In a shocking twist, Olivia wears a patterned shirt. Photograph by Richard Cartwright/ABC.
The show continues to barrel ahead at its usual jaw-dropping pace. This week we got plenty of reminders that our characters are all deeply flawed people who, despite having the ability to solve others' problems and talk at a pace faster than normal humans, can't seem to manage their personal lives, even when they know the people they love are not good for them in any way. To the recap!
Charlie in the Storage Unit, With the Lead Pipe
The case of the week involves the season’s ongoing story arc: Late former CIA director Osborne’s widow comes to Olivia insisting her husband did not commit suicide but was actually murdered, which we already know. Her proof? His suicide note referred to her as “Susan,” when in 30 years of marriage he only ever called her “Susie” or “honey.” It takes the Dream Team approximately five seconds to figure out the widow Osborne is right—that envelope of cash in his freshly dry-cleaned suit was for betting on horses, and Molly, Wendy’s friend who first fingered Osborne as the mole, just had thousands wired into her bank account.
So the real mole is still out there, which means one thing to Abby: that Jerk Jeremy, briefly deposed from his perch on the HQ couch, is still in danger. She frantically rescues him from his apartment, and once back at HQ, he at least makes himself useful by offering to use his Department of Justice connections to have Molly put on the no-fly list. “Gladiators in helmets, right?” he says. He also takes the opportunity to ask Abby whether she still has feelings for him, and when she confesses she does, he says he can’t love someone who won’t admit to stealing his flash drive and ruining his life. Which, good point.
Harrison and Abby question Molly, who says the mole threatened to cut out her tongue and kill her if she didn’t help frame Osborne. Will you be at all surprised if I tell you Molly doesn’t survive the episode? She’s killed in a “hit and run,” further evidence of how dangerous the mole is.
Olivia calls Cyrus—who has apparently been staying in a hotel for nearly a month per Ira Glass Lite’s request (more on that later)—to tell him Osborne was not the mole as they drink wines on opposite ends of the phone. But twist! Cyrus doesn’t care, because El Prez already announced Osborne was the mole on national television, and now that Mr. Bean has clawed his way back into El Prez’s good graces he’s not about to rock the boat. He accuses her of trying to sabotage the administration, which offends her, but he tells her he has to ignore the situation.
Huck traces the wired money back to the mole’s bank account and finds a charge for a storage unit in Virginia. He and Quinn go to investigate, but he makes her stay in the car. He finds the unit, which contains only a wooden crate that appears empty—and as he’s looking in it, someone comes up from behind him and bashes him over the head with a lead pipe, Clue-style. When Huck doesn’t return to the car for a few hours, Quinn goes in to look for him—and demonstrating some impressive moxie, she goads the manager into showing her the security tapes, on which she sees a suspicious guy in a baseball cap. She eventually finds Huck, gagged with duct tape in the crate, and takes him back to HQ, where his PTSD comes flooding back to a paralyzing degree. The Dream Team surmises Baseball Cap Guy works for the mole—and we see, as he makes a call to Cyrus, that it’s none other than Charlie Brown.
Their bromance was as vibrant as their sweater patterns. Maximiliano Hernandez as Chris and Noah Emmerich as Stan in The Americans. Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn for FX.
Given the many, many hints at Stan’s dark past (when he was embedded in a cell full of white supremacists) that have popped up this season on The Americans, it was sort of inevitable that something at some point would tip him back over the edge. Was it also inevitable that the not-quite-kidnapping of his partner, Chris, might be the final straw that broke Beeman’s back? No. Were all the flashbacks with Chris outlining his playa’s guide to life a bit clunky? Sure. But the final scene of last night’s episode, when Stan shot a Russian agent (whose one crime was going jogging with Arkady on Mondays and Wednesdays) from such point-blank range that the bite of hamburger he was chewing shot out of his mouth along with his brains, was a shocking and visceral end to an otherwise less-than-thrilling episode.
The main problem seems to be Philip and Elizabeth’s separation, which, much like Stan’s breakdown, was precipitated by not that much at all. Here are two people who regularly sleep with others to get what they want, and yet Elizabeth, who up until not that long ago had her own fancyman on the side, suddenly can’t forgive Philip’s New York tryst with his former longtime love? Both developments feel driven by plot necessities rather than realistic character development, so it’s impossible not to side with furious Paige and poor desolate Henry and be really angry at the Jenningses for being so stupid.
