what’s done is NOT done: whiskey, tango, foxtrot

Trust is a fragile thing. It is something that people must earn, must continue to earn – and, once lost, it’s not a thing easily gained back. We surround ourselves with people that we trust, trusting them to various degrees. And yet, what happens when one person breaks that trust? Then, another. And then, finally another. It’s not one, singular pain. It’s total devastation. In relationships, we take people for who they are, see them as they are, and gauge our levels of trust accordingly. This is the danger, I suppose, to putting someone up on a pedestal. Eventually, inevitably, that person is made to fall. That is a hard thing to recover from.

On Thursday’s Scandal (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot), Fitz is reeling. He has lost his grip on himself, on his identity, on his confidence. He’s drinking in the shower in the morning. He doesn’t even react, not really, to the ardent affections of his wife, Mellie. He just wanted whiskey. She wants to give him a blowjob, and he keeps DRINKING, until Cyrus interrupts. Basically, Fitz is every person who has suffered a soul-shattering betrayal. Where getting out of bed is a challenge and regaining perspective seems impossible. Fitz doesn’t get the luxury of spending a month in bed, eating Hagen Daaz and watching bad TV. He’s got a country to run. And we find that he’s seriously off his game. He’s frozen Cyrus out, because he knows the truth about the election. Cyrus, foolishly, turns to Mellie for help – thinking that they are still some kind of bastardized team. And she, only after her own gain ALWAYS, throws Cyrus under the bus, blaming him for the election rigging. “He made us do it.” The Fitz we knew before? He would’ve called bullshit on that. He would’ve recognized Mellie for what and who she is, and known that she was manipulating him. Instead, he asks for her advice on a mission. Then, he follows it, effectively shoving Cy farther into Presidential Siberia (again, brilliantly scripting with the repetition of “Did you need something?”). Listening to Mellie, whose political savvy is lacking, is a terrible decision, and the mission in question is a spectacular failure.

Olivia, on the other hand, is just as broken as Fitz. She is so off of her game that she can’t read people. She may not fall apart in the same way that Fitz does, but she is just as devastated. Approached in a coffee shop by Jake (played by the delightful Scott Foely), he hits on her and she is visibly flattered, unable to see it for what it is: some kind of surveillance. Why? We don’t know. But that was way too coincidental, way too much of a meet-cute to be actual accident. Of course, we discover at the end of the episode that he has cameras all over her apartment AND at OPA. (My first question is when did that happen? And why didn’t Huck notice? You’d think he would be on top of that.) I wonder if Edison has something to do with it. Regardless, Jake ties into Olivia’s current case – which is that someone set poor David Rosen up for murder, killing a woman in his bed. The woman in question is Wendy, a “story-whore,” who made her living by stealing and selling secrets. In turns out that she was in communication with Jake, who works in Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

After ten months (presumably) of not seeing each other, Fitz and Liv are reunited for Ella (Cyrus and James’s ADORABLE daughter) christening. They are godparents. Fitz and Olivia both look entirely stricken when seeing each other for the first time, even more so when they’re hands brush against each other during the ceremony. Afterwards, at the White House, Olivia goes to leave and Fitz follows her, consumed by a whirlwind of powerful emotion. Pulling her into an electrical closet, without a word, they sleep together. Contrasting that scene to the one with Fitz and Mellie in the shower, and you can see the difference between a convenient relationship and one that’s rife with passion. Fitz feels hurt and betrayed, but that doesn’t diminish his feelings of love for Olivia. You can still love someone and hate something they’ve done. That’s what love is, sometimes: forgiveness.

Truthfully, after they’re emotionally charged tryst, Fitz claims that he may not be able to control his erections around her, but that doesn’t mean that he wants her to wait for him. Why bring that up, in that moment? Because when all is said and done, he doesn’t really want to lose her. He is actively trying to wound her, because he’s hurt. And we all lash out at those we love the most, when we are that level of emotional decimation. She tries to apologize for Defiance, and he calls it a betrayal – not a mistake. That is why Fitz is hurting so much, that is why he can’t see or think straight. He feels like the one person who believed in him without exception did not actually believe in him. To borrow an analogy from the show, he found out that there is no Santa Claus, when he thought HE was Santa.

But you know what’s important about that scene? They had a conversation. It may have been short, but they got things out in the open. Each knows where the other stands, and both are clearly miserable with the way that things are. Fitz says one thing, but his actions say something entirely different. He could’ve let Liv leave the party without a word. He didn’t just follow her out of lust. They haven’t spoken, and we all know that when that happens, Fitz turns into a time bomb stuffed into a teddy bear. Tick. Tick. Tick. Liv, time and again, is the only thing that can defuse him. (Okay, that sounded LESS dirty in my head. Moving on…)

After his rendezvous with Liv, we find Fitz and Mellie in the shower together again. This scene is completely awkward, because here are two people who are so disconnected from each other. There’s no love. There’s no passion. She always manages to not see Fitz. She manages to ignore the emotions clearly written on his face, bumbling through “handling” him without paying attention to him. Fitz has a spaz fit, because he doesn’t want to intimate with Mellie. They share the most dispassionate kiss I’ve ever seen (again, WHISKEY!). The entire scene made me uncomfortable, because of the complete lack of emotional connection. Right there, that’s every passionless relationship ever created. That’s Mellie, trying to take advantage of Fitz, by attempting to keep him under her thumb when he’s so clearly vulnerable. Mellie is exploiting that for her own personal gain. In her mind, if she controls Fitz (and he foolishly IS listening to her), she controls the country. That is a scary thought.

We take out our pain on those we are closet to, because we expect them not to run when we’re ugly. We expect them not to turn from us when we’re at our worst, our weakest – when all we see when we look in the mirror is a monster, a failure, a fraud, a person undeserving. When we are as vulnerable as Fitz is, we lean on those we love. But for Fitz, the love of his life has sent him reeling. He’s grappling and grasping, drinking and disassociating – without actually dealing. His pattern is that he drinks when he’s miserable. This is the worst we’ve ever seen him, even considering the time his father spent of his campaign.

It takes time to earn back trust. To build up a willingness to try. The fact remains that without Olivia, Fitz is a weaker person. His gut is off. His instincts are frayed. He’s a lesser version of himself. For Olivia, it is the same. She’s tried to fill the void by keeping busy, by hurling herself into exercise and work. But that only takes the edge off. It does not negate the problem, the heartache, the hole that is doing the foxtrot in her life. Neither is whole without the other. Regardless of the particulars of the situation, they are less when they are apart. This separation is destroying them both, and while Fitz may protest that they are done, one look at those two – one look between those two – proves that could not be further from the truth. And, like dirty little secrets, the truth always comes out.