We are all super excited for the return of the fourth season of Scandal which happens on September 25, 2014 at 9/8c on ABC!

Here is a thread that will be used to help create excitement for the upcoming season, as well as each day will have a recap of an episode from Season 3 to remind us all of what happened! We can use this to help discuss anything from the "Episode of the Day" to help each other out! Everything happens at such a fast pace in Scandal World, we all know we might have missed or forgotten something!

Can't wait to see everyone back for the episode's and help bring some eagerness to the board!

__________________

"Episode of the Day!"
Season 3x01: It's Handled

Picking up immediately from where the season finale left off, Rowan drives Olivia to a private airplane hangar where he berates her before informing her that arrangements have made for her to disappear until her scandal blows over. Olivia agrees to her father’s arrangements, however on the plane she makes a final goodbye call to Cyrus who pleads with her to stay informing her that if she does he will protect her. Olivia leaves the plane and returns to her office where she informs her team that the White House is handling the scandal and they need to focus on work. Shortly thereafter she discovers that all of their clients have dropped them. While Olivia desperately contacts her clients Harrison rallies the team by telling them that the White House will destroy Olivia in order to protect Fitz and they need to act quickly in order to clear her name. Meanwhile Cyrus and Mellie work together to try and discover who leaked the information about Olivia. When they cannot Cyrus order Jeannine to collect a kill file on Olivia. He learns from the file that Olivia's mother died when she was young and after her death she never lived in the family home again. After discovering her history of dating older, powerful men Cyrus decides that they will use the information to destroy Olivia in the press. Olivia uses her emergency access codes to meet with Fitz and Mellie in a secret bunker. Mellie and Olivia agree that Fitz needs to come clean about the affair and Olivia will claim she slept with Fitz two times and Mellie will stand by him. After his meeting with Mellie and Olivia, Fitz meets with Sally and urges her to denounce him after he publicly admits to his affair. She tells him she will. In the meantime Harrison has rallied the team to his side and gathered dirt on Jeannine Locke which he passes on to Cyrus who leaks it to James. The dirt is a video in which a drunken Jeannine professes her love for Fitz. The media immediately picks up the story and announces that Jeannine is Fitz’s mistress. Fitz, upon hearing the news goes to Mellie where he learns that she was the one who conceived the plan to leak another woman’s name since she realized that Fitz had leaked Olivia’s name hoping that by introducing her to the public and having Mellie by his side he could eventually leave Mellie and be with Olivia. Olivia, after learning what her team has done, takes on Jeannine as a client. Meanwhile Rowan uses Charlie to summon Cyrus to B613 headquarters where he show him a special folder that reveals the truth about Operation Remington.

__________________

Season 3x02: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Five years from the present Olivia joins her father, Eli, at Sunday dinner in return for him paying off her law school loans. On her way home she is mugged by two men but before they can run off with her purse Huck, who she knows as a homeless man, attacks both of them and tells Liv to run. When Olivia asks Huck how he learned to fight the way he did Huck rambles that he worked for a secret off-shoot of the C.I.A. called B613 that used a paper company called Acme as a front and was also known by the name "Wonderland." At the following Sunday dinner Olivia asks her father to inquire about it through a friend of his that works for the F.B.I. Her father later tells her that after inquiring about Huck he’s learned that Huck has been arrested after attacking a couple and has a long rap sheet. When Liv doubts his story he shuts her down. Olivia later contacts David Rosen and asks him to run Huck’s prints. He tells her that Huck is not in the system and has never been arrested. Olivia finds her way to the Acme paper company which is at the intersection of Wonderland Avenue. She also realizes that a pen her father gave her earlier has the name of the Acme company on it. When Liv confronts her father about being a member of B613 he warns her not to get involved. However the next Sunday she returns with her fiancé, Senator Edison "Ed" Davis, and threatens her father, telling him to release Huck or she’ll leak information of B613 to Ed. Eli does release Huck however he also calls Olivia to tell her that Ed has been in a serious accident and that he does not believe that he is the right man for her. Olivia vows to break off all contact with him but Eli informs her that as family they will never be done with each other. In the present Olivia takes Jeannine Locke on as a client pro bono to defend her name and assert that she never had an affair with Fitz. Her father visits her at Pope & Associates and threatens Olivia telling her that she needs to let Jeannine take the fall for the affair with Fitz or he’ll hurt Jake. Olivia asks Fitz to free Jake so that her father’s threat will no longer be valid. Unbeknownst to her, the only way Fitz is able to grant Jake’s freedom is by confirming his affair with Jeannine. Meanwhile, Quinn, obsessed with hacking, hacks into Olivia’s email account after seeing Eli at the office. She tells Huck about Olivia’s fractured relationship with her father and notes that their falling out seemed to occur over a homeless man. Huck, putting the pieces together, attacks Olivia and ascertains that her father is Command of B613. At home Olivia receives a call from her father telling her to open her front door. When she does she sees a bloody and shaken Jake Ballard who manages only the word "Hi" before collapsing.

