Quinn Perkins is dead! At least, that’s what Scandal would like to have us believe.
The last ever midseason resummation of the series picks up not too long after the previous episode, where Olivia had gambled with the life of her friend in the high stakes game of chicken that she had engaged in with her father. Rowan called Olivia’s bluff then and purportedly shot and killed Quinn off screen.
The Loss of Life
“Robin” kicks off with Rowan driving a stolen car into an abandoned lot. He opens the trunk and takes a moment to stare down at what is within it. We catch quick glimpses of bruised legs and a bloodied lace dress before Rowan reaches for a metal can and upends it to douse the body with gasoline. He lights a match and tosses into the trunk. As it burns, he makes a phone call to report the fire and then walks away before the entire car explodes.
The following morning at QPA, David Rosen shares with Olivia and the gladiators that the Metropolitan Police Department got an anonymous tip about a fire and that the body that was found within it has been confirmed to be that of Quinn. Her official cause of death is two gunshot wounds, one to the head and the other to the chest.
David has a folder full of documentary evidence, which includes photos of pieces of her burnt wedding dress and that of the now destroyed hairpin that Olivia had borrowed from the Smithsonian for her. Huck grabs the folder from David to comb through it just as Charlie steps up to ask if the baby had also perished in the fire. David confirms that it had.
Devastated, Charlie steps away from the others and Olivia follows close behind, asking him what it is that he needs. When he simply replies “Robin”, Olivia starts to tell him that she can’t give him that, but he interrupts to clarify that he was referring to the baby. She was going to be named Robin.
Ah, damn.
Upon that revelation, Olivia looks momentarily dazed as if she’s been clipped by a passing vehicle. She is brought back to the present when Jake alerts her to a visitor. Mellie has come to personally offer her condolences to everyone. After she offers to Charlie any assistance that he may need, Mellie turns to the rest in the room to proclaim that the person responsible for Quinn’s death to be a “monster”. (Eek! If only she knew the half of it…)
Olivia comes forward then to say that she will follow Mellie back to the White House because she knows that there are a lot of pressing issues that need to be tended to, but Mellie waves that off, telling her that she ought to take all the time that she needs to deal with her loss, make arrangements, and be with her family.
As Mellie departs, Olivia watches her longingly as if she wished she could walk out with her. Was Olivia attempting to use work to avoid having to deal with what happened to Quinn? She’s known for burying herself in work (and other distractions) when things get emotionally messy for her, so if she was hoping that her duties as Chief of Staff would keep her otherwise occupied, Mellie effectively eliminated that as an option for her.
The gang is later seen at a funeral home trying to pick out a casket for Quinn, but Charlie doesn’t feel like any of the options are right for her. He recalls a story that he had shared with Quinn about a mentor who had wanted his ashes to be loaded into bullets and fired into his enemies upon his death, and Charlie says that Quinn loved that story. Olivia, Abby and Marcus deduce that Charlie is suggesting that this be how Quinn is buried. While they all think the idea to be looney, Olivia agrees to having Quinn’s ashes turned into ammunition. (LOL! Who came up with this??) Upon receiving this concession, Charlie asks if Olivia would be willing to write the eulogy, and Olivia accepts, though her expression is conflicted.
Some moments later, Olivia comes upon Huck where he is deeply examining Quinn’s autopsy report outside of the funeral home showroom. Olivia tells him that she is heading home to start on the eulogy that Charlie asked her to write, and then she relays that Charlie wants to bury Quinn in bullets. Huck is familiar with the story and seems to approve of it, remarking that Quinn loved that story. (Ha!)
Olivia starts for the door upon the conclusion of this brief exchange, but she comes to a stop when Huck asks if Quinn had ever mentioned anything to her about a hairpin. Olivia is caught off guard by the question, and Huck goes on to explain that the antique pin was mentioned in the report, but that he doesn’t recall Quinn mentioning it to him. They, after all, had gone over every detail while planning her wedding, and this item was not one of those details. Olivia outright lies to him and says that she knew nothing of the pin. (Oh boy…)
Flipping over to Cyrus, he has been anticipating Fenton’s return from Montana, and to make things extra special, he commissioned the services of the chef from a Japanese restaurant that he enjoyed to whip up dinner. .When Fenton finally arrives, he does not look happy. Cyrus initially doesn’t pick up on his mood, excited as he was to have his boyfriend back, but he does make note of it when he goes in for a kiss. Baffled by his behavior, Cyrus asks Fenton for an explanation, to which Fenton tells him that things are over between them. Fenton then turns to walk out, a move that Cyrus thinks is part of some joke, but Fenton is dead serious. (Ut oh.)
