Scandal Recap/Review: "Vermont is for Lovers, Too"

Raina Deerwater ’16/ Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
This week’s Scandal started where last week’s left off: with confusion, excitement, and Olivia’s (Kerry Washington) parents. Eli (Joe Morton) is keeping Maya (Khandi Alexander) aka Mama Pope in a weird B613 prison place and informs her she will need to be transferred. Olivia is clearly getting too close to this one and Eli needs to keep her away from that.
However, when he leaves the prison, she goes crazy. Not like “Oh, I’m gonna have an extra glass of wine” crazy, but full on bonkers. She starts biting her wrists. Yes, Olivia’s Mom, is eating the skin off of her own wrists, so much so that she bleeds profusely and has to be taken out of her cell. It was a really extreme way to go, and why did she have to have so much screen time?
Instead of being taken to the hospital, like what normally happens when someone eats his or her own wrists, Maya is taken to the creepy B613 hospital bed which looks like it’s in the middle of an abandoned warehouse. Eli visits her there, with pictures of their beautiful daughter, the famous Olivia Pope. Their conversation about their daughter reveals that Maya was behind faking her own death, and maybe more than we think. Does she know about B613? Does she know about all the scandals? Does she know that smartphones exist?

Unfortunately none of these questions are answered, and Eli still insists on her transfer. She is having none of that though, and when Eli comes back, he finds her gone. No one was really surprised by this. Maya wants to find her daughter.
Said daughter is busy doing two things: managing Josie Marcus’s (Lisa Kudrow) campaign, and fighting her feelings for Fitz (Tony Goldwyn). The former involves dealing with the fact that a laptop has been stolen from the Marcus campaign by the opponents. It turns out it was all a set up from Josie’s daughter (who is masquerading as her sister), Candy (Sally Pressman).
Pope and Co. find out about it and tell Josie she really needs to fire her sister-daughter. However, Josie instead takes full blame for the situation. And then, to the heartbreak of many, she removes herself from the presidential race. Lisa Kudrow will definitely be missed. Her character was good fun and many were looking forward to her going toe to toe with Fitz. Yet, alas, it cannot be.

And to make matters even more disappointing, Olivia and Fitz slept together again. She was doing so well, though! She even smashed the special phone only he calls on. But when the President of the United States builds you a house in Vermont and then gives you an emotionally manipulative speech about how much he loves you, you have to fall into bed with him, apparently.
While they were having their tryst, Mellie (Bellamy Young) tried to call her dear husband, then Olivia, before finally figuring it out. It will be interesting to see what she’ll do now.  Hopefully punch Fitz somewhere where it hurts, because he kind of deserves it by now.
Additionally in this episode (yes, A LOT happened), Cyrus (Jeff Perry) used his husband shamelessly. He tried to get James (Dan Bucatinsky) to interview the Vice President’s husband, Daniel Douglas (Jack Coleman), in an attempt to out Douglas as being gay. Cyrus was very good at manipulating James into the intimate setup, but then James figured it out. And he got his payback, by sleeping with Douglas himself. When Cyrus’s photographer sends him the scandalous pictures of Daniel Douglas’s secret, he sees his husband with another man. It got real very quickly.
Things that also became real: Quinn’s (Katie Lowes) new B613 gig. She is not having it, but she doesn’t have a choice because they know she killed a guy. However, Huck (Guillermo Diaz) got the footage of her killing said guy. He surprises her in her apartment with this knowledge, and it’s really intimidating. Huck has always been a little bit of a wild card, and when you add his protegee betraying him for his enemy into the mix, it could get rough.
This isn’t the biggest shocker of the night, though. For when Olivia walks down the street in DC, on this very night, whom does she run into? Her mother, whom Liv has assumed has been dead for 20 years. Yes, mother and daughter reunited again. We have no idea what Maya’s motives are and Olivia is in a fragile place right now. Hopefully we find out more on December 5th! (Spoiler alert: It will just leave us with more questions.)