The irony, of course, is that they’re the perfect couple. In the episode’s opening scene, when they had to go and ruin the kids’ picture-perfect American dinner of fried chicken by announcing their separation (as a child of divorce, I can tell you Henry will never want to eat KFC again), even their responses to Paige’s questions were perfectly synchronized. These are two people who can work together in perfect harmony, who clearly think the same way after years of working as a team, and who have real feelings for each other. The idea that they’d disrupt their children’s lives out of one case of deception just doesn’t ring true.
Also ironic: that the Jenningses would spend practically the whole episode trying to learn whom the FBI were targeting when that information was openly discussed by Agent Gaad at the Beemans’ party, and that if P and E had spent more time creeping and less time worrying about the consequences of their breakup (Paige’s sullen face, Henry staring into a glass of Kool-Aid, Mrs. Stan observing Philip leaving) they might have had a much easier time of figuring out that Arkady was in trouble.
Olivia counsels Doyle and his fourth ex-wife on how best to deal with kidnappers. Photograph by Danny Feld/ABC.
This was, in my opinion, one of the best episodes of Scandal thus far. It had the dizzyingly fast dialogue and plot development, but it also had real emotional heft and a theme that resonated throughout all the storylines with more depth than usual. There was also some unusual character interaction—Quinn and Doyle, Abby and Harrison, FLOTUS and El Prez—that draws on the complicated relationships the show has been building over the course of both seasons. To the recap!
“Why is the devil our client?”
The case of the week involves none other than Hollis Doyle, who shows up at HQ with his fourth ex-wife and a tape of his only daughter saying she’s been kidnapped for a ransom of $20 million. I immediately think she’s scamming him for money, and hey! Doyle agrees with me. “That there is nothing more than the fruits of six years of film school, acting class, scene study, and whatever the hell else Maybelle wanted to take,” he tells Olivia. His ex is horrified, but Maybelle has been in and out of rehab multiple times and Doyle wants some proof she’s not just extorting him. Which they eventually get in the form of an ear delivered to HQ. Doyle immediately agrees to pay, and we finally see some humanity under the deep-fried batter of his personality in a nice scene with Quinn. She’s upset Olivia took on the man who ruined her life as a client, but Olivia says, “Even the devil loves his kids.” Quinn buries her ire under her gladiator suit, but when she comes upon Doyle crying by the window, she seems to gain some sympathy.
The Dream Team manages to retrieve Maybelle and take her to the hospital, and she tells them her ex-boyfriend kidnapped her. But then Huck figures out by the “frayed edge” of the ear they left just chilling on the conference table that Maybelle cut off her own ear (grosss) and is preparing to flee the country with her haul. They intercept her and sit her down for a talking-to. Il Papa is in fine form. “Poor little rich girl,” she tells Maybelle. “Whatever sad cliché you’re holding on to, it doesn’t matter—nobody feels sorry for you. You’re being offered a do-over. No one gets that. If you don’t take it, you’re not just spoiled and selfish, you’re stupid.” Doyle offers Maybelle a choice: the $20 million or a relationship with her family. She takes the money.
Cyrus prematurely celebrates a win against Olivia. Photograph by Richard Foreman/ABC.
Welcome back, Scandal fans. After a few weeks off, the show returns with as many impassioned speeches, complicated relationships, and layers of intrigue as ever. To the recap!
This episode we see Olivia Pope making a welcome return to full crisis-solving mode. The case of the week centers on Sarah Stanner (played by Lisa Edelstein, a.k.a. House’s Dr. Cuddy) who is rumored to have had an affair with Murray Randall, whom El Prez has just nominated to the Supreme Court, when he was her professor in law school while both were married. The story blows up in very Scandal-ian fashion, with Sarah’s 13-year-old daughter, Annie, going to the front door of their house expecting the pizza delivery guy and instead finding a cavalcade of reporters brandishing microphones. Enter Il Papa, who’s dispatched by a friend of Sarah’s but who is also feeling some pressure from Cyrus, who wants the situation handled in order to get back into El Prez’s good graces. Interestingly, when the Dream Team walks in, Sarah immediately holds her hand out to Abby, saying, “You must be Olivia Pope,” to which Il Papa snaps, “Actually, I’m Olivia Pope.”
Nina (Annet Mahendru) and Stan (Noah Emmerich) in their cozy Eastern Market debriefing room. Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn for FX.
