"Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" picks up ten months after Olivia (Kerry Washington) turned down Senator Davis' (Norm Lewis) marriage proposal and Fitz (Tony Goldwyn) learned the truth that Olivia, Justice Thornton (Debra Mooney), Cyrus (Jeff Perry), Hollis Doyle (Gregg Henry), and Mellie (Bellamy Young) rigged the election in his favor and turned his back on Olivia and chose to stay with his wife. As the President deals with four Americans spies kidnapped abroad by an Al Qaeda terrorist cell Olivia Pope & Associates get a new client when David Rosen (Joshua Malina) wakes up with a dead woman in his bed and the police knocking at his door.
As Huck (Guillermo Díaz) and Quinn (Katie Lowes) move the body to the dead woman's surprisingly lavish home and recreate the crime scene, Rosen goes about his daily routine teaching a political science class at a small local college. When the body is discovered by the cable man the group has only hours to discover who killed the young woman and decided to frame Rosen for the crime. Huck is able to identify several men whose pictures the victim had on her phone and learn the woman was digging up dirt and exposing secrets of men with access to sensitive and solicitous information she would get out of her marks through sex and/or drugs. She was particularly interested in David's investigation into Defiance before he was fired as a U.S. District Attorney.
As the President continues to shut out those closest to him, Olivia shares her suspicions to Cyrus that Fitz knows the truth about Defiance and what their group did to ensure his election. This leads Mellie to throw Cyrus under the bus in an attempt to win back some trust from her husband on the way to the christening of Cyrus and James' (Dan Bucatinsky) new baby girl. Her plan works, but it also leads to Fitz to ignore Cyrus' council and send in a SEAL team prematurely on faulty information and have angry sex with Olivia in a White House server room one final time.
Tracing recent calls to the dead woman's cell phone leads Olivia to the Pentagon and the same charming man (Scott Foley) she met the day before in a coffee shop who the victim was trying to sell classified information to in the days leading up to her death. He's also the man doing highly illegal surveillance on Olivia and her friends. Rosen fires Olivia after her team keeps him out of prison but has second thoughts when he finds the victim's flashdrive and needs Olivia's help to decide what to do next with the high level classified military intelligence it contains including the locations of U.S. black sites and nuclear missile silos.
That's an amazing amount of plot for a single episode, but Scandal handles it well. An increasingly drunk, and paranoid, President certainly raises the stakes and I'm glad to see frenemies Olivia and David back on the same side and working together. I'm also intrigued how the introduction of Scott Foley and how this recent new wrinkle will play out.
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