‘Scandal’ finale: Torture, heartbreak and a cynical restart
Spoiler alert! “Scandal” is the most cynical show on television.
No seriously, don’t read any further if you care about what happened on Thursday night’s finale but disobeyed the directive to watch it in real time. Because for weeks now, creator Shonda Rhimes has been warning her “gladiator” fans that if they missed watching the final five minutes in “real time,” they’d be kicking themselves all summer. One assumes she is referring to the big “What’s Up Doc?” rip-off of a final scene in which Olivia (Kerry Washington) is hustled through a braying pack of reporters, who have finally learned of her affair with the president, and into a waiting limo. There she takes one look at the mysteriously well-connected and dastardly man (Joe Morton) who has been behind pretty much every terrible thing, including two attempts on Olivia’s life, that has happened this season, and says, “Dad?”
Honestly, it was difficult not to laugh. “Dad?”
Other than that, nothing really happened in the season finale beyond Rhimes’ whipping everyone up into what has become a characteristic frenzy only to have them fall to the floor, dizzy and exhausted, but pretty much right back where they started at the beginning of the season.
Olivia and President Fitz (Tony Goldwyn) are off again and Fitz has once again returned, on his knees no less, to the dreaded Mellie (Bellamy Young). Cyrus (Jeff Perry) and his husband, James (Dan Bucatinsky), have likewise reconciled, despite the fact that Cyrus has been so emotionally and verbally abusive to James that if James were a woman, feminist groups would be picketing the show. The Cytron card that proves Fitz won the Oval Office by election fraud has been destroyed. Which means Fitz’s presidency is safe and he can run for a second term, never mind that he is The Worst President Ever. And all of Olivia’s employees are safe ‘n’ smug, having turned the once righteous and actual justice-seeking David Rosen (Josh Malina) into a scam-running, law-obstructing, card-carrying gladiator.
Does it bother anyone but me how proudly Olivia, her team and indeed, the show’s fans, throw around the word “gladiator”? Just as if he original gladiators were warriors, rather than slaves forced to fight each other, often to the death, for the blood lust of the Roman masses.
But perhaps it’s fitting; for a show that purports to be about a crisis manager, a lot of blood is spilled in “Scandal,” and in a way that can be described only as cavalier. Torture, which has put shows like “24” in the critical cross-hairs, has become a light-hearted motif of “Scandal,” inevitably accompanied by a bouncy soundtrack. In the finale, when Huck (Guillermo Diaz) was unable to torture the man the team suspected had the Cytron card (a gadget, it must be noted once again, that would have given the American public an Important Truth about corruption in their government), young Quinn (Katie Lowes) snatched the power drill from his hand and joyfully set to work. Even Dexter feels bad about his penchant for pain. Ol’ Quinn, on the other hand, was last seen tripping out like she’d just won the Lotto.
Because torture is now something Americans do on a regular basis, or at least those who work for Olivia Pope, a woman who, with absolutely no irony whatsoever, accepted Rosen’s gift of a white hat.
A white hat, for a woman who condones torture, who regularly wiretaps people’s phones and hacks into their computers. Who will do anything to support an illegitimate presidency and continues to love (albeit now heartbroken and from afar) that president even after learning that he recently murdered a cancer-riven Supreme Court justice. A white hat for a woman whose best friend proudly admits to lying, cheating and killing to get where he wants to be, a woman who believes there is no good or bad, just the best interest of the client.
She’s not a gladiator. She’s a Roman emperor. They wore a lot of white too.
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