It was sort of inevitable that The Americans, a show that says it’s fundamentally about marriage but is really about the conflict that happens when you get it on with a coworker, would start wrestling with what I like to call the Meredith and Derek Paradox right in the middle of its debut season. Named after two characters from Grey’s Anatomy (whose romantic ups and downs took up the best part of eight years before they were finally allowed to be happy together), the Meredith and Derek Paradox rules that no matter how much an audience might be invested in characters and rooting for them to have functional relationships, they cannot do so because a love life that is all smooth sailing makes for bad television.
The Americans, which turned normalcy on its head by starting with a married couple who subsequently fall in love with each other, is dealing with this problem by throwing a new wrench into Philip and Elizabeth’s relationship each week. In episode three it was Gregory, in five it was a sadistic contractor, and in six it was the Jenningses being kidnapped and tortured and wondering who’d given up whom first. Last week there was Irina, who begged Philip to run away to Canada with her, and about whom he lied to Elizabeth at the end of the episode. Now, thanks to Granny, Elizabeth knows the truth and has somehow decided that this means the absolute end to any genuine feelings of affection between her and her husband in name only.
It’s a little sloppy as plot development. For one thing, Elizabeth has no reason whatsoever to trust Granny and should be savvy enough to figure out that the KGB wins by keeping her and Philip suspicious of each other. For another, there’s been genuine affection between the two of them for the past several weeks, and that kind of thing is impossible to just shut off. But Philip’s pronouncement at the end of the episode that they both live in a modern country and there’s no reason for them to stay married to each other if they don’t want to be was a fascinating trump card to play. Elizabeth, who responded to it by going into her children’s bedrooms and tearfully watching them sleep, is clearly more invested in keeping her family together than she’d like to be.
Scandal fans, mark your calendars: Il Papa herself, Kerry Washington, will be in Washington to deliver the commencement address for George Washington University on the Mall on Sunday, May 19. Washington graduated magna cum laude from GW in 1998 and will receive an honorary degree from the institution in addition to addressing the crowd of gladiators in gowns. In a press release, GW president Steven Knapp said the Django Unchained actress “has captured the imagination of our students, and they will benefit greatly, as they head out into the world, from hearing her perspective both as an alumna and as a highly successful actor on stage, in film, and on television.” The press release failed to mention whether Tony Goldwyn will be making an appearance to stare at her creepily from afar.
This is not really what travel agents (or 45-year-old women) look like. Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn for FX.
Ah, Solidarnosc. You were as much a part of the 1980s as Madonna, androgyny, and Paige’s 16 pairs of legwarmers. I remember you from my ninth-grade history lessons much the same way I remember perestroika and glasnost—as concepts to be cherished, recalled only in the vaguest terms, and filed alongside obscure Olympic medal winners in the brain for future games of Trivial Pursuit.
Luckily for peace and freedom, Lech Walesa was never framed as a brutal rapist by two members of the KGB posing as American travel agents at a conference in New York. In last night’s episode of The Americans, Philip took the spotlight when he traveled to NYC and staged an elaborate mission to undermine a Polish national hero attempting to set up an opposition to the communist government while in exile. The twist was that his partner in crime was his ex-lover, Irina, whose photo he ripped up when he was first introduced to Elizabeth, and who dropped quite a bombshell on him during their Big Apple trip—that she’d borne his son all those years ago (despite the fact that the actress who played her, Marina Squerciati, is maybe 29 at most).
She’s a clever one, that Claudia. Not content with kidnapping and torturing the Jenningses in episode six, she’s now attempting to turn them against each other by reuniting Philip with an old flame, a fact that makes Elizabeth distinctly nervous (hence the legwarmer hyperbole and the hiding of the remote control from Henry). In the car, she attempts to talk to Philip about the fact that not only do the KGB not trust the two of them, but they now don’t trust each other. But he brushes off her concerns and hops on the northbound Amtrak.
Elizabeth doesn’t have all that much to do in this episode, save sporting a vampy black wig and purple eyeshadow and embodying the very definition of a ball buster. She busts in on “Sanford,” a potential source, while he’s in the men’s room at a casino, and figures out he’s heavily in debt, which is compromising his role as a replacement for “Adam.” More to the point, he seems immune to her threats, saying, “Just put me out of my misery. I’m dead already.”
Elizabeth also has to face Claudia after rearranging her features last week, and Claudia doesn’t seem to be in a forgiving mood (the shiner probably doesn’t help). She does offer a cursory apology, which E rebuffs, saying she wishes she’d have killed her when she had the chance. “Better luck next time,” says Claudia grimly, before revealing E’s real name—Nadiesta (or Nadia?).
