Scandal Season 5 Premiere Review - Mutually Assured Destruction
With the shocking (happy?) ending of the season 4 finale, it was no surprise that Shonda Rhimes hit the ground running with the season 5 opener of Scandal. For those of us that spend the entirety of Thursday evenings in Shondaland, it meant we had no chance to breathe until the clock struck 11. I mean, seriously, I think someone needs to do a study of the number of real life heart attacks that occur during #TGIT.
The Scandal premiere centered around a Princess Diana/Kate Middleton/Grace Kelly-esque storyline (heavy on the Princess Di). We meet Princess Emily, “America’s Princess,” who has a seemingly fairytale life, married to the Prince of Calidonia. In typical Shonda fashion, we get just a glimpse of this princess (enough to make us fall in love with her, too), before she’s killed off in a tragic car accident.
In the one scene where Princess Emily is alive and well, she has a pretty great run-in with Olivia and Abby in the bathroom where she overhears Abby talking about her.
Abby: “You know whose life I need? Princess Emily’s…She was a human rights lawyer, and now she gets to wear diamonds on her head. On her head, Liv.”
Olivia: “I think I’ll stick with being me.”
Abby: “I wonder what that life is like? You know, one day you’re a regular person and the next day you’re the most famous woman on the planet, and only because of who you’re in love with. Suddenly, that’s all you are…”
Side note: This, of course, is all foreshadowing what we have in store this season between the President and Olivia who have finally stepped out of the shadows into the sun. Well, sort of.
At this point, Princess Emily walks out of a bathroom stall, though how she and her poufy princess dress fit in there to begin with, I’m not sure.
Abby stops talking as Princess Emily emerges.
Princess Emily: “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to ease drop, it’s just people get weird when they see me, so I just, I was just going to try and stay in there until you left but then you started talking about me and I thought you’d want to know I was in there.”
These lines are delivered without a trace of anger or malice. Princess Emily’s earnestness comes through and you immediately feel for this girl. Abby apologizes and rushes out, and that leaves Olivia and Princess Emily. The Princess immediately recognizes Olivia, who apologizes again on Abby’s behalf, to which Emily replies:
“Oh, I’ve gotten used to it. For most of the world, I’m not a real person anymore. I stopped being a real person for people the moment the world found out I was marrying Richard. To them, I’m not human, I’m just a spectacle. And I don’t think they would say half the things they say if they knew they were hurting an actual person. Do you?”
This is our only glimpse of Princess Emily as a real, live person, but like I said, it’s enough to make us fall in love with her. Over the course of the episode, the fairytale that was her life unravels and we see a real girl with real issues – she was having an affair with her bodyguard, her mother-in-law (the Queen of Calidonia) had her murdered (of course it was the mother-in-law). And though the Princess was married to a man who was head-over-heels in love with her, she wasn’t happy. As the Queen states later, “He loved that girl. Worshipped her. Blindly. She could do no wrong where he was concerned.”
This seems both romantic and sad, and eerily echoes Princess Emily’s earlier words. After all, a woman who can do no wrong in the eyes of her husband isn’t a real, flawed human being either.
The moral of this episode seems to be “fairytales aren’t real and there is no happy ending.” As I mentioned above, I think we’ll see this play out over the course of the season in the relationship between Olivia and Fitz which, as the episode closes, is leaked to the news media with evidence this time in the form of photos.
I for one, really hope Olivia can kick her Fitz habit this season. She deserves better than Fitz, who though he has his moments, has proven himself a coward in every romantic relationship he enters into. He’s been a coward in his relationship with Mellie, though she’s always had his back in her own way. He’s been a coward with Olivia, continually regulating her to the shadows, making and breaking promises, and trying to tell her what she can and cannot do in her life and her job. And he was a coward with that intern from season one who he slept with and discarded (though she did get a golden retriever out of it, so there’s that), and who was then murdered, which he never seemed particularly torn up about.
So, here’s hoping that by the end of season five, Olivia and Jake have reunited. #TeamJake all the way, baby.
A few other honorable mention relationships:
I’m beyond happy that Quinn is back in the land of the white hats, even if hers is a little tinged and bloody now after traipsing through the dark side. Sometimes you have to leave the family to find yourself, and Quinn has really grown into her own which is great to see.
In one of the ending moments of this episode, Huck turns up on Jake’s door asking for his help, and that is going to create an interesting dynamic this season. Huck has relied on Olivia and only Olivia for so long to fix him, and she’s great at it, but she can’t this time. She’s battling her own demons (*cough cough* Mr. President), and her brokenness is preventing her from helping lead Huck back into the light. But I think Jake is more than up for this job. After all, he and Huck aren’t all that dissimilar. They are both B613 survivors. They would both die to protect Olivia. They both try really hard to be good (and fail at it a lot of the time).
Elizabeth North is racking up so many enemies it’s hard to know who will be her downfall this season, if she has a downfall at all. That woman is power-hungry and cunning, and she’s not afraid to destroy anyone standing in her way. Her vicious take-down of the First Lady was one of the best moments of the episode:
“First, let’s be clear. You did not do anything for me, you did that for you. You only ever do anything for your own benefit. Second, you didn’t take me in. I was your prisoner, I was your puppet, I was your bitch. Third, your payment, was that I got you elected. You are sitting in that chair, in this office, a United States Senator because of me. That is how I repaid you. Forth, one can only be betrayed if there’s loyalty first. I was never loyal to you, and you were never loyal to me. I don’t think you’ve ever been loyal to anyone. So, when I made my move on the ladder of political success all on my own, I wasn’t even thinking about you. Because you don’t matter to me. And now you also don’t matter to the most powerful man on the face of the earth. But guess who does. Me.”
I do miss Elizabeth North’s epic hairstyles of last season though. She’s growing it out and it’s all soft and wavy, which is in stark juxtaposition to her sharp and savvy personality.
Lastly, the Mellie/Fitz relationship seems to have finally hit its breaking point. Fitz served Mellie with divorce papers (apparently when you’re the leader of the free world, you get to serve your own papers). He was pretty much as vindictive as possible, serving them right after her swearing in as junior senator of Virginia, and delivering this particularly caustic diatribe after she says she’ll never sign, “You have so many qualities I despise, but I do admire your brilliance. So, do the math, Mellie. Fighting this, fighting me, will mean both of us deploy every weapon in our arsenal. Every lie, every secret…mutually assured destruction. We’ll be ruined. Now me, hey, I’m a war hero, governor, two-term president, my bucket list is done. You? Your biggest accomplishment so far is waving and smiling… You’ll sign.”
Mutually assured destruction will definitely be a major theme this season. Mellie/Fitz. Fitz/Olivia. Elizabeth North/the White House. I can’t wait to see who survives…and more importantly, who doesn’t.
Alisa Williams is a writer, reader, and parent to two 70-lb rescue pups. She serves as Spirituality Editor at SpectrumMagazine.org, blogs at AllyWritesStories, and tweets at @AWWritesStories.
