe it or not. It just has nothing to do with Daniel Tosh. Gary going through Selina’s bag muttering, “Is this a rape alarm? Like she’s ever going to need that. I mean, she’s not ugly, but she’s got a wall of security,” should be in the textbook for emerging comedians who don’t hate women.

Google: Amy has a sister, Sophie, who’s horrendous (as all people named Sophie are). “Oh, my God, Amy,” she says in their father’s hospital room. “You work for the Vice President. It’s not like it’s Google.”

Nerdy, Nate Silver-esque numbers guys: I can’t find his name on IMDB because IMDB flat-out sucks, but Selina’s unlikely savior in “Midterms” is a wonky statistician who becomes her new best friend after he tells her that her campaign appearances have actually had a better bump than the President’s. “You’re like Neo from The Matrix,” he says. “Everything he does is awesome.” The bump is 0.9 percent, which isn’t even a real number, but it’s enough to get the Veep into the Oval Office and math back into the mainstream.

Read More