SOME SPOILERS AHEAD.
Again with the twists! By this point I should know better when it comes to a Shonda Rhimes show. I should have known better than to assume that everything was as it seemed and accepted everything at face value. Of course we hadn’t found who really was behind the whole scheme yet. That would have been too easy.
Mama Pope is not the mastermind behind everything and is simply a hired gun. Her job was to assassinate Mellie. From the moment Jake and company took her into custody and the first thing out of her mouth was that she didn’t do it, I believed her.
I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t find her the first place they looked. At that point I still believed that she was behind everything and thought that she’d fled because, like I said in the last recap, she’d seen them coming. But she did make a good point when she was being interrogated by Papa Pope; if she’d done it she wouldn’t have gotten caught.
Furthermore, she’s way too smart and clever to have left that much evidence behind. Unless, like Papa Pope said, it had been a ploy to stall for time; give them a mountain of evidence – too much in fact – to delay them by making them waste time digging through it. But they did figure out that she was planning on assassinating Mellie and that she was after the disgraced​ secret service agent fairly quickly.
I was shocked when it was revealed that the person behind all of this had gotten to Maya. Only because I assumed that they had turned her into their puppet the same way they had Eli. Anyone who could manage to bring both of them to their knees would be beyond formidable. But then I realised that, Maya being Maya, they wouldn’t have needed to threaten her. All they would need to do is pay her.
She wasn’t even shaken, not even a little bit, when Liv attacked and strangled her and begged her to tell her to kill her. I myself was taken aback by the fact that Liv went that far. Although, given what she did to that one man, that one time, with the chair, I wouldn’t have put it past her to kill her mother. She wasn’t putting on an act at that point anymore. If it hadn’t been for Jake, she really would have killed her.
I was all for Mellie cancelling her inauguration ceremony. It was too dangerous for her to do it. Plus, it would have been quite the event to have not one, but two president-elects assassinated​ in the same election before either of them could be sworn in.
I didn’t believe Fitz when he said that he would cancel if he was in her situation. I thought that he believed he would, but I couldn’t see him making that choice. That’s not the Fitz we know. He would have not have let fear make the decision for him. But then he gave Mellie the speech about knowing what it felt like to be shot and the idea of putting the mother of his children through that and I believed him.
Ultimately I’m glad that Mellie didn’t cancel. As she was watching the news report about how many women would be attending her inauguration, I didn’t want her to and I knew that she wouldn’t. Her inauguration is too much of a big moment for her not to. It’s about more than just her and she has to do it.
Unlike anyone besides Mellie (as hesitant as she seems), I don’t think that Liv’s plan is necessarily a bad one or misguided. She was right in saying that Mellie is in danger whether or not they go through with the ceremony. They would definitely find another assassin if Maya was unable to do it. I don’t think things will at all go smoothly, or that Maya won’t simply tell her employer about Liv’s plan, but it’s all they’ve got at the moment.
Random thoughts:
- Why does everyone find Quinn’s redecorating weird?
- Abby is still in the dog house with Quinn too.
- Laying it on thick there Liv.
- Quinn’s pregnant?!
- Yea…no…Fitz isn’t running B613.
