The Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry) assassination epic continues in “The Belt” (Feb. 16): After a harrowing Cyrus-centric episode last go-round, we didn’t expect the show to stick with him, but move back to filling in the blanks on all our other favorites. We’re glad they didn’t: “Scandal’s” prison-cruelty episode was another in a string of hits that finds the show finally balancing its epic moments and its human side.
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In the end, after some thrilling misdirections and terrifying close-quarters danger, the question hanging over Cyrus’s head even as he’s vindicated remains: Even if he wasn’t the cause — indirectly or otherwise — of the assassination of Frankie Vargas (Ricardo Chavira), he is still facing a reckoning… And it’s been a long time coming.
And he’s not the only one. Huck’s (Guillermo Diaz) coming out of his cage again, looking for love with a client — and if the signs are to be believed, Mellie (Bellamy Young) may have finally gone through enough — her newest path to the presidency has her dancing to En Vogue with a cautiously optimistic Olivia (Kerry Washington), and while we love the bonding scenes more and more every week between these two, we’re cautious as well. At some point, Olivia’s desire to win will overcome her fear of losing — and from there it’s just a jump to giving Mellie her true allegiance and loyalty. We don’t think Olivia’s quite there yet, which makes us still very protective toward this sisterhood while it’s still in its infancy.
Abby (Darby Stanchfield) faces a reckoning, as well: Leveraging her power as the mouthpiece of the President to stop David Rosen (Joshua Malina) and the DOJ from seeking the death penalty for Cyrus is, it turns out, a major overreach. Fitz (Tony Goldwyn) never gave such an order — and he only learns about Abby’s machinations from FBI Director Angela Webster (Saycon Sengbloh). When Abby comes to the Oval Office the next day, she receives a huge dressing down from the President.
Abby’s been on this path for a long time, essentially since she took Olivia on last season, and her ambition has been getting in the way of her good sense: It’s a Day One mistake to think Fitz’s hurt feelings could ever be compromised by compassion, and Cyrus’s betrayal is about the worst thing that could have ever happened to our entitled princelet — make Fitz Grant feel stupid, expect the death penalty to be an option. But Abby’s not one to back down, and Fitz’s sneaky, bizarre relationship with Webster has got to be pinging her unfairness detector pretty loudly.
If last week’s “Fates Worse than Death” was about Icarus rising toward the sun, then “The Belt” is about Icarus’s fall after his wings have burned off: Cyrus has committed a number of sins, and his time should have come a long time ago. We spend the episode with him in his prison cell, dealing with the basic inhumanities of prison that over 2 million incarcerated people face in America every day. Not released into Gen Pop for his own safety, Cyrus is on what the cannibalistic murderer in the cell across from him coins the “Murderer Hall of Fame.” There’s no sympathy from the prison guards — Cyrus’s needs are so basic that he longs with the desperation of a child for a pen, to write a love letter to loony old Tom (Brian Letscher), hoping he’ll recant his confession and/or at least say Cyrus is innocent.
Cyrus is, after all, Cyrus — nothing if not good at strategizing and manipulating in high stress situations. He convinces Elizabeth North (Portia de Rossi) to get his letter to Tom, and an abusive guard (Derek Phillips) to give him pen and paper in exchange for help getting out of a drug mule situation. I had the Oval, he explains in that manipulative Cyrus croon we know so well. I had leverage.
While the hack does get Cyrus his pen, it turns out his Oval is Cyrus himself: He’s handed over to a mob of prisoners who beat him nearly to death for killing a president they desperately need to believe in… And the letter itself, bought with that blood, ends up in Michael’s (Matthew Del Negro) hands — the last straw, after a great many of them, leading to their divorce. Cyrus believably loves Michael, on some level — and that’s a blow compounded by news that the death penalty is back on the table.
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Dream sequences regularly get a mixed reaction: Often, they’re jarring, or feel like cheating fakeouts. But in “The Belt,” Cyrus’s bout of unconsciousness after his beating works, because it shows us what Cyrus really wants, down deep: Not just the Presidency, or his exoneration, not Michael, not even James (Dan Bucatinsky), his first husband, brought back from the dead… And not Fitz.
Fitz Grant doesn’t appear once in Cyrus’s dream — the second person he wishes to his bedside is Olivia — and not as a fixer: She’s there to forgive him, and to ask for forgiveness. It’s easy to forget how much the two matter to each other, no matter how far apart they’ve grown, but these moments with Olivia in his imaginary hospital room ring truest — even more than when he walks into the Oval Office after being sworn in, only to realize it’s been decorated by Mellie after all.
After the dream, at his lowest point — and the episode’s highest — a beaten Cyrus calls Olivia, her dream words — “You’ve been through enough” — still ringing in his ears. Begging her to set aside her confirmation bias and need to win for Mellie, he promises that he didn’t kill Frankie… And when she says she’ll always care for him, but that they won’t talk again, it’s devastating. It almost doesn’t matter if he caused Frankie’s death — he’s gone too far, and done too much. His wings are already burned off.
“It’s time to be a man,” she tells him. Time to pay your bill.
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The Western interpretation of karma is actually quite Christian — this idea that at some point, we have to pay for all the bad we’ve done, and get rewarded for all the good. The difference is that this happens during our lifetime, and is used most lazily to explain why bad things happen. Because that’s nonsense, of course, it may often seem the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, or maybe there wasn’t a crime at all — but it’s a natural reading to make. Olivia is that voice in Cyrus’s head: He’s done so much in his life, hurt so many people. Whether it was for the “greater good” (always the enemy, thought-wise; watch it play out this season with Olivia) or not, he has to pay his bill.
At this point, if you were Cyrus, you might be willing to admit that, like it or not, plausible deniability or not, ultimately you killed Frankie. So when he asks the guard for his belt, it could be the end: His version of paying his bill is going gently into that good night.
But this is Cyrus, and Cyrus always has a plan. With the help of his new cell neighbor the cannibal killer, Cyrus manages to overpower the guard — how Cyrus smiles! No one leaves Cyrus to be beaten and get away with it, because Cyrus is never beaten — who is forced to take them to Tom’s cell. Cyrus’s neighbor chokes out Tom, who finally admits that he didn’t kill Frankie, and so Cyrus is innocent.
Cyrus doesn’t have to pay his bill by making sure Tom is dead (though of course that’s how Cyrus would interpret it): What matters is that Cyrus himself doesn’t have to die. Meanwhile, back at OPA, the team has also learned that Tom was nowhere near Frankie on the night of the assassination. He’s innocent.
While it was another deep-dive Cyrus episode — and one that ends on him nearly crowing his “victory” to the skies — it’s also one that puts a point on itself rather easily: It’s an hour of consequences, the tabs these folks have racked up over the years, and the past mistakes they’re trying to erase with the mistakes they’re making now.
In this week’s (Feb. 23) episode, we see Olivia finally come up against Jake and his new wife (Scott Foley & Jessalyn Gilsig) — is this the beginning of the fall? And if not: When do Olivia’s past wrongs catch up with her? When does she pay her bill? And how much wine are we gonna need when that day rolls around?
“Scandal” airs at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Thursdays.