Olivia Pope heads a team of professional fixers who step in to avert any crisis faced by the elite, political and otherwise. It is a procedural with a new case every episode that forms a canvas to paint a simmering political plot between Olivia and her former boss, the President of United States, Fitzgerald Grant, with whom she was romantically involved, which happens to be a well kept secret. Her feelings for President Grant force her to take up the Tanner case, wherein a woman, Amanda Tanner accuses the ‘happily married’ President of infidelity. Her emotions cloud her usually impeccable judgment, and her ‘never failing’ gut misguides her for the very first time when she wrongly believes the President to be innocent.
It takes the newcomer, Quinn Perkin’s persistence to get the hereto infallible Olivia Pope to question her belief when a chance hearing of a hospitalized Amanda muttering the all too familiar ‘Sweet baby’ as the lover of the President, shocks her to the core. Olivia’s sense of right and wrong during the entire episode hits you square in your heart. She is shown through the eyes of the new entrant to the firm, Quinn, who is sufficiently shocked to see Olivia in action.
The team of “Gladiators in suits” places their utmost trust in an institution called Olivia, who is gut wrenchingly moralistic yet does not hesitate to pull an immoralist punch when the situation demands – Anything to save the client as long as the client tells the truth and nothing but the truth, or help him God! She is fearless in her mission to safeguard what her gut tells her to be the truth. In this episode, she goes against her team’s opinion to take on a case involving a war hero who walks into their office drenched in blood claiming to have not killed his girlfriend. She commands that justice be done by their client, and the team wordlessly scurries to make it happen while she bends every rule in the law book to achieve it.
The clincher was the not the way she closed the case but how she opened a far more onerous one when she takes on Amanda Tanner as her client thereby challenging the President for an open duel, which goes against her profession of suppressing a scandal as a fixer.
Watch out for the second episode of ‘Scandal’ @ 11 pm Saturday on Zee Café.
Neeraja Unni
Rangmunch.tv