We next see Huck in the morgue speaking to Quinn’s charred body. He relays to her how perfect things looked for the wedding that she never made it to, telling her that she would have loved how it turned out. He then tells her that he has every intention of avenging her death, vowing to go after the person who hurt her just as Quinn would and has done for him.
Retribution this way comes, folks. Hide your wife, kids and any persons named Olivia!
Elsewhere, Jake arrives at Rowan’s workspace with the delivery of his dinosaur bones. As he hands Rowan the accompanying paperwork, he says to him that he hopes the bones were worth it. Rowan replies that things didn’t have to end in the way that they had. Jake agrees that it didn’t, but then points out that Rowan made the choice to kill Quinn.
Rowan counters by saying that the choice was not his to make, that the power of what would happen to Quinn rested solely in Olivia’s hands. He goes on to state that he gave Olivia his demands and told her what the consequences were should she fail to meet them. Instead of ceding to him, she opted to test and belittle him. Rowan then tells Jake to go back to Olivia and ask her if keeping his dinosaur bones away from him was worth Quinn’s life. Jake points out that Olivia lost her friend in this, and Rowan replies that he himself lost his child. Like Quinn, Olivia is also dead. There are no winners here.
Nothing but bones.
So what is Rowan’s endgame here? Is it still to save Olivia from going further down a dark path, because if it is, this is one hell of a crazy way to go about it. Does he anticipate that Quinn’s death would push Olivia so far over the edge that she will decide that this life really isn’t the one that she wants for herself? It’s a rather extreme way for him to get the outcome that he wants, but then again, extreme is in keeping with how Rowan operates.
Grief (and Guilt) Makes You Do Crazy Things
Back in her apartment, Olivia is sitting at her dining room table and staring into the screen of her laptop as the cursor blinks on the blank page of a Word document. She is struggling to come up with something to write when she receives a knock at her front door. She goes over and takes a look out of her peephole and then shuts it with a long pause. (You know what this means.)
She finally opens the door and Fitzgerald is standing on the other side. He tells her that he just heard the news and he asks her how she is holding up. Olivia stares at him for a moment before she sarcastically replies that she’s doing great. Then in typical Olivia fashion, she lashes out at him, blaming him for what happened to Quinn. She says that if he had left when she asked him to and given her a chance to fix things instead of running to Mellie like a “child”, that what has happened could have been avoided.
Okay, pause, because no. What Olivia Carolyn Pope ain’t gonna do is foist onto Fitzgerald the blame for the bad decisions that she made. That’s what we not go’n do.
But I get it. She’s angry and Fitz is an easy target. He always is. After all, when you know that someone loves you unconditionally, you tend to say the stupidest, most delusional shit to them because you know that they’ll forgive you for it. This is especially true when you’re hurting and looking for a punching bag. It’s not right, but that’s human nature for you.
Olivia asks him why it is that he is at her front door, and when he replies that he is there because he is her friend, Olivia has herself a record scratch moment. She was like…
Of course, she isn’t done throwing pebbles at his head as she tells him that he is all kinds of things, but her friend he is not. She couldn’t even get that last bit out, instead pivoting to say that she doesn’t want him for her friend, that he isn’t good enough to be her friend. (Uh huh.) She goes on to taunt him for coming by with a bottle of alcohol and believing that they’ll just sit about and trade old stories.
Good and worked up now, Olivia proclaims that she doesn’t need him because she has AMAZING FRIENDS, and Fitzgerald sardonically replies that he can see that, “that” being the friends that he actually cannot see because Olivia’s tantrum-throwing behind is there all by her lonesome.
When I tell y’all that this response and Olivia’s stunned reaction had me rolling on the floor?!
