Last week, Mellie Grant decided to put on her big-girl drawers and pick Frankie Vargas’ widow, Luna, as her vice president—Peus and Sarah be damned.
At the beginning of this week’s episode, Luna is accepting the position and Team Mellie is feeling itself, until news breaks that drones are hovering over nine major cities. Peus informs Olivia Pope that not only do the drones belong to him, but so does Mellie, and until Olivia returns Mellie, he’ll be detonating them one by one. Don’t believe him? He detonated the first one over Dallas, killing 35 people. Dear Scandal, as I said last week, This. Is. Too. Dark.
Eli Pope does not have time for this shit. He’s ready to pack his bags and run. He invites Olivia to join him, but she wants to hang back and save the world.
Jake is trying to get “Samantha”—who was referred to above and in every other episode this season as Sarah—to talk, but she’s being hardheaded, so he slams her hard head onto the desk and cuts out the microchip tracking device that’s in her neck.
Meanwhile, Fitz is actually presidenting, which feels weird because it’s been a while since he’s done anything other than wear dark suits and chase women. When Peus detonates a drone over Philadelphia, killing 30 more people, Fitz is sure that Eli must know something that can help him.
Eli swears he doesn’t know anything and his only plan is to run, so Fitz thinks it’s a good idea to yoke Eli up by his collar in front of his daughter. I’ll never understand how Fitz and Liv’s relationship has any legs, given the relationship between Fitz and Eli. After all, Eli killed Fitz’s son! What are we even talking about here?
Then David Rosen hands Olivia a set of invoices that show that Peus and Now-Samantha sent Eli a package every few days while he was being held at the lab. Olivia asks Huck to play the surveillance footage from Eli’s lab, and they see that Eli received a package every few days. Each time he opened the box, he jumped back with terror. One of the packages fell over, revealing that a brick was inside. Huck notices that each package weighs around 11 pounds.
Knowing that Now-Samantha doesn’t have a TV, Jake Ballard tells her that they’ve captured Peus and offered him immunity in exchange for the location of the drone control center. Now-Samantha is quickly ready to rat everyone out if she can get the same deal, but she wants David, her lover as of a week ago, to deliver it.
Now-Samantha tries to flirt with David by apologizing for killing Elizabeth North and asking if they can start over. But when David tells her that he hates her, Now-Samantha can tell he was lying about having Peus because his eye was twitching, which is what happens when he lies, so she rips up the deal and he punches her in the face. Scandal-heads everywhere knew that David was going to botch that.
When Olivia tells Fitz about the packages, Fitz realizes that Eli isn’t working for Peus, so he visits Eli again to see if they can work together. Eli explains that a human head weighs 9-11 pounds, and if he had stopped cooperating with Peus, he would have found Olivia’s severed head in the box. Eli states the he was once one of the most powerful men in the world, and now, at the end of his career, he can’t even protect his own daughter. Fitz tells him that protecting Olivia is what he’s good at, and she is his legacy. This causes Eli to have a change of heart and he offers to help. He thinks he knows how to make Now-Samantha talk.
So Eli barges into Now-Samantha’s basement bunker and tells her that he’s leaving and going somewhere safe. If she can guarantee that he’ll be left alone, he’ll take her with him. It’s a deal. So he shoots the guard in the leg to get the code to the tunnels, and he and Samantha make a run for it.
It’s all too much, and Mellie is ready to tap out, but Olivia says nope, you’re about to become the first female president, and people don’t want that because “a woman in power is a nasty woman.” She’ll be damned if Mellie allows some man to take her power and turn her into a puppet. She and Mellie will not be leaving the White House without a fight. Take that, Donald Trump.
Eli is back at the lab with Peus and Now-Samantha getting his walking papers when he alerts Jake to Peus’ whereabouts, so Jake shows up and kills Peus and his two drone-center cronies. When Now-Samantha comes out with a passport, cash and condoms, Eli shanks her with a crusty old dinosaur tooth.
Oh, thank God, it’s over! And by “it,” I mean this entire Peus-and-Now-Samantha storyline. Buh-bye. Is anyone else ready to move on to the part where these nasty women start running the country?