__________________

A woman named Mary Nesbitt retains Pope and Associates for a mysterious job. When Quinn discovers that the woman has drawn all her money from her bank account, Olivia goes to find her and discovers her at Congressman Jim Struthers' office holding him hostage with a bomb. Mary proceeds to inform Olivia that the reason she is holding them all hostage is to find out the details behind her son’s murder at the hands of F.B.I. agents. Olivia is eventually able to ascertain from Fitz that Chris Lawrence, Mary’s son, was a C.I.A. agent but because recruits of his are still working as spies the U.S. government is unable to release that information to the American public. Unable to reveal this information to Mary, Olivia informs her that her son was a terrorist causing Mary to commit suicide by detonating the bomb. Meanwhile a man named Peter Foster attempts to contact Fitz in the oval office but is stopped by the secret service. Upon discovering this, Cyrus contacts Rowan informing him that the two have a “Remington problem.” Huck, still upset by the discovery that Rowan is Olivia’s father, begins to stalk him in the hopes of killing him. Instead he follows him to Peter Foster’s trailer where he finds Peter bound and gagged with weapons to make it look as if Peter committed suicide. Huck kills Peter and then returns to the office where he informs Olivia that he’s still owned by Rowan. Olivia returns to her apartment and confronts a semi-recuperated Jake about how he managed to escape from B613 and her father.

__________________

"Episode of the Day!"
Season 3x04: Say Hello to My Little Friend

After the events of the previous episode Huck attends an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where he confesses to having relapsed and has begun drinking “whiskey” again. He sees Quinn at the meeting prompting a rift between the two of them. Jake leaves Olivia's apartment in order to protect her. Before he goes they argue over whether to try and stop Rowan with Liv insisting that she cannot be involved in order to protect both Huck and Jake. Jake instead finds his way to Huck to ask him for help taking down command, but Huck refuses, determined to protect Liv. Fitz reads about Pete Foster’s suicide in the news and organizes a proper burial for him prompting Cyrus to reach out to Rowan. Jake secretly records the meeting and tries to give the information to Liv who refuses to listen. However, Huck sneaks into Olivia’s office and listens to the recording and realizes that Pete Foster had information on a secret mission involving Fitz and Jake that Rowan is trying desperately to cover up. Meanwhile the gladiators are finally hired to clean up the image of Senator Richard Meyers, a politician on trial for murdering Desiree Oaks, a woman he was sexting. While they manage to destroy the murder victim’s reputation they hit a road bump when it is revealed that Meyers has continued to have affairs with other women. His wife nevertheless testifies on the stand that he was with her the night of the murder leading to an acquittal. Liv eventually realizes that Shelley Meyers was the one behind the murder. Mellie accidentally insults an up-and-coming politician, Josie Marcus (played by Lisa Kudrow) shifting the spotlight onto Josie and minting her as the potential democratic candidate in the presidential elections. Cyrus sends an aid to Montana in order to destroy Marcus’s reputation and discovers that when she was 15 she gave birth to a child she gave up for adoption. The episode ends with Fitz seeking out Rowan.

