TV REVIEW: It’s Just More of the Same in Scandal’s “Flesh and Blood”

By Chelsea Hensley

You guys remember Alias, right? Jennifer Garner was in it, and she wore a lot of wigs, spoke a lot of languages, and kicked a lot of butt. It was pretty good (until around the middle of season three). I’ve mentioned Scandal season three’s resemblance to the former ABC show before, and as the season approaches its finale, it only becomes a more fitting comparison. Well, “fitting” isn’t the right word.

Scandal is a boring – very boring – Alias. There’s hardly any spycraft, and Kerry Washington isn’t running across the globe on the hunt for Rambaldi artifacts. Besides the complicated family dynamics all we’ve got are some interludes with talk of explosive devices, some feeble computer hacking, phone stealing and stakeouts, but it’s not good enough. It’s certainly not good enough to devote so much time to it. Scandal isn’t Alias. It’s not even a spy show. It’s a political soap opera that wants to be a spy show without actually being a spy show, and the clash of those two concepts makes every episode that spares time to watch Quinn, Charlie or Huck do anything almost painful. Because “Flesh and Blood” picked up where last week’s episode left off and Maya’s bomb hanging over everyone’s head, the episode had more than its fair share of the semi-spy game Scandal‘s been playing.

Aside from the fact that the spy shenanigans are barely fleshed out and are a piss-poor representation of any kind of quality television intelligence operations, there’s nothing to actually care about. In the middle of all the death threats, killing and torturing, there’s not actually anything there. Maya and Adnan’s plans are unimportant aside from the fact that there’s a bomb involved, and some main characters lives might be threatened (but we know they won’t).  How we got to this point isn’t interesting, and Scandal doesn’t seem to be trying to make it so by sliding in some scenes of Maya and Adnan admiring a bomb trigger. It all lacked a distinct feeling of having significance. Not for a second did I think that anyone important to the show would perish, and when the biggest source of tension in an episode is the possibility of a bomb going off, it would be nice to care about said bomb and who its victims may be, but more on that later.

(ABC/Kelsey McNeal)
GUILLERMO DIAZ

Before the bomb became a big problem, “Flesh and Blood” picked up moments after last week with Jake storming into OPA and grabbing Olivia by the throat to inform her that she’d just killed the president. Despite ABC’s promo push replaying that particular scene over and over again, Scandal pretended such a thing never occurred. Oh, Jake’s warning about Fitz being in danger was at the center of the episode as everyone put their heads together to keep it from happening, but no one cared much that Jake choked Olivia. Not even Olivia who went about her interactions with him as if their only issue now is the decision she made to sleep with him to gain access to his phone.

But on to Olivia’s other unhealthy and annoying love interest. Most of us wouldn’t venture outside the security of the White House during a bomb threat (that only about eight people are working on stopping, by the way), but not Fitz Grant. It’s amazing that someone with so little self-preservation has managed to stay alive both politically and biologically. It doesn’t matter what Fitz ignores warnings about his career or his life because he always comes out perfectly fine (a perk of being POTUS I assume). He headed to Defiance to speak, but it was fine because Maya and Adnan changed the venue anyway. Then, Cyrus, having gained no sense of morality following James’ murder, allowed Sally, Leo, Andrew and hundreds of mourners turn up at a senator’s funeral despite knowing that the bomb was there and going to detonate. And Fitz? Sitting in the Oval Office.

There was only one real threat against Fitz this week, and it came in the form of Mellie. Coasting off last week’s epic slap and wandering the White House with a coffee mug full of booze, she asked a White House doctor about a paternity test for Gerry. For the few seconds that it was a viable threat, before Mellie changed her mind, it was exhilarating. Mellie’s been well within her rights to give up on Fitz since season one, and after having the relief she found in Andrew being snatched away by a husband who won’t love her and won’t let anyone else love her either, Mellie choosing now to give up on preserving Fitz’s political career felt right.  And since it felt so right, it couldn’t happen. Sure, we know for sure that Gerry was born of Mellie’s rape, but Mellie’s still holding onto this lie so nothing’s changed for her. Nothing’s really changed for us either since it was pretty much guaranteed that Fitz wasn’t Gerry’s father.  It would have been more shocking if he was, just as it would have been more satisfying if Mellie had gone through with her threat, but in the end we were just left with a stalled plot point.

(ABC/Kelsey McNeal)
NAZANIN BONIADI, KHANDI ALEXANDER, CARLO ROTA

Scandal loves its surprises and its cliffhangers and its big moments, but the longer the show goes on the smaller those moments become. For a show that’s become popular on its ability to test limits, defy expectations and shake things up, the show’s become very comfortable with its status quo. The bomb doesn’t feel like it matters when it’s not killing anyone but some recurring characters (two of which we’re not supposed to like that much anyway and one who we haven’t spent enough time with to care about). This is right up there with Billy Chambers coming back from the dead to be the mole as if it was all that satisfying to see a character we’d forgotten about take the rap for a big mystery despite plenty of regular characters who could have taken on the role and made it mean something.

Scandal‘s shocks and surprises only matter if you care about the people involved, and the further Scandal goes the less I care about anyone. It’s not as if this will have any lasting effects on anyone either. Mellie will be devastated if Andrew dies, but Scandal‘s proven itself unwilling to see her do anything more than run around the possibility of abandoning her post as dutiful First Lady. Just as it’s done with everyone else, retreading the same steps of previous seasons and ending up with nothing in the way of character development or inter-character relationships to show for it.

Stray Observations

• If we were looking for more proof that Scandal‘s spies are bad at their jobs, let us look no further than Huck and Quinn getting busy in the parking garage and missing Maya strutting her way into OPA where she attacked Rowan and left him bleeding for Olivia to find.
• “I don’t want you sleeping with Jake. It makes me crazy,” says the man who ruined his wife’s extramarital affair last week.
• Just because Sally doesn’t have the NAACP in her corner, I refuse to believe that means Fitz has a shot.

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