Episode Report Card Kim: B | 72 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT In the Wind
By Kim | Season 3 | Episode 10 | Aired on 12.12.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.This was less an episode and more of a series of scenes wrapping up various storylines, so I'm going to deal with one storyline at a time.
First up, Sally, Daniel Douglas, James, and Cyrus. We open with a flashback to the argument between Sally and Daniel Douglas where all the dirt get laid out on both sides and then Daniel Douglas threatened to leave her and tell everything to the press, so she stabbed him with a letter opener and then called Cyrus. Who comes over to her house, sees what she's done and pukes. Then he pulls it together and calls Charlie and Quinn to clean up the mess, and oversees the doctor declaring Daniel Douglas dead from a heart attack.
Cyrus then tells Mellie the truth of what happened. After the long day, he goes home and realizes that James thinks Cyrus killed Daniel Douglas and Cyrus has the audacity to be upset about this, and yells at James. Mellie offers condolences to Sally while also making it clear that she knows the truth and that she'll go public if Sally tries to run against Fitz. James tries to get David Rosen to dig into Daniel Douglas's death, but David's been burned by James before and refuses.
James comes back to see Cyrus, who gives him a sob story about how they still love each other, and Cyrus isn't any more evil than he was when they got married, and then threatens him with taking their child. So he's kind of just throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. Leo tries to convince Sally that she should still run, and makes it clear that he knows what Sally did and he doesn't care other than he wishes Sally had called him instead of Cyrus. In the end, James says that if Cyrus appoints him White House Press Secretary, he'll stay. Ugh.
Meanwhile, Liv tells her crew to find out what her mother really did so they can have her arrested when she lands in Hong Kong. Quinn misses her chance to kill Rowan when his goons find out where Maya is, so she ditches the syringe and pries out the dental tracking device placed there by Huck. Fitz has Rowan taken into custody to prevent him from doing anything to Maya's plane, and decides to interrogate him himself. Doesn't the President seriously have more important things to do? I feel like Fitz has way too much free time.
Fitz tries to provoke Rowan into telling him…something but Rowan delivers an amazingly scathing monologue about what a waste of space Fitz really is, and suddenly I'm rooting for Rowan. Abby discovers that Maya was born into a radical family and was a spy for hire all her life, and the crime for which she was arrested was stealing classified documents from Rowan.
Jake and Huck track Rowan to the Pentagon, and Liv gets Fitz to let her in to talk to her father. Liv figures out that when Rowan pulled Maya off the plane, Maya told him there was a bomb on the plane so he had it shot down to avoid it detonating over London and killing thousands. Except it turned out that there never was a bomb, and Rowan killed all those people for nothing. That's the big Pope family secret.
Quinn leaves Charlie and goes back to see Huck, who tells her she's betrayed Olivia and all of them and she's not a gladiator anymore. B-O-O H-O-O. As I tell my kids, when you make bad choices, sometimes you have to live with the consequences. Fitz tells Olivia that Maya's plane never made it to Hong Kong; the plane landed in Mongolia, and both pilots and the guard are dead. Maya's in the wind. Jake kisses Olivia, tells her he loves her, and leaves. For good, seemingly. Quinn goes back to Charlie, mostly because she has nowhere else to go.
And then we have the ending scenes, setting up the spring episodes. Some junior engineer who does work for the NSA shows up in David's office with a recording of Sally's phone call to Cyrus. Rowan tells Liv that he can't give her the answers that she wants about her mother. Then it turns out that Jake is the new head of B613, put in place by Fitz. Maya calls Liv and says she'll see her soon, and as she walks away, we see she's in front of the White House.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We open with a flashback to Sally confronting Daniel Douglas over the photos of him and James en flagrante. Sally is furious with her husband for betraying her, their marriage, and their future, especially when she was so close to having her dreams realized. Daniel Douglas assures her that no one knows except James and Cyrus, and Sally already said that Cyrus won't go public because it's his husband. Sally argues that James was "poison fruit" and Cyrus will want vengeance, and DD has "released a snake into [their] garden." I would argue that he released his snake into James's garden, if you know what I'm saying. Sorry. Not sorry.
Sally changes tactics and scolds DD for his "perversion," but DD argues back that Sally knew what she was getting into when they married. Sally denies it, but DD says that she knew in college when she saw DD with "that boy across the way" but she didn't care because she was "Shrill Sally the rich debutante" and "couldn't get a husband" and she needed "a handsome man on [her] arm" who could "put up with [her] aspirations." And DD needed his family to not disown him, so he went along with their sham of a marriage. So DD claims that he put up with all the fish fries and town hall meetings, and he got her to the Vice Presidency.
Sally gasps and sputters and says that DD didn't get her where she is. She rants, "You are the burden that I carry on my back as I make my way to salvation. You are my cross to bear. You are my original sin. You are pretty, and stupid, and you can't make a living to save your life. What you have given me is our daughter, who can't keep her knees together. I suffer YOU! I got myself here. And I am taking myself to the Promised Land! I cannot wait until you meet your maker. I cannot wait until you are charged with your lies!" This entire speech is intercut with Sally stumbling around post-murder, in a stupor.
Daniel Douglas pauses to be sure that Sally is done with her rant and then says simply, "I'm done." He adds that he has the one thing Sally can't buy: a set of balls. So maybe he'll find a nice boy and settle down, or maybe he'll do a tell-all interview. He turns to leave and Sally grabs a letter opener from the desk and stabs his three times in the back. This leads to the scene we saw at the end of the previous episode, except this time we see that Sally's face is covered in blood spatter as she calls Cyrus and says that she's committed a sin. You know, despite all that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-style arguing and, you know, the murder, I kind of want a spin-off of Sally and Daniel Douglas in college. Unfortunately, the perfect person to play Sally the college co-ed is Liza Weil, and she's already been on the show in another part.