Welp, you just had your most disturbing episode ever, Scandal. What’re you going to do? Repent? Or try to full-court press this Jake and Olivia thing to distract everyone? Nice try, Scandal, but we’re not buying it.
More than any other show right now, Scandal brings up all these philosophical TV questions for me. Say you are an extremely successful showrunner. You have a story you want to tell. Your considerable fanbase appears to hate the story. Do you stick to your guns and ride it out, trusting your own judgment? Or do you cut bait and move on?
There have been instances of shows quickly cutting bait (the drop of the unpopular Kalinda ex-husband plot on The Good Wife, Shonda Rhimes’ own abrupt drop of Brooke Smith’s Grey’s Anatomy storyline). Rhimes, once again to her credit, is someone who puts up with very little bad behavior from her cast. Cross her, or do something she can’t forgive (badmouth her to the press, beat your wife), and you’re off her show for good in a quick plot twist.
This is a two-way street, however, so Rhimes is unfailingly loyal to some actors, even when they play some unpopular characters on her shows. Case in point is Joe Morton as Papa Pope, who had at least five too many diatribes this episode and my God, we were burnt out on them about fifty diatribes ago. Despite sinking ratings and bad reviews, Rhimes steadfastly refuses to diminish his presence on the show, even after the destruction of his B613 baby. (This show is making me talk about B613 again, an abomination that I will not quickly forgive.) Morton is a fine actor when he’s not eating the scenery for snacktime and probably a nice person, so maybe Rhimes likes having him around. But Papa Pope is just an awful character. He’s a twisty manipulator who has the same objectives as the most cartoonish of supervillains—power and world domination, apparently—so he will slit the throat of his pseudo-son without hesitation instead of having him settle for being “mediocre.” Y’know Ellis Grey gave Meredith a lot of shit for being “ordinary,” but she didn’t actually lop anyone’s head off. The man is a straight-up lunatic. And Olivia sits down and eats eggs with him like there’s not a 50-percent chance that they all have a Windex glaze.
Running a close second to Rowan/Eli in the problematic character category is Jake Ballard. As with Joe Morton, none of this is Scott Foley’s fault, a perfectly pleasant actor who Rhimes previously used to positive effect as Henry, the short-lived husband of Teddy on Grey’s. Get him in, have him charm the people, he dies on the table. Everybody wins. But Rhimes did not take that lesson to heart when she introduced Foley on Scandal, as a long-running obstacle to the Olivia and Fitz romance.
Like Fitz, like Rowan/Eli, like Huck, like pretty much everyone on the show now up to and including Olivia, Jake is a cold-blooded killer. He was one of Eli’s pet projects, we see in this episode, from B613. We saw him gun down James, for example, Cyrus’ husband, a guy whose only crime was knowing about the Defiance ballot box. Jake has tried to get out before: working with David to try to take down B613, escaping with Olivia to an island at the end of season three/beginning of season four. It never works. At this point, we’ve seen Olivia and her two suitors in just about every scenario possible. This season was especially egregious as Jake made creepy, stalky visits to Olivia’s bedroom in the middle of the night, and Olivia unhingedly spied on Jake and his wife-to-be through security cameras. Compounding all the ickiness is the fact that the two are basically de facto siblings now, under the tutelage of Papa Pope.