Olivia is none too happy with him for pointing out the obvious, so now she’s even more incensed! With eyes flashing, she steps all the way up in his face, a snarl at the ready as if she’s going to inflict bodily harm, but what’s she really fitna do? It’s kinda hard to take her seriously when she’s out here looking like a chihuahua yapping up at a giraffe. What, is she going to bite his ankles? And it didn’t help that Fitzgerald was staring down at her as if she was an inconvenient yet tolerable piece of lint found lodged in between the cashmere fibers of his sweater.
Because she has no suitable comeback, all Olivia had at her disposal to do was snatch from him the whisky that he brought and slam the door in his face. She immediately works the top off the bottle and takes a desperate gulp of the drink.
LOL….this woman is a trip and Fitzgerald is King of the Unbothered. He needs to teach me his ways because after the last time that the two of them had a confrontation, I’d have chucked up the deuces and ignored her existence for the rest of my natural life. Bump showing up at her door to offer my condolences. She’d have been lucky to have gotten a condolence DM via MySpace, the brat! But with Fitz being Fitz, he’ll show up whenever he knows that she needs someone to lean on, even when the odds of her rejecting his overture are high. God bless him.
Over at the White House, Jake is walking down one of the halls when Cyrus flags him down to ask him if he had anything to do with Fenton breaking things off with him. Cyrus states that he’s been doing as Jake asked and staying in his own lane, but he suspects that Jake hasn’t shown him the same courtesy. Jake denies having a hand in Fenton’s change of heart, and then he continues along his way.
Later that night, Abby returns home to find Huck sitting in wait for her in her darkened bedroom. She is startled to find him there and asks why he has come. Huck hands her several sheets of paper that he brought with him, telling her that he looked into that unexplained hairpin that was found on Quinn’s body. He was able to trace it back to the Smithsonian and also determine that it was Olivia who had signed it out, despite her earlier denial of knowing anything about it.
Huck tells Abby that he believes that Olivia “did a bad thing”, but Abby is skeptical. She thinks that he’s jumping to wild conclusions based off of Olivia forgetting about a hairpin, but Huck tells her that it’s not just the pin. He proceeds to lay out other papers upon Abby’s bed, one of the sheets being a copy of Olivia’s phone records. He speculates that Olivia may have been the person with Quinn at the War Memorial, but Abby still finds his speculation to be crazy.
Huck further outlines other things that have made him suspicious, including how Olivia took over the search for Quinn when she went missing. Abby replies that Olivia’s reason for being around was because she was concerned, but Huck thinks it is because Olivia was trying to manage them in order to keep them from learning the truth. Abby remains unbelieving, asking Huck why Olivia would want to manage the search and Huck states that it is because Olivia killed Rashad and when Quinn found out about it, Olivia killed Quinn, too!
(Welp. So very close, Huckster, but then you veered left.)
The entire scenario is far too insane for Abby to accept and she orders Huck to stop with the crazy talk. She tells him that because he is grieving, he is grasping for answers and is therefore coming up with some out there scenarios. She tells him that Olivia did not kill Quinn, and then she instructs him to take all of his documents with him and trash them.
Whoo wee! Abby is in for one hell of a surprise when she finds out just how right Huck is. She may not replicate the detty slaps that Olivia gave her when Huck was missing, but she is sure to go all the way off. It won’t be pretty.
The following day, Fitz is sitting at his desk at the Grant Institute when his assistant pokes her in her head to inform him that he has the most unlikely of visitors. The woman tells him that a “Mr. Huck” is there to see him. (Huck??)
When Huck is seated across from him, Fitz inquires as to the reason for his visit. Huck explains that he has come because of Olivia, stating that the White House has changed her for the worse and that she has done some terrible things because of it. Fitz shares that he has already made an attempt at an intervention with Olivia, but that she wants nothing to do with him. When Huck asks him to clarify what he means, Fitz states that his return to Washington was for Olivia, but Olivia rejected his entreaty to choose a different path.
Huck is heartened by this revelation and his relief is palpable. Fitz is confused by his reaction, and Huck explains that Fitz seeing that Olivia is now a different person proves that he himself isn’t crazy. He had thought that he was the only one who noticed that she had changed.
Grateful for the confirmation, an emotional Huck gets up from his seat, prompting Fitz to follow suit, and he thanks the former President for his time before departing.
