Olivia first thinks that Suzanne Thomas is one of those privileged people who need boundaries; she scolds Kinky Sue at their first meeting for violating her former partners' privacy. When she tries to scold Sue at their next meeting, where the plot officially becomes extortion, Sue is either no longer scared or no longer pretending to be, using Olivia's mannerisms to convey that she plans on claiming her own power in life. Their next meeting is Olivia making a deal that will really give Sue the life she wanted in the first place. A life where Sue isn't punished by a harassing, retaliatory boss for her sexuality. Their last meeting is Olivia making good on her deal. The episode breezes right through Olivia's progression from contempt to mentoring to semi-imitation for and of Sue. Come on, she's only got an hour.
Holding a purse like Olivia Pope doesn't make you Olivia Pope.
Like most of Olivia's professional problems, the answer is in one of the details she didn't emphasize at the beginning. Suzanne started out as a chemist at the EPA with a bright future and a secret past time indulging DC men in BDSM, role play, whatever they wanted that also intrigued her. Suzanne Thomas and Kinky Sue co-existed very nicely until Suzanne's manager at the EPA discovered her personal life. After that, it was the old she's-a-slut-so-let's-coerce-her-into-having-sex. I've never understood this phenomenon. It's based on the idea that if a man discovers a woman he knows is sexually active, he instantly decides she must also have sex with him. Is it because he feels insulted and threatened at not being sexually desirable to a woman who will have sex? Is it because he feels like life "owes" him as much sex as any other man gets? Or, is it because men have figured out that women who freely have sex are easy targets for hard-to-prove-sexual-misconduct? When a woman has frequent, enjoyable, even risky, sex, why is it that people find it hard to believe that she can, in fact, say no to a man? Why is it so difficult to accept that she can be as picky as she is prolific?
Kinky Sue's 17 greatest partners are proof of that. They're powerful men. Some are married. Some have girlfriends. A couple were alone and needed someone anonymous and discrete. Well, they got anonymous. But she's about to be famous by abandoning her discretion. This wouldn't be such big deal for the bachelors of the Naught 17. Except that two of those bachelors just happen to be former and current boyfriends of the White House Press Secretary. And Abby just can't contain her rage. At Leo and David for having sex with someone from the Internet. For that sex being so kinky that Leo's chapter sends her into a rage so terrifying I was worried for Leo's physical safety.
Your penis is ruining me!
Why is Abby so obsessed with being the one who will make this possible book go away? Leo thinks that he'll look bad for a while, and DC will teeter knowingly at Abby, but that her life will go on. Leo even tells Abby he'll deal with it. Abby's as angry at the thought of Leo screwing up the cover up as she is at the Dustbuster act he pulled to get in the book in the first place. She's red with rage. It's different once she's with Olivia. Restrained, part-dignified and part-embarassed Abby is back. She can't even let Olivia look at her as she informs Olivia that Leo is one of the book's Naughty 17. Olivia doesn't even want to look at Abby as the news sinks in. But she's all business once Abby gives her the work of shutting the book down.
Olivia, Huck and Quinn don't figure out right away why Suzanne plans to extort $3 million dollars out of somebody, or she'll publish the book and make money off of titillating and scandalizing the nation. Suzanne, at first, pretends to Olivia that she's giving the Naught 17 nicknames like "The Doctor" or "Sit and Spin", instead of naming anyone. But, after her extortion and threat is official, Olivia, Huck and Quinn quickly figure out who each of the Naught 17 are. And the scene where they are all assembled, and advised to play the blackmail, is comedy gold. Between Leo shouting "Amen!" from the pews, and Olivia smacking a table and talking to wealthy DC power brokers like they're kindergarteners, it's all fun and games until David Rosen tells them it's not.
David Rosen just can't stop being the Attorney General. Ever. And he outright refuses to pay any extortion money. He'll go down for being kinky, even though there was nothing illegal or even unethical about what he did. He'll go down because paying extortion money is illegal. He'll walk out of Olivia's meeting repeating that catchy warning to the others, ruining Olivia's second plan, after threatening Sue didn't work out.