__________________

"Episode of the Day!"
Season 3x05: More Cattle, Less Bull

Olivia has her weekly dinner with her father while Jake and Huck break into his house to look for clues on Operation Remington. They find footage of Rowan and Fitz talking together about the operation and realize that he was not the pilot on the flight but was instead involved in another secret mission somewhere in Iceland. Josie Marcus hires Olivia and her team to cover up a teenage pregnancy she had. The team goes to Montana and manages to bribe the few people who knew about the pregnancy into not speaking to the media. They do, however, discover that Josephine’s child was never given up for adoption and that the child was raised as Josephine’s younger sister, Candace, who now works with Josie. Right before Josie’s debate against Governor Reston Olivia discovers that Reston has been leaked the news by Cyrus prompting her to advise Josie to come clean and admit that she gave a child up for adoption. Candace does the math and figures out she’s actually Josie’s daughter prompting Josie to fire Olivia. In the meantime Olivia finds herself struggling with her relationship with Fitz. She throws her secret Fitz phone in the trash only to retrieve it when he calls. She asks Jake to accompany her to the White House Correspondents' Dinner as a cover but when she is called away from the table by the secret service she encounters Mellie who begs her to come back and run Fitz’s re-election campaign. At the end of the night Jake reveals that he knew he was there as an excuse for Olivia to see Fitz and warns her that he isn’t willing to play second fiddle. Abby and David’s relationship continues to progress along a positive note until she lies to him that she’s still in Montana to avoid going to the White House Correspondents' Dinner with him. David later realizes that Abby skipped the dinner as her abusive ex-husband was in attendance. At the end of the night, after leaving Jake, Olivia receives an offer from Josie to work as her campaign manager leaving her with option of working with either Fitz or Josie. Jake returns to his home where Huck informs him that he has discovered that a plane was shot down in Iceland when Fitz was there and that one of the passengers was Maya Lewis, Olivia’s mother. The two rush to Olivia’s apartment to present her with this new evidence

__________________

"Episode of the Day!"
Season 3x06: Icarus

Olivia reminisces about the last time she saw her mother alive. In the present she goes to the White House to ask Fitz about his involvement in Operation Remington. When Fitz refuses to tell her about Operation Remington she decides that she will not work on his re-election campaign and instead accepts an offer from Josie Marcus. At Josie Marcus’ campaign headquarters Olivia and Abby try to persuade Josie that she needs to shed her homemaker image and launch a series of attack ads in order to secure big donors. When Josie refuses, Olivia and Abby set up an interview with James Novak. Right before the interview they show Josie video from an attack ad from Reston’s campaign leading her to show a more dominant aggressive side in her interview mentioning her years of military service and criticizing Novak for his language couched in sexist remarks. Meanwhile Olivia asks Jake to gather more proof of what happened during Operation Remington. He tries to use an old contact to secure the airplane’s black box and narrowly avoids being assassinated by a member of B613, saved only by a member of Fitz’s security team. Olivia reaches out to her father in an attempt to find answers but is only able to ascertain that he did not give the order to kill her mother. Cyrus, upset at Olivia for abandoning Fitz’s re-election campaign, contacts Harrison and asks him to get Olivia to drop Josie Marcus as a client, threatening that otherwise Adnan Salif, a former associate of Harrison’s, could re-enter the country. Harrison asks Huck for his help in denying Salif’s visa application. Cyrus, after learning through Harrison that Olivia is still campaigning for Josie Marcus, issues Adnan Salif a visa to re-enter the country. Cyrus also discovers that Sally is planning a bid for presidency. Upset at being frozen out by Huck, Quinn takes to a shooting range where she is discovered by Charlie who gives her tips on improving her form. Unbeknownst to her Charlie is working under the orders of Rowan Pope to bring Quinn into the fold of B613.

