I like to think I'm picky about my television shows. Call is snobbism, but I don't fall for just any type of show. I imagine I have my guilty pleasure here and there, but typically, if a show is too stupid -- see, How I Met Your Mother -- I don't watch it.
I almost didn't watch 24 because I wasn't a fan of Kiefer Sutherland. I saw the first episode and was hooked, until it started getting goofy in the third season. Dexter followed a similar trajectory, saved only by the wildly entertaining Trinity arc.
About a year ago I happened to catch an episode of Scandal, the latest rage in prime time television. The plot involved election rigging, not to mention the usual Olivia Pope messianic acts saving the damned from messes of their own making. Throw in a somewhat tenuous affair between Ms. Pope and the President, a shadowy off-the-books government agency and an interesting cast of characters with skill sets that could command a very high salary in the open market, and it was eminently watchable. The cliffhanger at the end of the season was pretty nifty, and the flashbacks showing the evolution of Huck were pretty cool. So I decided to watch it.
That is, until last night. Last night's episode rivals the infamously bad Hawaii Five-0 episode mocked in this space some months ago for its jumped-the-shark qualities. Considering I had a very busy day that started at five in the morning and ended around nine o'clock, I might be a little muzzy on some of the details, but here goes:
The episode begins with Ms. Pope wavering on answering her Batphone to take a call from her estranged lover the President. She does and barks at him despite the fact he's hopelessly forlorn about her safety, telling her cryptically to leave it alone for her own good. Undeterred, Ms. Pope angrily hangs up on the leader of the free world and storms out of her swanky apartment ready to delve into the deepest, darkest secrets of the espionage world.
Next we're treated to some montage of the president's jilted wife, Mellie, rejuvenating her image with some film crew as she takes them on a tour of the White House and a nostalgic journey down Memory Lane to revisit how she and the president started out. Barry Bostwick, of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, appears in the flashbacks as the domineering father of the now-president who is, to say the least, pushy about his son's political aspirations. At turns goading and then figuratively shoving his son -- always with a drink readily at hand -- Bostwick cajoles his war-hero son -- who of course is Rhodes Scholar this and Navy SEAL that -- into running for governor of California, the first step on his fictional road to the White House. As the episode develops, it appears that the future president, who at the time was one of the top fighter pilots in the military (Top Gun, anyone?), shot down a commercial airline on which a dirty bomb had been smuggled.
Now, try to follow the Super Ball that's been thrown into the room: On that plane, in a tragic coincidence, was Ms. Pope's mother. Yes, the very mother of the woman with whom the president would cuckold his wife, was shot down in this action. But the shoot-down was blamed, publicly, on a mechanical failure. And who orchestrated the cover-up? None other than the conniving, power-hungry father.
Meanwhile, a late night talk between the father, who's a known womanizer, and the future First Lady turns into a rape. Yes, the father-in-law rapes the comely daughter-in-law on the couch while the son-husband is asleep upstairs. As fantastical as this seems, the wife not only keeps the rape to herself, she encourages the father to apologize to the son the next morning at breakfast to persuade him to run for governor and inject his war record into the campaign.
Taking a breath from this stratospheric flight of fancy, we turn to one of Ms. Pope's trusted aides whom she rescued during the vote rigging that got her paramour elected. This woman cozied up to Huck last season, sensing that she had a taste for black ops. In a turn that I don't quite understand, she's now cozied up to Huck's former tormentor, a member of the same black ops unit that plagued Huck. The Stanford-educated lawyer buys this guy's story that he's left black ops and is now just a private dick. Without so much as batting an eye, she ceases her surveillance of him and begins to have feelings for him, wooed no doubt by the two passionate kisses they've shared on screen. He convinces her to go into this building late at night and convince the security guard to turn his back so she can inject him with some drug that will make him pass out, allowing the newly-minted private investigator to slip into the building and do his investigating. Without giving it a second thought, she does just that, only to become horrified when he first starts foaming at the mouth and then starts bleeding. Soon enough, he's lying dead on the floor and her hands are literally covered in blood. She runs from the lobby screaming, forgetting, of course, about the security cameras that have to be all over the place.
Why is this important at all? Because this person is a key witness in the goings-on at the airport from which the doomed plane that the now-president shot down before he went political. Ms. Pope has eschewed her former lover's advice and began poking around looking for answers about her mother's death. The security guard had worked at the airport and was considered a key witness with crucial information.
We next turn to the now-frantic employee of Ms. Pope's agency who is with her would-be lover and former-black-ops-agent-turned-private-investigator asking what happened, only to be shown a tablet with the security tape showing her doing the deed. With a sneer he looks at her crestfallen face and welcomes her to the very black ops agency he claimed to have left. So much for her Stanford legal education, not to mention her law license.
So in the short space of forty minutes of so, we've had incestuous rape, the revelation that the future president shot down his future lover's mother, only to have his deed covered up by the very father who raped his wife while he slept upstairs and a Stanford-educated lawyer being dooped to commit murder. I nearly forgot to mention that the president's chief of staff has just learned that the vice president, who is an archly-conservatie Moral Majoritarian (although not by that name), is married to a closet gay man, as he sees him hitting on the chief of staff's husband. Why is this significant? Because the Veep is a potential challenger in the next election.
So. Incestuous rape. Mass murder and a cover-up. Black-ops and a tainted Stanford legal education. Not to mention the revelation that Ms. Pope's own father sanctioned the hit on the plane on which his wife was flying, causing Ms. Pope even more angst.
One would think it couldn't get any more convoluted.
One would be wrong.
The last scene of the night is of Ms. Pope's father going to some ultra-secure, underground bunker behind Get Smart doors guarded by HGH-enhanced soldiers in camo where he takes a seat in front of a cage within which is someone lying covered by a blanket. Lo and behold, Ms. Pope's long-dead mother is actually alive and has been kept in this cell; she never got on the plane.
Yes, people, this is what passes for creativity in prime time. And they have the audacity to look down their noses at soap operas. I won't be watching any more Scandal.
This also serves to explain why I prefer shows like Yukon Men and Alaska Frontier.
Sometimes, truth isn't stranger than fiction. Sometimes fiction is just....strange.
(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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