Just for fun — as an experiment — I’ve decided to do this recap as a ranking, somewhat a la The Good Wife. In this case, it’s a Suck Index, although that’s rather blunt so maybe it’s just a Worst of the Week scale. Because everyone is bad, but who is just meh, and who is SINCERELY THE WORST? Let me tell you, it was a tough call. I may have punted.
15. Mellie
Mellie is not as rotten-to-the-core as she’s been in previous seasons — although she’s a bit put-upon for someone who has authored some of her own personal demise, like faking a miscarriage for PR reasons — and this week, she is Taking Action, as you can see by her power-red outfits. They are red like her beating heart and the heat of her lust. Mellie is going to SEX YOU UP. If you replace the word “you” with “Jon Tenney.”
See, Jon here was finishing up at a function when his car blew up, which the government suspects to be the West Angola Liberation Front (not to be confused with the Liberation Front of West Angola, which prefers to threaten people with uncomfortably long hugs and a relentless stream of clickbait titled things like, “Someone Told This West Angolan That He Couldn’t Sing. His Reaction Will Make You Applaud”). Mellie was so scared that he’d been blown to unhumpable smithereens that she had to run to see for herself — and then she clears the room and jumps his relatively intact bones.
Later, right when you think he’s going to tell her it’s Too Late, or Not A Good Idea, Mellie tells him that she pulled away from him because he chose the vice-presidency over her — I believe this refers to him dumping her at Fitz’s douchey behest — and then when Jerry died she recoiled from everything and everyone. She tells him that she’s experienced losing someone prematurely,without getting to say and feel and do everything you want to, and that it sucks. “When that bomb went off, I woke up. My body woke up,” she says. Translation: She wants to reap the veep. And I for one think Mellie deserves a harvest.
Fug the Show: Scandal recap, season 4, episode 9, “Where The Sun Don’t Shine”
So, apparently, now that the sun isn’t shining and thus no one can go stand in it, Shondaland needs to make a new phrase happen. Unfortunately, they chose “little bitch baby,” an epithet Connor spat at Michaela in episode two of How To Get Away With Murder, and which Olivia Pope picks up here and she and Cyrus use it in one scene approximately eight hundred times (give or take), always at top volume. I want to scream. Do the writers of those shows work in the same building, as with Vampire Diaries and The Originals? Because this feels like the most obnoxious inside joke. Why are you people so proud of “little bitch baby”? Are you twelve?
We begin with the fallout from Rowangate:
Special Forces has located the torture hole. Or, in clickbait terms, “When One Man Decided To Shut His Hole, You Won’t Believe How He Meant It.”
You’ll be pleased to know that Mama Pope looks exactly the same as the last time we saw her, despite spending so many moons living underground in a box. I would be SCREAMING for my prison-issue bologna sandwich, but then again, Rowan Pope probably poured $30-a-glass wine down a tube into her mouth, because to him that’s the cheap stuff. So she probably ate low-level caviar down there. And now she’s happy because she’s just sure Olivia will tell Fitz and Jake that they can’t keep her because she hasn’t been charged with anything.
Olivia’s response is basically, “Okay, then charge her, lock her up, and then KILL THE HELL OUT OF MY FATHER.” Mama Pope seems surprised by this. I can’t think why. Perhaps there were some ill-effects of Torture Hole, like common-sense erosion.
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