We finally get to see Matthew Rhys speak Russian in flashbacks, and the voice lessons must have paid off because he sounds to my inexpert ear as authentically Slavic as they come. Young Philip’s thrilled to tell young Irina he’s been selected for an elite position (presumably to come to the US as a spy), and he doesn’t seem to realize this means the end of their affair. Flash-forward to the 1980s present, where Irina, wearing a sassy red dress, tells Philip he’s as handsome as ever. They briefly discuss their target, who’s described as a potential “fuse that lights the Polish street” and sparks revolution against the USSR, before ending up in bed together.
These guys are Russians pretending to be Americans torturing a Russian pretending to be American. Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn for FX.
It was almost inevitable that this would happen—that the Jenningses would eventually be caught up with by Claire Danes, who’d transport them to Abu Nazir’s warehouse in Chantilly and waterboard them in between soccer games and sexual liaisons with loose-lipped technology executives.
What’s that you say? This didn’t happen? I’m confusing The Americans with Homeland? Either two pages got stuck together in my recap notebook, or all this talk or moles and torture and abductions of fake CIA agents has left me dazed and confused, like Paige’s wannabe abductor after Henry walloped him on the head with an imported beer. Last night’s episode, titled “Trust Me” after Stan’s many professions to Nina that everything is going to work out just fine and in no way is she going to be shipped back to Moscow in various empty tea caddies, was solid, but the minute our erstwhile spies Philip and Elizabeth got taken into custody, it was inevitable that we’d discover it was their own side torturing them.
Why’s that, you ask? Because it would quite simply ruin the show if the Jenningses were forced to go work for the Americans this early on in the first season. For proof I refer you to season two of Homeland, in which the truth about Brody was revealed far too soon, forcing the writers to turn to ever more ridiculous ways to amp up the suspense for the remaining ten episodes (hello, Gettysburg stormtroopers). So it was a given that Claudia was lurking somewhere in the shadows while Philip was having his head dunked in a tank of icy water and Elizabeth was locked in a room surrounded by photos of her children, like a Carrie Mathison mood board if she were into stalking kids, not terrorists.
The most interesting thing about P and E being held in captivity was how everyone who interacts with the pair in this show seems to assume Philip is the stronger of the two—even the KGB, who you’d think would know better at this point. For example: He is subjected to hours of being beaten with a taped-up phone book while all she gets are fuzzy photos of Paige and Henry, as if her maternal instincts weaken her as an operative. It’s entirely possible that they do, of course, but given the rage in Philip’s eyes when the fake FBI agent with the cigars brought up the “debate” over his non-Russian-speaking children, I’d be inclined to peg him as the more susceptible of the two to emotional torture. By contrast, Elizabeth kneed her attacker repeatedly in the groin while he was trying to detain her in her home and beat Claudia almost to death while screaming, “I’m going to kill you, you stupid bitch.” She’s a lot of things, but weak isn’t one of them.
Keri Russell in a trunk. Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn for FX.
Between the zavarka, Stan’s marriage, and Philip’s fury at the scars on his wife’s back, there was a lot more than tea brewing in last night’s episode of The Americans. “I won’t say this job is twice as hard for women, but it’s something close to that,” says Claudia to Elizabeth, just a few minutes before we see literal representation of this when E is forced to clamber gracefully between car trunks like Catwoman while her partner gets to smoke cigarettes and pick up doughnuts.
One of the most interesting elements of “Comint” was the way it made Philip look slightly feeble in comparison to his wife, who literally closed the episode with a bang, not a whimper. Things open with Elizabeth in possibly her mousiest disguise yet, acting as a DoD security agent interviewing someone on the ballistic missile program who’s still grieving his late wife of 30 years. She left it as long as she possibly could out of respect, she tells him, and she seems troubled by his loss. But this is no ordinary fishing expedition: The man is a KGB mole who’s “spinning,” in the FBI’s words, or has the “jitters,” in the KGB’s. E quickly susses out that an idiot (a “trustworthy idiot,” perhaps) could break him without too much effort, eliminating their best inside contact in the program.
The FBI surveillance team are using new encryption on their radios, so the nice KGB boss at the Russian embassy can’t reach his contact to reassure him. Claudia tells E and P they need to find a way to get the codes to resume communications, but things get complicated when the grieving agent calls his boss from a payphone in Bethesda and tells him he feels like he’s standing on a diving board at the edge of a pool with no water in it. Somehow, this pure poetry tips off the FBI, who zero in on an opportunity. So Stan, when he isn’t driving Philip to work after racquetball and somehow irritating Elizabeth by reminding her she doesn’t have the luxury of downtime, has to find Nina and persuade her he’s a wall that’s protecting her and she has to use her feminine wiles to get intel for him.