This scene was short, but boy was it pivotal! Who would have thought that there would ever be a scene between Fitzgerald Grant and Huck?! Given that these men are two sides of the same Olivia coin (in a way), them having this brief moment at this juncture of the narrative makes complete sense. Who better to confirm Huck’s suspicions about the change in Olivia than the other most important man in her life?
While neither man is infallible, both have respectively made it their mission to do and be better than they had been in the past. They are the two who ground Olivia, so it is noteworthy when they share the same concerns about her. Unlike certain other somebodies, neither Huck nor Fitz would ever encourage Olivia down the path that she is on now. Do you know why that is? It’s because when people love you, they won’t let you stumble head long into a fire when they know you’re going to get burned. It is those other people who don’t really give a crap about you who will encourage you further into foolishness. I ain’t naming names, but...
It will be interesting to see if this first meeting leads to further interactions in the episodes ahead.
Elsewhere in DC, Cyrus has showed up at Fenton’s office to speak with him since Fenton won’t return any of his calls. He wants to know why it is that Fenton has called things off, and Fenton explains that while he was away in Montana, he had his folks look into Charlie. He found out that Charlie used to be a mercenary for hire and that he at one point had worked for Cyrus.
Pause. How was Fenton able to find out any information about Charlie at all? Charlie isn’t the man’s actual name and he has no last name. Prior to working for OPA/QPA, he was a man in the wind, so how would Fenton had been able to have linked him back to Cyrus?
You know what? Let me stop asking questions.
Fenton is pissed that Cyrus know the man who tortured him with a bag of oranges, that Cyrus associates with murderers and thugs. Cyrus insists that the things that Fenton discovered are all old news, but Fenton doesn’t believe him. He tells Cyrus that the one thing that he has always been able to rely on was his instinct, and that his instinct is telling him right now that Cyrus is a bad guy.
Cyrus is taken aback by this assessment, but then in typical Cyrus fashion, he attempts to flip the tables and implicate Fenton of being a dishonest broker in his business deals. Fenton defends himself by saying that he has never rigged the game in his favor. (Ooo! Unintended indirect reference to Defiance here.) Cyrus then questions the gifting of the painting, and Fenton is reflective as he replies that he thought the painting was beautiful and that he had also thought Cyrus to be beautiful at the time that he had gifted it to him.
Upset now, Cyrus demands that Fenton admit that he is no better than he, but Fenton does not bite. He instead tells Cyrus that the difference between the two of them is that if he thought someone was trying to curry his favor with a painting, he would have never allowed it.
Well, shit. That relationship ended before it even had a chance to get off the ground. Cyrus’s past comes back to haunt him courtesy of Olivia and her sidekick’s shenanigans. If she wasn’t so busy covering her tracks with lies upon more lies, Fenton wouldn’t have encountered Charlie and Cyrus would have been having himself a grand reunion with his beau. And if Olivia hadn’t opted to assassinate Rashad and his niece, Quinn wouldn’t have been kidnapped and eventually killed, but you know, let’s blame Fitz for this one.
The Fracturing
It’s now evening and Olivia is still staring at a blank screen. She eventually starts typing random stuff, only to then erase it all. Over at QPA, Huck is in his office and staring at his toolbox. He gets up to caress it before the moment flips to Huck attending an AA meeting. He is telling the group that he has been sober for the past 6 months, but because his sponsor/friend died, he is feeling the urge to “drink” again. While the temptation to fall off the wagon is strong, Huck says that if he follows through with it, he won’t be able to live with himself. (For those who may not recall, Huck attends these meetings whenever he feels the urge to torture and kill, referring to this drug of choice as “whisky”.)
As he shares with the group his strong desire to have this drink, the scene is juxtaposed with that of him at QPA opening his toolbox and that of Olivia in her apartment knocking back glasses of Fitz’s whisky.
Boy is there danger around the bend.
Huck later returns to QPA following his AA meeting and he is in his office trying to breathe past the urge to “drink” when the sound of glass shattering from within the suite causes him to sit up straight. Armed with a gun, he goes to investigate who the intruder is. He makes it to the big office only to discover the the intruder is an inebriated Olivia. She is crouched down close to the ground, a white hat perched upon her head as she picks up bits of glass and puts them in the trash can. Huck lowers his gun to his side, but his finger rests lightly on the trigger.