__________________

In the present Mellie is forced to go through an interview in order to win over public sympathy now that the public has turned on her for revealing Fitz's affair. Despite playing up her motherhood her attempts are hampered by the fact that Fitz fails to show up for their joint interview. The episode flashes back to 15 years in the past when Mellie and Fitz are newlyweds staying in Fitz's father's home. Fitz's father Big Jerry introduces them to Cyrus Beene and they begin grooming Fitz for his political career. Fitz and his father clash and Cyrus starts to leave after Fitz says he will not use his military record for political gain. Mellie gets Cyrus to agree to come back the next day and promise to get Fitz and his father working together. In an attempt to smooth things over Mellie tries to talk to Big Jerry who rapes her while he is drunk. In the morning Mellie tries to brush off the rape and instead uses it as leverage to induce Big Jerry to apologize to Fitz. Fitz agrees to run for Governor of California and Mellie informs him at their campaign celebration that she is pregnant with their first child, who Fitz decides will be called Jerry after his father. Back in the present a drunk and disappointed Mellie asks Fitz to support her. To her surprise he shows up for their rescheduled joint interview and defends Mellie to their interviewer by taking responsibility for his affair. Cyrus and Mellie discover that Sally is planning to abandon Fitz and run for president herself. They decide to embroil her husband in an affair but after their attempts to use a woman to seduce him fail they realize he is gay when he shows interest in James. Fitz in the meantime is trying to reconnect with Olivia who wants nothing to do with him after learning that he shot down the plane her mother was on. After Olivia admits she knows Rowan in a conversation and tells Fitz that he doesn’t know everything about her he requests a file on her where he sees a photo of her father “Eli” and recognizes him as Rowan. At Olivia Pope and Associates Olivia decides to investigate the murder of her own mother. She learns that one passenger was taken off the flight her mother was murdered on: Omar Dresden. The team is able to track down a man who was working the night that Omar was removed from the plane and still lives and works in the area though now as a security guard. Jake makes plans to meet him. Quinn starts spending more time with Charlie, who says he now works as a private investigator, and she accompanies him on a mission to steal some files. He tells her that he is planning to drug the night guard, injecting him with a sleeping agent and teasingly suggests Quinn do it, then pulls the case away. Quinn says Huck once let her torture someone and she got what they needed. Quinn and Charlie kiss passionately. We next see Quinn talking on the phone to Charlie as she enters the building, where she then injects the security guard. Shortly after she injects him she realizes that whatever she gave him was lethal and she runs from the building. Charlie finds her and shows her security footage of her murdering the security guard and informs her that she now belongs to B613. Jake arrives shortly after since the security guard that Quinn murdered was the one that had the information on Omar Dresden. He realizes that B613 is behind the murder. Having discovered that Olivia is close to finding out the truth Rowan visits a restricted jail cell where he informs a still alive Maya that her daughter is asking questions about her.

__________________

"Episode of the Day!"
Season 3x08: Vermont is for Lovers, Too

Rowan visits Maya's cell and informs her that since Olivia has been asking questions about her he is going to move her to a more remote location. She begs him to let her see her daughter before she's moved and he refuses her request. In her cell Maya chews through her wrists and lands in the medical ward, delaying her move. While she is recuperating Rowan brings her news articles highlighting Olivia's achievements. When Maya asks to see more personal photos she is horrified to discover that there are none and that Rowan claims to have grown apart from Olivia when she was 12. Cyrus and Mellie hatch a plan to entrap Sally's husband in a sex-scandal using Cyrus's husband James as bait. Cyrus arranges an interview between Sally's husband Daniel and James and encourages James to dress casually and conduct the interview at Daniel's house. Mellie warns Cyrus that the affair could become real but Cyrus is confident that James will rebuff Daniel's advances. However when Daniel attempts to have sex with him James realizes that Cyrus set up the whole scenario and decides to have sex with him anyway. Cyrus is sent the pictures of James and Daniel having sex and realizes that Mellie's prediction came true. Meanwhile the gladiators are split between trying to discover who killed the security guard in "Everything's Coming Up Mellie" and managing Josie Marcus's campaign. Huck and Jake try to uncover security footage of the night that the guard was killed while Quinn does everything in her power to try to sabotage them from finding out. However at night when she returns to her apartment she finds Huck lying in wait for her with his torture devices ready, wanting to know why she has been lying to everyone after seeing her kill the security guard in the surveillance footage. During the night Fitz asks to see Olivia and brings her to a house in Vermont. After they argue he informs her that he built the house with her in mind for the future he wanted them to have together. They spend the night together and she asks him not to sell the house. Josie's daughter's house has been broken into and a laptop containing campaign material has disappeared. The laptop is discovered at Governor Reston's campaign headquarters however material had been removed from it and it soon becomes clear that Candice planted the laptop in order to boost Josie's campaign. Olivia urges Josie to publicly fire Candice to make an example of her but instead she takes responsibility for Candice's actions and drops out of the race. Going home at night Olivia hears someone calling her name and recognizes her mother, who managed to escape from B613 and has managed to find her.