While Olivia works on her third plan, Huck freaks out. He's already testified against an agency that should be gone. But it's there. B-613 never goes away. Huck knows it. Even if it's not active, the agents are out there, and they'll be thirsty for revenge if Huck's whistleblowing goes public. So, he demands that Rosen give him immunity. Now. For any and all crimes, good forever. But, what if Rosen loses his job? Would the next AG look with approval on Huck's immunity? Huck ain't going to jail. Huck's going home. Huck doesn't care who's throat has to be slit.
Rosen isn't the only one preparing to lose his job when the Naughty 17 are exposed. Abby is already writing her letter of resignation. Leo is getting one last good workout in before Abby has to very publicly dump him. And Leo just doesn't get how Abby could possibly lose her job. So, Abby has to womansplain for him. See, Leo, women aren't people. At least, not in the imagination of the general public. Women are appendages. Sometimes they do things that are interesting, and achieve things in life. But that's never as important as how desirable they are to men. Everything written about important, powerful women also has to include whether any man finds them attractive enough to date. And everything written also has to analyze whether they really are attractive. Now that Kinky Sue is about to reveal that, not one, but two men in Abby's romantic life needed role playing and toys made of leather to get off, just how attractive will the general public still think she is? Answer: not at all.
And unattractive women who aren't Supreme Court judges don't get to be powerful.
Women who can't keep their men happy in bed get to quietly hand their resignation letters into their boss the next morning, warning him of the scandal they're involved in. Abby does the right thing by not letting Cy get a shocker. In return, he does what he always does with losers; he brushes them aside. White House Chiefs of Staff only care about winners. If Abby had warned him about the book and told Cy she wasn't going anywhere and he should be ready to suck that up, he might have insisted on keeping her in his office. Instead, he told the little mouse to scurry away.
Good thing Olivia actually cares about Abby. Before failure can even be considered, Olivia and the Gladiators have discovered how it is that Suzanne must publish a memoir to make money. Her old manager at the EPA, once snitched on for his sexual misconduct, didn't just get her fired. He got her blackballed. She could find no other work in her field as payback for doing the right thing. One wonders how many other Suzanne Thomas' there are, in any field. Wandering through underemployment because of a boss who couldn't face consequences, and a system that makes sure he doesn't.
But Olivia has gone from Suzanne's opponent to champion. Olivia arranges for a lawyer for Suzanne, and that she will help make Suzanne's complaint public so that it's Suzanne who comes out on top. Olivia arranges for new job interviews, because she's more important than a manager at the EPA. She's important enough to get Suzanne a chance to write for the Washington Post. Hey, good writing is good writing. She wants to shut Suzanne's book down, but that doesn't mean she doesn't want Suzanne not writing at all.
When Cy arranges to pay the extortion money, Olivia triumphs as she brushes away the money in the enormous black case, which is so obviously cash for some nefarious purpose I'm surprised Cy wasn't dressed in all black with a fake mustache. Cy tries to rope her into White House drama; Olivia, instead quickly figures out that Cy was making his own play for the manuscript, and the dirt on DC's powerful in it. Olivia muses at how terrible the town that pays her bills is before wandering off, leaving Cy with $3 million dollars. Should he blow it on his wedding?
Better save it for your kid's college fund
It turns out to be Huck who ruins Suzanne's new bright future. Despite Olivia's new, working, strategy to keep the book from printing and David Rosen in a job, Huck is convinced that Kinky Sue will talk. And, Olivia doesn't yet know what Rosen and Huck have been doing. So, now may not be the time to tell her that Suzanne needs to be silenced no matter what. Huck gets his chance after interrupting one of Kinky Sue's former lovers in his threatening knife attack. He simply launches one of his own, slitting Sue's throat before Quinn can even realize what Huck's done.
