"Scandal" Recap: The One Where Everything Happens, All At Once

Lots of things happened on Thursday night’s episode of Scandal, most of them setting up for the big finale next week. In this recap you get two warnings: it might be hard to keep up and as unual WATCH OUT FOR ALL THE SPOILERS below.

In last night’s episode Rowan Pope joined Jake Ballard and the Gladiators in the search for a bomb, planted somewhere in Washington, while Fitz chilled out/was put under house arrest at the White House, putting him temporarily out of commission.
Elsewhere in the White House, things were taking a much more personal turn. Cooped up and alone, the First Lady is suffering some serious pangs of guilt. The Langston camp finds out that Mellie is trying to have a paternity test taken, but Olivia, being excellent at her job as ever, finds out and shuts down the whole thing. This means that it’s finally confession time for Mellie and she lets slip the secret of Little Jerry’s possible parentage. Liv is left shocked, but promises to find out the truth.

The Pope family is ruthless in their search for the bomb.

Click through to the next page for to read the rest of the recap.

Rowan has Dominic Bell, his ex-wife’s lover and partner in crime, kidnapped in an attempt to get info on the bomb in question. Once he determined Bell didn’t have the knowledge he was looking for, he gave Maya a call while engaging in a game of Russian Roulette. Her reaction was far from the one he was hoping for. “It must kill you to keep hoping, thinking that if I cared about him, maybe at some point I cared about you. Goodbye Dominic.” Well then. That complicated things a bit. Not too much though, since it turned out that Rowan really was perfectly capable of pulling the trigger, which he did, inside the Pope Associates office. This leads to Charlie, Huck and Quinn arguing about the proper way to dispose of a body. Tired of the bickering, Quinn takes it upon herself to get rid of the evidence, leaving both men in the dust. Hurrah for women in charge, sort of?

The tension then escalates into the most awkward/violent televised hookup ever (excluding anything on GoT, that’s just its own category) where Quinn and Huck go at it on the hood of a car. They’re so busy getting it on that neither of them notices Maya walking straight past on her way to the Pope Associates office. She marches straight in and orders Rowan: “Bring my baby home.”

Having ignored Olivia’s protest, Fitz and co. are now in Ohio, campaigning at a local high school and maybe (probably) putting themselves in danger. Fitz, Mellie, Olivia and Cyrus sit on a stage in a high school in Ohio, the tension high. Fitz does some not-so-sly, thougoughly gross flirting with Olivia, to which Mellie reacts with “If we’re going to die, can we do it now so I don’t have to listen to you two?”

Read on for the episode's big cliffhanger

Just before the POTUS takes the stage, Olivia receives a call from her remorseful father, telling her to evacuate the building immediately. Everyone makes it out safe and sound. And if you want a happy ending, you might want to stop reading at this point.
Olivia returns to Washington, to find her dad bleeding out on the floor at Pope and Associates, while Harrison, who finds Maya’s lair as well as what he believes are plans for the bomb, is greeted by none other than Adnan Saliff. Adnan confesses Ohio was nothing more than a ruse. Elsewhere, Jake and David Rossen discover that Maya Pope, clever lady that she is, orchestrated the death of a senator, in order to have Fitz conveniently at his funeral. So Jake makes the call to Cyrus, who in turn decides to keep it all on the DL – a dead Sally Langston means less competition come election time.

As we near the end of the episode, Mellie is seen tearing open the Big Scary Envelope of Paternity Results, whileSally, Leo Bergen and Andrew Nicholls each enter the church, oblivious to the danger awaiting them. In the episode's final scene, Maya activates the bomb, scheduling it to go off in just under sixty minutes.

Scandal fans out there definitely shouldn’t miss next week’s episode. The series airs Thrursdays on ABC.