So… Mellie and Cyrus are out of the White House. Rowen is in jail. And Quinn is holding a gun to Huck’s head.
Just an update on where things stood as we kicked off Scandal Season 5 Episode 1 and strapped in for the latest dose of Shonda-inspired craziness.
The premiere opened with Sally Langston (a self-described “true American”) updating viewers via her “Liberty Report.”
We watched as Fitz hosted a state dinner in honor of Prince Richard of Caledonia marrying an Iowa farm girl named Emily, with Sally worried that it’s a ruse to butter up Queen Isabel in order to get a U.S. naval base built in Caledonia.
But whatever, Sally. We weren’t paying attention your “Sodom and Gomorrah” warnings, not when your narration was being interspersed with HAWT Olitz sex scenes.
Mellie, of course, was stewing when we saw her again, having been banished from the event due to an imaginary case of the flu.
Mellie’s anger was not shocking, but this was: Olivia gets called to the scene of a horrible car crash, one that finds the new princess dead and the paparazzi snapping pictures of her corpse.
Gladiators? Game. On.
Olivia and her team get hired to make the paparazzi photos disappear, though Prince Richard is the one who saves the day by posing for shots alongside Emily’s body in the morgue.
However: who was the mysterious, helmet-wearing fake photographer who fled the scene?
Cut to Mellie and Elizabeth not exactly making nice, with the latter winning this first round thanks to the following burn:
I was never loyal to you … 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.
Things then get worse for Mellie when Fitz makes a cameo at her swearing-in ceremony (yay!), only to later serve her with divorce papers (boo! Well, yay for Olitz fans). Will Mellie sign them?
Back to the crime at hand: David confirms Emily was murdered. Olivia and Quinn believe the Prince did it. But Fitz wants his naval base and wants to gloss over that troubling truth, which leads to a fight with his girlfriend.
(Side note: Olivia eventually finds Huck holed up in her apartment waiting for her to “fix” him. Through tears, she tells him, “You need a much better plan than me.”)
Ready for another bombshell? Emily was pregnant at the time of her accident, due to an affair with her bodyguard. Olivia delivers this news to the Queen, only to discover that she did it.
“Not all fairy tales have happy endings,” she tells Liv in a likely bit of foreshadowing.
The premiere concludes with Huck showing up at Jake’s door and also with Fitz and Olivia out on the Truman Balcony, considering going public with their affair.
But Sally makes that choice for them, ending the episode by telling the world to forget the “rumors” surrounding the President and his mistress. These are “facts.”
Go ahead and watch Scandal online if you missed the opener and get your first look below at Scandal Season 5 Episode 2:
