It’s been four months since we left Olivia Pope, cozy on the Truman balcony, cut loose from Jake Ballard, and poised to embark upon a new life alongside the most powerful man in the world. No one expects Liv’s path to the White House residence to be easy, though it sure looks that way in the first trailer for Scandal Season 5.
So, yes, Team Fitzlivia, feel free to rejoice: about half of the 30-second preview consists of the president and the Pope rolling around in bed, to the strains of “At Last.” (Team Jake will just be over here in the corner, still trying to sew our broken hearts back together.) Then we get a montage of intense, panicked, but in no way specifically revealing faces from all the central characters and a promise that, as of September 24, all the “twisty, crazy goodness you crave — well, it’s handled.” There is a bit of a bombshell (albeit a very expected one) in the final moments, though: Fitz hands Mellie divorce papers, to her apparent shock and horror.
What else do we know about Season 5 so far? At a Television Critics Association panel last month, Shonda Rhimes told critics, “We are picking up almost pretty much where we left off, which is a pretty harrowing place, where the world had been fairly blown apart for everybody.”
Of course, if there’s anything we’ve learned from four seasons of Scandal, it’s that there’s really no use making predictions; Shonda might well blow up everything we know about the show in the first few minutes of the season premiere. Her plan for the Gladiators, the White House staff, and the country they (somewhat worrisomely) control is entirely unknowable — and that’s the way TGIT fans like it.