Of course, that’s not something Stan will ever admit he did, hence his faux outrage when Nina told him what she did to get the information about the agent with the jitters (thank goodness for the tea, is all I’ll say here—this is a family publication). “I never said that, Nina. Jesus. I wouldn’t,” he claims, but Nina knows better, obviously. Stan’s intriguing relationship with Nina is getting more complex, despite the fact that his negligee-wearing wife is getting the cold shoulder at home. None of this makes me feel any better about Nina’s long-term prospects for survival as a character, especially when Stan starts talking about her future (inevitable doom in a show like this one).
If Olivia looks sad it’s because her ex-boyfriend is the actual worst. Photograph by Danny Feld/ABC.
This week the Dream Team play Cupid for an aspiring politician, and El Prez continues on his moody, alcoholic downward spiral. Props to the makeup artist for managing to make Tony Goldwyn look so haggard and hungover—or maybe to the set designer for putting real whiskey in that decanter? To the recap!
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
The case of the week involves finding a fake wife for gubernatorial candidate Will Caldwell (hey, it’s Joan’s horrible husband from Mad Men!), a member of the Caldwell family, one of the “dirtiest political dynasties in American history,” as Abby refers to them. “We do that?” asks Quinn in a mildly amusing fashion. Will’s senator big brother (hey, it’s Daniel from Ugly Betty!) solicits Olivia’s help to find his brother a lady because he hasn’t dated in, like, a decade, and his conservative donor base is starting to think he’s gay. So they audition a bunch of women and finally settle on one with whom Will seems to have some chemistry (leading Harrison to shoehorn in “Boom goes the dynamite”). Except Abby catches her on the way to the elevator and tells her to make sure she knows what she’s getting into. “Your life won’t be yours because they bought you,” she tells Potential Wife #1. “And they’re gonna want what they paid for.” Turns out Abby’s ex-husband—the one who beat her—was a politician, and Abby (who has certainly showed consistency in terms of advocating for women) couldn’t stand by and watch someone walk into a situation she didn’t fully understand. Her speeech is enough to send the woman running for the hills—and to a reporter for the DC Dish—about which Il Papa is understandably pissed, but admits PW1 obviously didn’t have the stomach for the life. She dispatches Harrison to kill the story and goes with PW2, a pro-gun, pro-life kindergarten teacher. PW2 is a hit at the big fundraiser Will was preparing for, but his eyes are elsewhere, namely on his brother’s wife, with whom he’s been having an affair for years. O catches them kissing in the garden (at the fundraiser, which, c’mon) and, in the best moment of the episode, gets into serious real-talk mode with Will. He tells her what they have might not be much, and she counters, “You have nothing. You have a pile of secrets and lies. You’re letting your life pass you by; you’re a statue waiting for something that’s never going to happen, living for stolen moments in hotel hallways and coat closets. Stolen moments aren’t a life. You have nothing and no one. End it now.” Later Big Brother comes to thank her and reveals he knew about the affair the whole time. Also noteworthy: Early on, Olivia tells Will that she could take him all the way to the White House. Appears Il Papa hasn’t learned her lesson.
Freakouts and Flashbacks
In other news, Jerk Jeremy is being followed, and Huck has ceased to shower. JJ thinks whoever killed Wendy is after him, too, so Olivia tasks Huck—or, as we should probably call him this episode, Yuck—with keeping an eye on him. Turns out his tail is actually Wendy’s best friend, a mousy woman who claims to know who killed her. Yuck and Quinn manage to decrypt one of the files on Wendy’s flash drive and find information about the hostages mentioned in last week’s episode. Then Mousy starts flipping out at the TV, pointing and saying she sees the man who murdered Wendy. Turns out it’s . . . the CIA director, Osborne, who first suggested the presence of a mole in the first place. So now we know, I guess. And as to why Yuck’s not showering? Because of the waterboarding he was subjected to while being interrogated about shooting El Prez—and his PTSD is so bad he can’t even go out in the rain. After the rest of the Dream Team dances around the issue for a week, Quinn finally confronts him. “I used to live in a box outside the Metro, and before that I used to dismember people for a living,” he says. “I’ll be fine once the rain stops.” I still don’t like Quinn, but I do enjoy their weird, unlikely connection. Oh, also Abby and JJ occasionally bang—on her desk, in his car—though both claim it doesn’t mean anything. Uh huh.
