Welcome back, Gladiators. I hope you enjoyed the Scandal break half as much as Olivia and Fitz did, seeing as how they’ve been doing it nonstop in secret ever since the president kicked Mellie and Cyrus to the curb.
Unfortunately for them (and Princess Emily), real-life fairy tales don’t have happy endings. Fitz and Olivia’s secret love is forced into the open against their will, and it promises to unleash all sorts of fresh hell as Scandal season 5 kicks off.
The Divorce
Mellie gets sworn in as a U.S. Senator, and at first Fitz’s new chief of staff Liz North convinces him not to attend. However, Olivia urges him to go to help make things appear normal since they’re keeping their relationship a secret, even from Abby.
Fitz attends, but afterwards he asks Mellie for a divorce. He basically threatens her to sign the papers, otherwise he’ll expose her role in those dead jurors from the end of last season.
Mellie runs to Cyrus, urging him to get his old job back and talk Fitz out of doing something as stupid as divorcing her. Meanwhile, Liz and Abby finally figure out that Olivia and Fitz are sleeping together, something neither of them is particularly happy about.
Fitz and Olivia Exposed
By the end of the episode, Fitz is ready to go public with his relationship with Olivia, but she’s not. She doesn’t want to become a spectacle and a news story, she wants to let their love grow naturally in private before making any big moves. Fitz agrees.
But the choice isn’t his. The season 5 premiere with Sally Langston airing Fitz and Olivia’s dirty laundry on national television, telling the world that Fitz’s marriage to Mellie is a sham and he’s secretly having an affair with Olivia Pope. She even has photos from inside the White House to prove it. So much for keeping it a secret.
Huck Is Broken
Quinn is now the only employee at OPA because Huck is hiding out at Olivia’s apartment, ashamed of murdering all of those jurors. He begs Olivia to help fix him on the inside, but she can’t. Instead, Huck goes to Jake Ballard for help since he knows a thing or two about what Huck is going through.
A Royal Tragedy
Fitz throws a state dinner for the royal family of Caldonia. Princess Emily is an American girl who married Prince Richard, living out a fairy tale fantasy (and I can only assume it’s also a shout-out to Gilmore Girls since Lorelai’s parents were named Richard and Emily). Fitz also has an ulterior motive for the dinner, trying to get the queen to agree to opening a U.S. naval base on Caldonian soil.
Olivia quickly realizes she and Princess Emily are the same. Emily was a civil rights lawyer, but now people only think of her as the woman in love with a powerful man, feeding into Olivia’s fears that if she and Fitz go public, she’ll become nothing more than a scandal. After the party, Princess Emily dies in a car crash in a tunnel, taking a page from Princess Diana.
Who Killed the Princess?
Olivia goes to work managing the crisis, enlisting Quinn to buy back all of the photos of the dead princess so they don’t get published. They figure out that one of the paparazzi was actually a hacker who caused the crash.
It turns out Emily was having an affair with her bodyguard, leading Olivia to assume that Richard had her killed. She wants justice, but Fitz wants to let it go because accusing him would derail his naval base.
When Olivia finds out Princess Emily was pregnant, she takes her theory to the queen. However, in a rather expected twist, the queen was the killer all along, having Emily killed because she knew about the baby and since it wasn’t Prince Richard’s, the queen didn’t want that child becoming the heir to the throne. I assume the queen’s personal hero is Cersei Lannister.
In the end, Olivia gets justice by telling Prince Richard about what his mother did and he forces the queen to abdicate her throne so he can rule. That’s good news for Olivia, but bad news for Fitz since the prince is even more opposed to the naval base than the queen was.
It should be a bumpy season and, in true Scandal fashion, the show isn’t afraid to go into overdrive on the plot. Instead of giving us a few episodes or even half a season of Olivia and Fitz happily sneaking around, they’re love has been exposed and the fallout should be crazy.
(Image courtesy of ABC)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
John watches nearly every show on TV, but he specializes in sci-fi/fantasy like The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood. However, he can also be found writing about everything from Survivor and Glee to One Tree Hill and Smallville.
