SOME SPOILERS AHEAD.
I’m not as upset with Abby as I was at the end of last week’s episode. Not now that I know her side of things; that she wasn’t complicit in most of it and that she had no idea what she’d gotten herself into. But at the same time I still don’t sympathise with her. I spent the entire episode shaking my head at Abby.
It wasn’t like with Papa Pope. They didn’t trap her the same way that they did him. She was lured into it with sweet, little promises of power and the presidency. She fell for their con. Given her background with Pope & Associates and her current position as Chief of Staff in the White House, she should know so much better. When random people from an organisation you’ve never heard of come to you, offering you $300 million dollars for a vague idea of what your future could be, that’s suspicious and you should turn it down.
Which she did at first. Then she changed her mind and took them up on it because she was mad that Fitz wanted his library to be in Vermont. If ever there was a moment when Abby was petty and childish, that was it. Who the hell was she to think that she could chastise Fitz and tell him how he is to live his life after leaving office? If the man wants to move to Vermont and live a simple, quiet, normal life, that is his prerogative and he’s more than earned it. I cheered when he put her in her place. The woman needs to learn to respect his choices.
I’m sure that Abby’s acceptance had little to do with her being upset about Vermont and everything to do with what “Marjorie” (the woman in the red dress) said about her being in service of someone else’s vision and never being heard, but still. If we didn’t know who those people were it was still obviously a trap. Even so, Cyrus thinks that Abby has what it takes to be president so who knows?
She wasn’t even very discreet in executing the tasks that they’d set for her. Especially switching the bullets that were in Frankie’s body. Major Morales had to have found her behaviour to have been extremely odd. He had to be suspicious of her. Abby was far too zealous in trying to convince him to do the autopsy without the proper authorisation and then she had him kicked out mid-way through. She shouldn’t even have been there when she had him removed.
Not as suspicious, but close enough, was when she handed the secretary the red folder. Her instructions were so shady; hand it to another secretary and tell her to hand it to Fitz in fifteen minutes and if she asks say it’s confidential? Maybe manipulating the information the president gets, how and when is so common that no one bats an eye at that and Abby didn’t need to worry.
She didn’t even know that they had planned to kill Frankie and frame Cyrus for it. Something that it seems she tried to atone for by actively working against them when she tried to convince Fitz not to pursue the investigation into Cyrus and to take the death penalty off of the table. Earlier in the episode when it became clear that she wasn’t aware what she was getting into and I thought back to those moments, I thought that maybe she’d managed to tell someone about the conspiracy and was by then a double agent; that she tried to get rid of the death penalty because she didn’t want Cyrus to die because she knew that he was innocent and was trying to save him.
That’s what she was trying to do, albeit under different circumstances than I had imagined and she did try to tell someone, David, but failed because “Marjorie” had wormed her way into his life and was posing as his girlfriend. And she’s still trying to save Cyrus; she went to them and gave up Jennifer in exchange for his freedom. She redeemed herself quite a bit there.
And we still don’t know whether or not Huck is alive.
Random thoughts:
- “Election Nigh. Again.” Yea, we’re as tired of seeing it over and over again as you are of replaying it.
- Answer your phone Abby. You wanted to be part of this.
- In way over your head Abby.
- Abby’s phone didn’t say “Private” when “Marjorie” was calling her before. It showed a number.
- They really like taking money from shady bank accounts and using it to blackmail the people they gave it to don’t they?
- Why was Meg standing outside of the door to Cyrus’ room?
- They prepared for everything!
Scandal airs Thursdays at 9 PM on ABC.
