Warning: This article contains spoilers
In an explosive and deadly season finale, “Scandal” was actually able to top itself by having its lead character, Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington, get on a plane and walk away from everything — her own company, her ex-lover, President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn), and her insane parents, Rowan and Maya Pope (Joe Morton and Khandi Alexander).
Olivia makes a serene exit, silencing a last-minute call from a dejected Fitz, seated next to her sometime lover, Jake Ballard (Scott Foley).
Plenty of blood is spilled before that jet takes off down the runway, however.
The episode opens with a bang as mourners at a political funeral flee a church where a bomb has been discovered. Not everyone gets out in time. Vice President Sally Langston (Kate Burton) is wounded in the escape, and her campaign adviser (Paul Adelstein) tells her to seize the moment and turn the disaster into Election Day votes. Sally dutifully tends to the wounded in full view of television cameras, effectively ending the re-election hopes of the Grant campaign.
Faced with the bad news, the first lady, Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young), drunkenly says to Olivia, “I want a refund. I thought we hired [you] to win.”
The president, for his part, thinks he is finally free and can actually divorce Mellie and marry Olivia. Not so fast, says Olivia. It seems that when Fitz was running for governor, your father raped your wife.
Viewers saw this happen in a well-done flashback earlier in the season, and it was a turning point in the episode. Fitz knows he’ll never leave his wife. Olivia knows she’ll never be with him. As she visits her wounded father, Rowan, at his bedside — he was stabbed in the previous episode — she is shocked to find her psycho mother, Maya, there as well. Maya admits to planting the bomb in the church, tells Olivia that she could have killed the president if she had wanted to, and sails out.
The president, Mellie and their two children, Jerry and Karen, take to the stage while Fitz exhorts voters to go to the polls and cast their ballots for him. During the speech, though, Jerry begins to bleed from his mouth and nostrils. He collapses and is rushed to the hospital, where he dies of bacterial meningitis.
Cynically, Olivia and the president’s chief of staff, Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry), know this death will turn the election in Fitz’s favor. “When did we stop being people?” Olivia wonders.
The boy’s death is traced to Maya Pope, and Rowan vows to the president to bring him her head on a platter. But then Olivia decides that everything that has gone wrong with the situation, from her parents to Fitz to the boy’s death, is connected to her. And she resigns in front of her incredulous gladiators.
One of them, Huck (Guillermo Diaz), has an unexpected reunion with his family. Rowan delivers the news to the president that Maya Pope has been murdered. And as the election returns come in, Fitz can feel no sense of triumph. He’s lost his son, he’s trapped in a loveless marriage and he’s facing the future without Olivia. What he doesn’t know is that he has mistakenly placed his trust in Rowan.
In a series of flashbacks, we see Olivia’s dad admit to his daughter’s employee, Harrison (Columbus Short), that he was the one who procured the vial of bacterial meningitis and had one of his henchmen administer it to the Grant boy while he stood in the wings during his father’s address. Rowan prepares to murder Harrison. Having also apprehended his wife, he did not kill her but put her in a cell again, where he once kept her for 22 years.
And Olivia, taking to the friendly skies, knows none of this.
“Scandal” will return in the fall on ABC.