Seeing him, Olivia explains that she came there in the hopes that sitting in Quinn’s chair would help her with writing Quinn’s eulogy, but that strategy didn’t work. A sob escapes from her as she struggles to her feet and says that while she was unable to find inspiration, she did find the white hat! She’s a hot ass drunk mess as she walks over to the mirror and examines herself with the hat on. She laughs humorlessly at her reflection before remarking that she remembers the hat being prettier. (Ah, Livvie. The hat was pretty back when the soul of the person who wore it wasn’t covered in soot.)
Taking off the hat and hanging it up on a rack, Olivia turns to Huck and says to him that they were supposed to protect Quinn because they’re gladiators and protecting is what they do. She then mocks herself and the gladiator mantra, calling the whole thing stupid. After a moment, she tells Huck that the gladiators in truth got eaten by lions and that they didn’t get eulogies.
Olivia reaches for the bottle of whisky that she brought with her and takes a swig before she goes on to state that the gladiators were not only entertainment for the spectators, but that they also happened to be food. She laughs at the irony of the whole thing, classifying themselves as “dinner and a show”.
Sobering, Olivia makes to exit from the office, but before she gets to the door, she turns to Huck and gives him a kiss on the side of his face just as Judas Iscariot did Jesus.
This display by Olivia was difficult to watch. Much like the glass that she was cleaning up earlier in the scene, the woman is now a shattered version of who she used to be. The once confident and sure Olivia lay mangled atop the heap of the bodies of her fellow gladiators, her father (the lion) having toyed with her for years before finally eating her whole and then spitting out her bones. Who is she now if she can’t save, fix or command anything?
The following day, Abby returns to the funeral home to collect Quinn’s ashes, but she can’t bring herself to leave. She had called David to come and pick her up, and he wondered why since she had driven herself there. Abby was having a moment dealing with the finality of cremation, and she was contemplating her own mortality and life choices. This is what kept her from driving herself back with the ashes.
She tells David that she wants a fancy casket with lots of flowers and that she wants her burial to be traditional. She absolutely does not want to be turned into a weapon. (LMAOOOO!) David in turn tells her that he wants a simple headstone that will read, “Here lies David Rosen, Chief Justice”. (Somebody’s aiming high, I see.) That’s enough to coax a smile out of her before they depart from the funeral home.
This scene highlights the desire of these two characters to have conventional (or close enough to it) lives versus the zany one that they are embroiled in now. The conversation ties back to one that David and Abby had at QPA where David expressed his fear that Abby may be the next one to go missing or end up dead (707). Then Abby had dismissed his concerns, but given what has happened to Quinn, she has given his fear further consideration. It’ll be interesting to see how (or if) this moment informs any that lie ahead for these two.
Later, Charlie and Abby are in the conference room pouring Quinn’s ashes into empty shell casings. Huck eventually joins them. This moment is juxtaposed with Rowan overseeing the unboxing of his dinosaur bones and Olivia dressing up for the funeral. Olivia is then seen staring out the window as Jake drives her to the funeral site.
Stevie Wonder’s “I’d Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” overlays these moments, casting a somber pall over everything. Nobody is happy, not even Rowan with his dusty bones.
The funeral is out in the woods somewhere and everyone has got the whole Quinn aesthetic going with what they have on. Olivia, Jake, David, Abby, Marcus, Huck, and Charlie. They’re all standing in a line when Olivia steps forward to deliver her eulogy, which frankly is weak AF. She has nothing prepared because she says she couldn’t find the silver lining or put a positive spin to what happened. She struggles to come up with something to say, and all she is able to offer is that “Quinn’s death is….awful.” (Yeah, no shit.) She looks at Charlie then and apologizes for being unable to add to that, and he tells her that it’s okay.
As Charlie steps forward with a gun loaded with the Quinn bullets, Olivia takes a step back and David says to Abby that what they are about to do is probably illegal. (LOL!) Charlie points the gun and fires as we flash to a Charlie Quinn moment (306). When it is Huck’s turn, we get flashed back to the time when Huck called Baby Quinn weird and told her that “weird is good” (103). With Marcus, the flash is back to when she used the tactic that Harrison had used on her to recruit Marcus to OPA (504). Abby’s moment is of when she told Quinn that she’ll help her with raising her baby (616).
David recalls a moment when he, Charlie, Huck and Quinn were sitting on the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial (418), and as he fires off his gun, he says, “Aleha HaShalom” (Hebrew for “may she rest in peace”). Jake’s recollection is of when he informs Quinn that Olivia is okay following her kidnapping (413), and Olivia’s is of the moment that she hands over the reigns to OPA to Quinn (614). She offers a “rest in peace, Quinn” before she fires her own bullet into the ground.
Death Becomes Her
Following the funeral service, Huck and Abby are sitting about in the conference room, with David next to Abby and Marcus standing by the entrance. Huck asks of Charlie’s whereabouts, and Abby replies that he went home. All of them fall silent again, and when Marcus moves away from the door as if to leave, Abby grabs her stuff to do the same. Huck and David follow suit, but Marcus is soon back with a bottle of whisky. (This stuff is popular in this episode.) They all take a moment to look at one another before they settle back down into their seats and get to drinking.
As they sit about sharing various Quinn memories and laughing fondly at her antics, Huck asks Abby if she called Olivia to join them. Abby says that she did, and David chimes in then to say that he can go out and get them all something to eat. It is at this point that Huck gets up from the table and departs from the room. The others wonder what’s up with him and Abby follows him to find out. Entering his office, she tries to coax him into rejoining the others, but Huck ignores that to ask her when it was that she had called Olivia.
Abby takes the question to mean that Huck is still hanging on to (what she believes) to be his crackpot theory that Olivia is behind Quinn’s death, but Huck assures her that he has let go of that whole thing as she had urged him to do. He presses Abby for an answer, and when she replies that she reached out to Olivia about an hour ago, Huck wonders then why it is that she hasn’t yet shown up.
We next get flashed over to Fitz opening the door to his hotel room to find Olivia standing outside of it!
Do y’all know how pivotal this moment is right now?! Think back to the last time that she showed up here. She was armed with a canister full of venom that she hoped would send Fitz packing. Then she restricted his access to the White House via Mellie, and just earlier in this very episode, she was offloading on him over something that he wasn’t responsible for. So, yeah. Her appearance at his door now with hat in hand is a 180.
Her gaze is directed downwards as she stands there in silence, unable to bring herself to look at him. Fitz watches her for a moment before he steps to the side and opens the door wider for her in invitation. Olivia doesn’t immediately make a move as she seems to be warring with whether or not she should step forward. Fitz patiently waits for her to make her decision, and when she finally does, she steps into the room and stands off to the side.
Fitz carefully shuts the door as if he’s afraid of startling her, and then after a brief pause, he quietly asks if she wants to talk. She answers no with a shake of the head, her body angled away from him, and she is still unable to look at him. When Fitz asks if she would instead like to sit, she again replies with a shake of her head. She struggles to hold her emotions at bay, but she’s losing the battle.
Seeing this, Fitz steps forward, but stops himself short of touching her. Olivia stands for a long moment as she seems to be having an internal debate as to whether she should or should not turn to him. She eventually capitulates and closes the gap between them before she drops her head onto his chest. Fitz brings his arms up around her and holds her close, caressing her hair as if she is at risk of falling apart if he dared do more than he already was.
The moment is reminiscent of when Fitz comforted her in “Rasputin” (508), a time when Olivia was holding more than one big secret that she knew would change the trajectory of their relationship. The one secret that was contemporaneously known was that she had gotten her father released from prison, and the other (which we learned in retrospect) was that she was pregnant. Fitz knew that something was weighing on her mind and tried to get her to share whatever it was with him, but when she couldn’t do it, he pulled her close and just held her.
In this present time, Olivia is again harboring a secret, this one unfortunately having a price point that was just too high. In her grief (and anger at herself), she lashed out at Fitz when he came to offer his condolences, but now she has come to accept the comfort that she had earlier denied herself. What’s sad is that she had to first be stripped bare and left broken before she could take this step.