She couldn't stop Huck from killing Suzanne. But she can prevent Olivia from finding out what Huck did. And she can talk Olivia into burying the manuscript and digital copy of the book. It's Sue, who was a nice girl and talented, but is now dead, or Abby. Despite Quinn and Huck's blockage of Abby earlier, even she now admits that Abby is family. Abby came to them to keep her secrets secret. That means that Sue's murder will just have to go unsolved. Olivia accepts this, eventually placing the paper and digital copies in her Safe of Awful Secrets. The White Hat accuses her, but she doesn't question this decision.
Huck gets what he wants after having to endure only an unintentionally brutal lecture from David. Huck's signing the immunity deal, safe with the AG who's going to be here for a while, while David tries to assuage his own guilty conscience for having had sex with a young woman who later ended up dead. Sure, he did nothing wrong. Not even to Sue, who was happy enough to have sex with him and then threatened to expose his sex life to the public. But, David just can't shake the though that he owed her something more. She was someone's daughter. And that fact has just occurred to David now that she's dead. Huck just tries to not listen to David at all while he meanders out, telling David, with tears in his eyes, that he's going home to his family. David might not have owed Sue protection, but Huck wants to protect Kimmy and little Javi if he can.
Abby makes up with Leo, partly because the book's not coming out after all. And partly because Leo agrees to act out Chapter 5 with her. Leo can't resist the dare, especially after hearing it involves butter. Leo loves slippery filth.
Fitz and Mellie make brief appearances. Fitz wants to keep his promise to Clarence Parker to make people safer; he wants body cams on police nationwide. Abby thinks it's a liberal pipe dream. Cy agrees to make it happen, loving that Fitz has given him an impossible task to do and be awesome doing. Cy decides that Lizzy Bear, now out of the DC power circuit, will be his votes bitch.
Lizzy has better plans. Because Fitz has also announced to his staff that Mellie is running for Senator in Virginia. And Lizzy figures it out based on a couple real estate transactions. And, she's also figured out Mellie's end game for the White House. And, she and Mellie already have a history. Mellie takes her resume- will Lizzy definitely get the campaign manager job?
Jake and Fitz are back to teaming up to spy on Olivia. It's creepy how fast these two put aside their pasts of competing over Olivia to the point that Jake was almost disappeared. But then again, he agrees to spy on Olivia for a fat check from Fitz. And he seems to neglect telling Fitz about a certain man named Russell. Or has he just not figured that out yet?
Olivia's first attempt to go home with Russell is filled with pointless, but amusing, flirting. Olivia pretends to be on the fence about Russell. She also pretends her name is Alex. Russell is happy to play along, to woo her, to pay the tab, and wait for her to freshen up before they leave.
"Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye is playing. Sue's take-down from a day ago is still ringing in her ears. She is a powerful woman. She's stood up to slut shaming before. Why would she try that with Sue? She deserved to be called out. She deserved to be told that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is better than her now. And she's reclaiming her own power over her own life by bringing home a man with no baggage and no drama. It will be wonderful sex that will remind Olivia that a woman's body is her own power garden.
And I am going to water my power garden
It's the bathroom that is Olivia's nemesis. Will she always be frightened by small, dimly lit bathrooms with no shower? Will powder rooms freak her out indefinitely? I hope not, because I never want to see Olivia scurry out the back of a bar to avoid a man again.
And, apparently, neither does Olivia. Her second go, scores Russell again. Wow. I thought he'd be avoiding her, but he just reappears when she does, wondering if Olivia was a dream. This time, Olivia has figured out to skip the bathroom and get right to her place with wine. And the show has figured out to play Aretha Franklin's "Dr. Feelgood" instead. We need to know that the sex is about making Olivia feel good inside and out, and that it's just sex. Jake and Fitz are always sittin' around. Russell is Dr. Feelgood, here to make her feel real. And here to bring Olivia's I'm Getting What I Want Strut back. I so missed that strut.
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