Kelsey Mix – Copy Editor
With new fall television starting this month, it brings back one of the most popular shows on TV: Scandal. Director and producer Shonda Rhimes created the political drama in April of 2012 and it has only taken off ever since.
Kerry Washington stars as Olivia Pope, owner of Olivia Pope & Associates (OPA) and former employee of the President of the United States. OPA is a crisis management program—also known as “The Fixer,” which was actually the name of the original South African show.
Washington’s co-stars who play her employees include Columbus Short, Darby Stanchfield, Katie Lowes, and Guillermo Diaz. Tony Goldwyn plays the President and the First Lady is played by Bellamy Young.
The character Olivia Pope is partially created from former press aide for the George H.W. Bush administration, Judy Smith. Rhimes wanted to be precise, so she made Smith one of the co-executive producers on the show.
This show, being a political thriller, can get pretty complicated. There are insane amounts of plot twists, which make the show exciting to keep up with, but it can be a chore at certain points.
When you first start watching the show, it doesn’t start from the very beginning of the story. Now that the show is going to be in its fourth season, you would think everything is revealed by now.
Nope.
Different tidbits of information keep popping up from Olivia’s time as the President’s employee, the First Lady’s encounters with the Olivia’s father, and probably the biggest twist of them all, her mother.
An ironic part of the show is that Olivia’s job is to deal with scandals, but her life is one massive scandal that she has been trying fix since the first season. Her father was the director of a top-secret government agency called B-613, and she gets involved with a man named Jake Ballard, who challenges her father for his job.
Olivia becomes torn between Ballard and her main love interest—the President of the United States, Fitzgerald Grant. The love triangle becomes a main theme on the show and causes issues for Olivia, the First Lady, and their family as well.
When Olivia’s mother gets involved in the mix, this causes problems not only for her family, but for the country as well. Olivia’s mother is a terrorist and organizes a bomb to go off at an event that the President is supposed to speak at to help his re-election campaign.
But not only is Olivia’s mother smart when it comes to acts of terrorism and treason, but so is her father. He poisons the President’s son and he ultimately ends up dying because of it, which helped him get re-elected.
Even though Fitz was re-elected—spoiler alert—Olivia flees with Jake at the end of the third season. We last see them on a plane flying into the sunset, left wondering where they’re going, what’s going to happen to the White House and Olivia Pope & Associates, and all the other cliff hangers they left us on.
After scouring the Internet, I’ve found a plethora of crazy predictions for the upcoming season. Sheknows.com has come up with some outrageous guesses, but anything is possible when it comes to Shona Rhimes.
One prediction is that Olivia and Jake’s plane crashes, leaving them on a deserted island—that of course being the impractical approach. Something more prone to happening at the beginning of the season is Fitz having a mental breakdown because Olivia is gone, which leaves the First Lady to take over the country.
For those of you who want to see the next step in Olivia Pope’s complicated journey, Scandal returns Thursday, Sept. 25. at 9:00 p.m. on ABC. Tune in if you’re in the mood for drama, romance, and some political controversy.
Photo Credit: Sam Javanrouh
