Scandal - Season 3 Episode 10 - Recap - A Door Marked Exit
Scandal - Season 3 Episode 10 - Recap - A Door Marked Exit
So ABC's Scandal is all set to go on winter hiatus, letting its audience finally take time off from the weekly barrage of unexpected plot twists and emotionally taxing revelations. The break is bittersweet! I'll be glad to get a short break, but I'm also hankering to find out what happens next to Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and company! Last week ended on a bazillion cliffhangers, and you'll be glad to know they're all resolved, so let's get right into it!
The episode opens with one of the most well-acted and beautifully shot scenes of the entire series thus far. We see the fight between Vice President Sally Langston and her husband Daniel Douglas Langston (guest star Jack Coleman). Decades of strife come to the surface here, years upon years of unspoken conflict suddenly becoming spoken. It, as we saw last episode, all leads to Mr. Langston being stabbed to death by the Vice President, and her phone call to Cyrus Bean admitting guilt. Cyrus goes over, filled with guilt and blame and worry. He pulls it together and convinces Langston to let the death be explained away and swept under the rug. There's a tense moment where Sally needs to put on the dramatics for the government doctor, but it seems like nobody's home behind her eyes. She snaps out of it just in time to stop the doctor from finding Dead Daniel Douglas with a big knifehole in his torso.
Mellie gets told about it. Cyrus's husband Jack gets told the heart attack story, but he's not buying it. Jack looks to Prosecutor David Rosen for help investigating his suspicions. Rosen says no, since Jack's last suspicion lost Rosen his career for quite a bit. Then, someone shows up to drop a bombshell on his desk: Voice recording of Sally Langston's frantic call to Cyrus! Oh geez! That's not going to end well... later in the season.
Over in the B-613 drama, Quinn made good on capturing Olivia's dad, Eli Pope (Terminator 2's Joe Morton). He's with President Fitzgerald Grant and and Quinn pulls out a tracker Huck placed in one of her teeth (yuck). Quinn takes little comfort from Charlie's embrace, leaving in the middle of the night to go confront Huck. Huck rejects her outright for her betrayal. She runs right back to Charlie. Not a lot of satifying conclusion here, but the back half of the season should make good on this!
Eli is going to be staying with Fitz for a bit while Olivia and her besuited gladiators search for Mama Pope. After last episode's realization that her mom was actually a real life wanted international terrorist. It turns out that Olivia's mom was an info dealer, stealing secrets from her husband to sell to foreign powers. It turns out that before the plane crash that everyone once believed had killed Mom Pope, Eli pulled her off to interrogate her about a bomb threat against the flight. Mrs. Pope fesses up to a bomb on the plane, and Eli has Fitz shoot it down. That's the full story, right? Nope! Mama Pope lied about the bomb. Eli ordered the deaths of 320 innocent people on a false alarm, and Fitz pulled the trigger. Oof. Small wonder Eli kept his wife locked up all this time. Mom's plane doesn't make it to Hong Kong, turning up instead with a dead crew and no Olivia's Mom. She's gone, for now (though the audience gets to know that she's still in DC). Eli returns to B-613, but he is not welcome there anymore. Jake has taken over as Command! Whaaaat!
This episode surely delivered! I was a little bummed to see Lisa Kudrow's character bow out of the season so early and not even return for the big winter finale, but I hadn't actually thought about her until just writing that sentence about it right there, so it really hasn't bothered me much. Usually, plots where somebody covers up a scandal on, erm, Scandal give it a little time before the plot is revealed, but this one with the Langston murder started to fall apart almost immediately, and now a prosecutor has evidence. Already! I'm so pumped for the show to come back, and I hope you are too, so check out this preview of the episode below okay?? Okay!!