Episode Report Card Kim: B+ | 85 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Who's The Monster?
By Kim | Season 3 | Episode 9 | Aired on 12.05.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Huck prepares to gleefully and creepily torture Quinn to find out who she's been working for, but he's interrupted when Liv calls to report that her mother is alive. Huck abandons Quinn, but not before yanking out one of her teeth.
Sally agrees to become pro-choice to give her Presidential campaign a chance to succeed. Meanwhile, Daniel Douglas is freaked out that James might reveal their sexcapades. Sally tells Fitz that she's resigning and launching her own campaign. James confronts Cyrus about pimping him out and threatens divorce. It's like FINALLY James grows a pair, but then Cyrus reveals that he has photos of the sexcapades and James backs down. Sigh.
The gladiators (no one asks where Quinn is) gather at a safe house with Olivia and Maya, who explains that she discovered her husband's secret life and was about to blow the whistle on him, so he had her imprisoned for twenty-two years until she escaped. Jake and Huck realize that she's probably got a tracking chip implanted somewhere so they dig it out of her body. And then the whole group takes off just before Charlie and company can converge on the safe house. Sure hope they have a backup safe house. A safer house?
With B613 hot on her trail, Liv decides that her mom needs to go to Hong Kong immediately. While securing her ID, Harrison finds out from his contact that Adnan Salif is in the country. Jake and Huck realize that Maya isn't going to be able to stop running unless Eli is dead. Jake goes to Fitz for help, but Fitz claims he can't help -- at least not now -- without really giving a reason.
Liv remembers that her mom talked to a reporter the morning she left, and thinks the reporter can vouch for her mom and thus Maya can live a normal life. Maya says it would put the reporter at risk so she won't do it; she got to see Liv and that's all she wanted. It seems fishy that Maya wouldn't even consider trying to live above ground.
Jake and a squad move in to take out Eli, but he saw it coming and set a trap, a bomb that kills some of the squad members. He asks Charlie to activate Quinn. Oh yeah, shouldn't Charlie be worried about Quinn disappearing too? Eli puts Maya on the FBI's Most Wanted list under a fake name so that she can't leave the country, at least not by commercial airlines.
Fitz calls Cyrus in to the Oval to yell at him for not preventing Sally from leaving the tickets. Cyrus breaks down when Mellie asks him what happened with their sting operation, and Mellie basically tells him to suck it up and follow through with it. Cyrus shows the photos of James and Daniel Douglas to Sally, but she points out the fatal flaw -- if Cyrus releases the photos, James will be humiliated too, and his adultery will reflect poorly on Cyrus and the Presidency.
David Rosen can't get Maya off the no-fly list despite Abby's begging. Liv calls Fitz who says that he'll handle it. He gets a military plane to take Maya to Hong Kong.
Charlie rescues Quinn and instead of running away, she takes a shower and then has sex with him. I don't even. I hope this is all a ploy, like Quinn told Huck what was going on and he arranged to have her seduce Charlie and then kill him or something. Quinn agrees to help Charlie track her former co-workers.
As her mom's plane leaves, Liv remembers getting a phone call on the morning her mother left and someone asking for Marie. Huck reports that Maya's name on the Most Wanted List is Marie, so Liv realizes that her mother really is a terrorist and her father has been protecting her all these years. The only problem is that Quinn really is working for Huck (I swear I typed all that above before this part was revealed) and is about to kill Rowan.
And speaking of dead people, turns out Sally wasn't as sanguine as she pretended to be about her husband screwing James, and she murdered him and then called Cyrus for help.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!So, Huck has Quinn duct taped up on a sheet of plastic, and he’s getting ready to torture her. He’s giving her a creepy monologue about how he normally starts will peeling off skin or removing fingers and toes, but because Quinn is family, he’s going to start with her teeth. I really don’t buy the performance by Huck as creepy torture guy. It feels really showy and fake to me. I get that reality is heightened on this show, but something about Torture Huck is off-putting and takes me out of the scene. Anyway, Huck lies down next to her and in a very excited voice says that he’s sorry that he’s so excited about this, but he’s never tortured someone in his family before. And then he licks her face. For a show that has 8 million "Come on!" moments, this was the first one that kind of broke me. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t like Quinn as a character, or because I don’t like Huck’s performance, but that felt like too much for me. I know other people loved this scene, so it’s clearly personal preference.
Huck promises that he won’t kill her, but he is going to rip out her teeth, and he inserts a crank of some sort in her mouth to hold it open. My other problem is that it doesn’t seem like very effective torture, because she’s willing to spill everything before he even starts. So why not just get the information and skip the torture? I guess torturers aren’t big on efficiency. Just as Huck is about to remove a tooth, his phone rings.
He shushes Quinn and answers to Liv whispering, "She’s alive." Liv starts freaking out, "My mother! She’s alive and she’s here in my apartment. What do I do? She’s not dead." Think about what a mind fuck that would be. Huck snaps into B613 mode and tells Olivia to hang up and take the battery out of her cell phone and go to the safe house and wait for him. Olivia has a lot of questions but Huck yells at her to just go because if Maya is alive then Command is coming for her. It should be noted that Liv is hiding in a different room and peeking at her mom through a crack in the door throughout.
Huck hangs up and tells Quinn that he’s sorry he has to go, but Liv needs him. Then he decides they might have time for one tooth extraction, and he takes on as his motto "YOLO" (episode title alert!). He yanks out one of Quinn’s teeth, and she screams. Doesn’t she live in an apartment? With neighbors? Maybe Huck killed them all.
Flash to Sally and Leo, her campaign advisor. Leo presents Sally with two sets of papers: one is to register her candidacy for President, and the other is to resign the Vice Presidency. Leo tells her that he needs a pledge from her first, because he needs her to abandon the Christian Conservatives after they get her into the debates. Sally thinks he’s joking, but Leo says that Sally has to come out as pro-choice or she won’t win. Sally starts to refuse and Leo packs up, saying that he can’t make her first female President unless she changes her abortion stance, because women won’t vote for a pro-life candidate. Then Leo just yells at her, and scolds her like a child. I guess that’s a valid acting choice, but I think it would have been better if he had been calm and cool with zero emotion.