...too bad imaginary AMAZING friends couldn’t provide her with their shoulders to cry on, but I digress.
While holding her, Fitz asks what it is that she needs, and it takes Olivia a while before she lifts her head from his body to respond. It is now that she finally risks a quick glance at him and says that what she needs is “just a night”. (Oh, word?)
There’s absolutely no way to misinterpret that request, and Fitz sets about giving her what it is that she says she needs. They start off slow, but in their haste to get to bare flesh, clothes are quickly coming undone. And just as things are getting interesting, the scene fades away. Damn shame. I was looking for pointers on how this grief sex thing worked.
In any case, Olivia’s appearance here is significant in that it seems to suggest that she is done playing in the dark. Recall that Fitz had told her the last time that she was there that she should let him know when the Olivia that they both recognize makes a return. Now, a version of Olivia has shown up; however, it is not yet clear if she is the one that either of them know. What is clear is that she has sought out the warmth of light (Fitz) in order to receive emotional sustenance. It remains to be seen what will happen from this point forward, but this feels like an important turn of a corner for her. Maybe.
Back over at QPA, David is leaving to get the food and when he gets to his car in the parking lot, he notices that Charlie was still sitting in his car. David knocks on the passenger door window to get his attention, and when Charlie rolls down the glass, David asks him if everything is okay. Charlie tells him that he doesn’t know where to go, that he can’t go back to the apartment because it is full of various items for the baby, including a huge playpen that Quinn wouldn’t allow him to help her assemble. He says to David that he doesn’t want to see any of those things right now.
At this, David orders Charlie to give him his keys, and the next day, David and Abby are seen working to take apart the playpen. As the contraption collapses, a flash drive that was hidden within it falls out. Dun, dun, dun!!! What could possibly be on it??
Elsewhere, Charlie has shown up on Rowan’s doorstep. When Rowan opens the door, Charlie tells him that he wants back into B613. He makes his case for why he should be accepted back, stating that he never asked questions or caught feelings and that he was a good soldier. Charlie says that he wants to return to the fun Charlie and not be the soft sap that Quinn turned him into. He doesn’t want to be the guy who can’t stop thinking about his dead wife and kid.
Rowan appears hesitant as Charlie speaks, and when he is finally done, Rowan is quiet for a moment before he tells Charlie that it may be best for him to go home and think about what it is that he is really asking for. Charlie allows Rowan’s words to sink in before he turns and starts away from the door. He only makes a few steps before the sound of a baby crying catches his attention.
Wait….a baby?!
Charlie turns back to Rowan and instructs the older man to let him into the house. When Rowan steps aside, Charlie quickly bolts up the stairs. In Olivia’s old bedroom, he finds a crib, and within it is a crying baby girl! (Since this is television, I’m just going to assume that this big ass baby is meant to be a newborn.)
Rowan certainly has some explaining to do. Now unless he has suddenly taken up babysitting as a side gig, there ain’t no good reason as to why Elijah Pope would have a squirming, white baby girl set up in his daughter’s old bedroom. Whatchu doin’?
Confused as to what is going on, Charlie turns towards the door right as Rowan makes his way into the room. Rowan tries to plead with him to leave, but Charlie wants answers! He holds Rowan by the chest and trains his gun at him as he demands to know whose baby is in the crib. Rowan is stone faced at this point, and before Charlie knows what is happening, Rowan makes an attempt to knock the gun from Charlie’s hand. He succeeds, but he doesn’t get far for Charlie is quicker, and he is able to maneuver Rowan onto the bed, where he gets to choking him!!
And the episode ends.
So, um, whose baby is that?? Is that little Robin? It better be little Robin because these writers are going to get a major side eye from me if they really killed off Quinn (which, btw, I don’t believe that they did). I mean, how are they going to kill off a young, pregnant woman when Jake Ballard’s useless behind is still roaming the Scandal streets? Riddle me that!
Since I’m all for shock and awe, how about they awe me by terminating a character who shouldn’t have made it past episode 222? I’m just saying…
But anyway…
This is the end of the recap/review of Scandal episode 708. The countdown to the series finale is officially on! (Sadz.) Share your thoughts about this episode in the comments section below or @ me on Twitter. Thank you for reading and see you all next week!
