Enough with the face-licking, okay?
Last night left me with three big questions: Why didn’t Mellie tell Fitz about the rape? Did Harrison actually die offscreen last season, and this season he’s a Sixth Sense–style ghost that only Adnan Salif can see? Is Mama Pope conserving her energy for the final showdown or something? That bitch is always lying down!
It’s Fitz Family Fun Night at the White House! Remember their kids? They sure don’t. Everyone is gearing up for an interview that might not happen now that the surly, scowling teens are able to see their parents’ dysfunction up close and basically want no part of it. Gerry has a “Reston for President†T-shirt on the ready and is running an anti-Fitz Twitter account (complete with the very teenage comparison of his dad to Hitler and fascism), and Karen is a shrill vegan because no one knows how to write teenage girls. My mom would have wound up to smack me like Thor swinging Mjolnir if I ever screamed at her to get out of my room. Then again, Karen could have lit the White House on fire after she caught her mom giving a beej to “Uncle Andrew†(uuuuuuuch), so I’ll forgive the girl a few histrionics.
No one on this show knows how to have an affair — Fitz and Liv carry on in the windows of the White House, and the curtains in Mellie’s office are basically made of wishes, but she still gets a stand-up handy in full view! What happened to those Secret Service agents from the first season who were like, “Uh, sir, we have to erase your philandering from our recording every night, because we are always watching you dummies.†Mellie definitely doesn’t know how to have an affair, because she gets caught right away. How long did Fitz and Olivia carry on before they were found out? It was 29 years, right? God, I wanted Mellie to have more fun. Instead, she got about a week of fuckity fun times and a mountain of guilt. Fitz laid into her about not being sexual after giving birth to Gerry, and then blamed her for killing their marriage. Cue the Jaws theme, because they’re back — Fitz and his enormous, bouncy balls are back! Instead of opting for caring, compassion, and communication when his wife told him she didn’t feel sexual (after his father raped her) after the birth of their first kid, Fitz just grabbed a bottle of bourbon, said “Fuck it,†and decided she was a frigid nonentity. He thought that Mellie had been banging Andrew all along, so now he’s free to ride around the room like a cowboy on his exercise-ball-sized testicles, pointing fingers and laying blame. I’m not saying he should be able to guess that his father raped her, but you would think that someone who married a vibrant, happy young woman who suddenly turned into a twitchy, forlorn shell would at least push for therapy and get to the bottom of it. Not Fitz! He’s waving a hat in one hand, holding onto the reins with the other, happy to finally have a reason to forgive himself for his trespasses. Ride on, douchebag. Ride on.
Speaking of dysfunctional couples, Charlie and Quinn seem nice and normal, right? Torturing Ukrainian spies together, working for B613, getting into their own groove. The only problem is that Quinn keeps flirting with Huck behind Charlie’s back, and he’s a jealous psychopath with boundary issues. When she wouldn’t move into his place, he moved into hers without telling her! Quinn is being Single White Femaled by her own boyfriend. Are they setting her up to get murked? I don’t think she can go back to being a gladiator — not even the gladiators are gladiators right now. This is all going to end badly.
Let me also take a moment to blame the Huckleberry Quinn shippers for foisting this face-licking extravaganza on us. I swear this is your doing! The internet went wild for them as and begged for them to be a couple, which carried all the way up to Shonda Rhimes’s ears, and now it’s happening in the only weird, disgusting way it could. Look what you have wrought!
Liv and company are working to bring down B613 by trying to trace their funds. It’s not going so well, and in the end, Papa Pope offers this bit of advice: “It’s not funded by one group, it’s funded by them all.†D’okay. Thanks for nothing, pops.
Adnan Salif, whose name I am incapable of breaking down to its component parts, pretended to need protection from Pope and Associates, only to knock Harrison out with sex (and a vial full of drugs) and steal all of their secrets about the president. This woman shoots glitter out of her cooch and suddenly has everything she needs to bring down the government. Why isn’t she a member of the permanent cast? People should be chanting her name and building statues in her honor. Figuring out how she’s going to trick Harrison with her vagina week after week like a Bond villain is the only fun part of the show right now, and I love her.
Cyrus is the mess we expected him to be. He most notably tried to smash Jake in the face with a vase in the Oval Office and then tried to take Fitz out to get to Jake again. Apparently, grief turns you into Mushmouth from the Cosby Kids, because I had to turn on the closed captions to figure out what he was saying. Jake was done with his speech anyway, something about how the president is a figurehead who “looks pretty†while he really keeps the republic safe. He got Cyrus in a headlock faster than you can say command, eked out a quick “I’m sorry for your loss,†and then peaced out like a sexy, sexy jerk.
Karen was ultimately the one who told Fitz that Mellie was having an affair, when she tearfully screamed it at him while Liv was trying to talk the kids into doing the interview, so Fitz found Andrew and punched him in the face. I’ll allow it. In the end, it all works out — Mellie takes Fitz’s hand, they wrangle the kids together, and put on a brave face for the network. Someone was even nice enough to grease up Baby Teddy’s severe middle part and plop him in Mellie’s lap! On the surface, they’re a big, happy family again, paddling like ducks underneath to keep it all afloat.
Leaderboard of Arbitrary Points, Week 15
+ Infinity points for the return of Ella! I know they made that cute baby run around Cyrus so we’d be sure he wasn’t at home sucking down pills or slicing his wrists open, but I feel like we all needed to see something that cute to cleanse the palette.
– 430 points to Andrew for his “glass houses†comment about Olivia when she caught him and Mellie. He’s right, of course, but ewwww, you just got here! Who do you think you are, talking to Olivia that way?
+ 8,900 points to Abby, whose snappy comebacks are giving me life this and every week. When Liv asked her to look into the Grant kids, she said, “Oh, are they funding B613?â€
– 15,000 points to Mellie for her comical gasping and clutching at her dress when she was caught cheating. That was unintentionally hilarious.
+ 300 points to Charlie for saying “Want me to kill him?†when Quinn mentioned Huck breaking into her apartment.
– 100 points to Mama Pope for calling Olivia “the help.†That’s just cold, even if it is sort of true.
+200 points to David for saying, “This is the last time I grant immunity to an enemy of the state†after doing so for Adnan Salif. Ha-ha, aw, David. No it’s not.
+1,200 points for making Papa Pope actually work in the Smithsonian now.