Before "Scandal" returns from its two-month hiatus tonight at 9 on ABC, TV Lust recapper Lauren McEwen wrote a refresher to get you ready for tonight's episode, "Run":
After receiving news about Harrison's death from Quinn, Olivia and Jake begrudgingly returned from their romantic deserted island getaway. Though Jake and Olivia's original agreement was to handle their D.C. responsibilities as quickly as possible in order to return back to the island to stand in the sun whilst wearing white hats, that dream soon died for a number of reasons.
For one, OPA was in shambles. With Liv gone, Abby, Quinn and Huck went down their own messy paths. Abby took a job as the White House Press Secretary, where she struggled to be respected by Cyrus and Fitz. They even refused to learn her name, calling her "Red" or "Gabby," instead.
Huck took up a job at a tech store and had been making fruitless attempts at reuniting with his wife, Kim, and their son, Javi. That was, before he began secretly playing video games with Javi online and Javi tracked him down by tracing his IP address. As for Quinn, she was the only one who continued to try to find Liv. She finally managed to do so by tracking down shipments of some fancy wine, because living on an island off the coast of southern Africa is not going to stop Olivia Pope from having her French reds.
For the Grants, life in the White House had been ... complicated. Mellie did not take Little Jerry's sudden death well. She wore pajamas all day, ordering up huge platters of fried chicken from the White House kitchen and making daily trips to the graveyard to lay atop Little Jerry's grave. Fitz is alternately patient and harsh. While he felt that he must support the wife that he'd wronged for so many years through her time of grief. Mellie was not showering on a regular basis and the tabloids had gotten photos of the sweat pants-clad First Lady lying on the grass during one of her cemetery visits.
Slowly, Liv began to take jobs again. In order to bolster Fitz's new and increasingly progressive political agenda, Cyrus blackmailed Liz into getting a famously heroic (and secretly, incredibly dysfunctional), gun reform-supporting couple to the State of the Union address. (It was at this same address that Mellie pulled herself together and put on a dress in order to quell tabloid rumors that she was mentally unstable.) Shortly after Olivia finished that gig, she got a call from an old law school acquaintance named Catherine Winslow whose teen daughter, Caitlin, ran away after she discovered that her mother statutorily raped her boyfriend.
After Caitlin Winslow's body was found, Catherine was suspected of her murder. After some digging, the folks at OPA suspected that the powerful law firm that her father, Jeremy, worked for may have been involved. Quinn stayed on the case while Huck and Liv focused on other matters. Eventually, Quinn figured out that Caitlin was killed after she stole a folder from the firm. After an intense search for a locker key (which ended with Quinn cutting the key out of a dead girl's body), Quinn found the folder and discovered that it was full of photos of Olivia. Someone had been tailing her for months.
Olivia was shaken by the news that she was being followed, but as usual, she was more concerned with her family/man issues. She was (and is) still annoyingly in love with Fitz, but what she and Jake shared on the island was just so amazing, so choosing between them proved to be a complicated matter. Instead of dwelling on the problem, she decided to focus on what happened to Harrison.
Jake did some investigating of his own because he suspected Rowan was behind Harrison and Adnan's deaths. That investigation got put on the backburner when it became clear that Little Jerry was murdered by Secret Service Agent Tom. Blackmailed by Rowan, Tom accused Jake of ordering Jerry's death and Fitz seized the opportunity to illegally imprison Jake and beat him bloody, both for killing his son and sleeping with his girl. Because Fitz is mature.
For weeks after Liv's return to D.C, her friendship with Abby had been strained. Abby resented that Olivia left them all stranded, and felt slighted because both Cyrus and Fitz would have clearly preferred Olivia as press secretary. That all changed when Fitz endorsed Abby's abusive ex-husband (the one that Olivia beat with a tire iron in the past) for an available Senate seat. Naturally, Abby had something of a panic attack after she saw him and Olivia went rushing to the rescue, even though there had been weeks of open hostility between them. Eventually, Abby confronted her ex and ruined his Senate bid with help from his campaign manager, Leo Bergen.
Because Olivia is smarter than both of the men in her life, she figured out a fool-proof way to get Tom to confess the truth about Little Jerry's death. She hired a man to attack Tom in prison and pretend that he was acting under Command's orders. Furious, Tom admitted that Rowan was the one who told him to kill Fitz's son.
Fitz was disappointed that he didn't get to beat up Jake anymore, but he released him anyway. Jake, Fitz and Olivia try to hatch a plan to bring Rowan down. Jake initially wanted to kill him, but Olivia wanted to do this clean, which would mean telling the American public about B613. Jake decided to use the files that he had previously given David Rosen. Unfortunately, Rowan was one step ahead of them. Boxes of blank paper had been switched out for all of David's files and Rowan smoothly evaded capture. He later confronted Olivia for betraying him and for a moment, it seemed like Rowan might have actually killed her. Seemingly heartbroken, he left her alone instead.
Rowan was not the only evil "Scandal" man to have his heart broken in the first half of the season. After years of being cold hearted and ruthless, Cyrus Beene finally regretted one of his decisions. By dangling his husband in front of Daniel Douglas as bait, he inadvertently led to James's death. Lonely and depressed, Cyrus found solace in the arms of a handsome male escort named Michael. The problem was that Michael was actually hired by RNC chairwoman, Elizabeth North (aka Lizzie Bear) to spy on Cyrus. After the news broke, Cyrus decided to resign as Fitz's Chief of Staff rather than marry Michael to keep up appearances.
It was all a part of Elizabeth and Vice President Andrew Nichols's plan to force Fitz to go to war with West Angola. They spent most of the season laying the groundwork: Orchestrating fake terrorist attacks, feeding a rebellious Mellie lines about the impending war. They also hired a shady ex-cop who worked for Jeremy's law firm named Dan Kubiak to serve as their muscle. It was through Kubiak that OPA discovered their entire plot.
While staking out Kubiak in connection with Caitlin Winslow's death, Quinn runs straight into Huck, who had brought his Javi along as he spied on Elizabeth North for Cyrus. After they realized that the VP is working with Elizabeth North and against
Fitz, Kubiak stumbled upon Huck's spy van. He attacked Huck through the window and Huck was forced to kill Kubiak as Javi watched. There is no such thing as Take Your Kid to Work Day when you're a former assassin who works for a somewhat shady political fixer.
Reeling from everything that's happened to her over the past few years, Liv finally decided to let it all go and be happy. She refused to choose between Jake and Fitz and instead, opted to drink wine and dance to Stevie Wonder in her apartment with Jake. The fact that she was making that much progress should have been the first sign that something was about to go wrong. As soon as Jake turned around to prep the living room for some piano-top sex Olivia suggested, Andrew and Elizabeth's goons burst into her apartment and kidnapped her.
As the second half of the season begins, we're left wondering: Where is Liv? Where is Rowan? What is Elizabeth and Andrew's endgame? Will Jake and Fitz be able to work together? How is Mellie going to react when she finds out what Andrew is up to?
To everyone who thinks this season is "boring," I respectfully, but wholeheartedly, disagree.