__________________

Huck begins to torture Quinn and is stopped by a phone call from Olivia telling him that her mother is alive. He warns her to leave her apartment with her mother and go to a safe house and goes to join her though not before ripping out one of Quinn's teeth in anticipation of the torture to follow. At the safe house Huck and Jake realize that Olivia's mother Maya still has a tracker in her body. They rip it out and manage to flee the scene before members of B613 manage to track them down. The gladiators manage to acquire false identity papers for Maya under the name Marie Wallace but before they can get Maya to an airport they realize that the No Fly List has been updated with Maya's fake name. Olivia calls Fitz and he agrees to help her smuggle her mother out of the country. As Maya waves goodbye from aboard the plane Olivia flashes back to a moment in her childhood where someone called the house asking for "Marie". She realizes that Marie Wallace is her mother's real name and she is a terrorist and her father was trying to protect her from her. She tells this to Huck who warns her they have a problem since after torturing Quinn he allowed her to be found by Charlie if she promised to get close to Rowan Pope and kill him. At B-613 headquarters Quinn holds a needle in her hand while talking to an unsuspecting Rowan. Meanwhile Sally Langston has decided to run for presidency even agreeing that mid-way through the race she will become pro-choice in order to assure her win. She announces her decision to Fitz who rebukes Cyrus for not having stopped her. Cyrus, who was confronted by James for using him as a rent-boy to entrap Sally's husband, decides to use the pictures of James having sex with Sally's husband to threaten Sally. She laughs off his threat but later calls him telling him she has committed a sin while standing beside the inert body of her husband who appears to be dead.

__________________

__________________

Addi: When he is here i´m just
Bailey: a woman who gets the hots for man candy and cheats on her husband."
Addison: "That is rude and unkind and completely true. Oh my God, what am I gonna do?"

__________________

__________________

Addi: When he is here i´m just
Bailey: a woman who gets the hots for man candy and cheats on her husband."
Addison: "That is rude and unkind and completely true. Oh my God, what am I gonna do?"

When we last saw Sally Langston, she was standing in her home with Daniel Douglas’s dead body on the floor before her. We jump back in time to see what led up to this tragic turn of events. Sally is furious at her husband for having sex with James. Daniel says he’s done. He’s leaving her. In a fit of rage, Sally stabs him in the back. Blood sprays onto her face. Sally takes a beat to process what she’s done. Then she calls Cyrus Beene about the sin she’s committed. Thanks to Huck’s handy dental work, Quinn has a tracking device where her tooth used to be. She’s at B-613. She’s making a deal with Rowan/Eli/Command while preparing to inject him with a lethal syringe. The deal is off once Maya’s location is discovered. Quinn misses her opportunity. She manages to remove the tracking device from her mouth. Huck loses her signal after she flushes it down the toilet. Quinn is gone. She and Charlie have been called for a job. It happens to be at the vice president’s place. Cyrus wants Sally to let him fix this mess. Daniel Douglas is set up in their bed. They are making it seem as though he had a heart attack. Cyrus needs a traumatized Sally to not let the examining doctor get too close to the body. That’s not going to be easy. Sally snaps out of her funk just before the physician undresses her dead husband. She knows what’s at stake. Cyrus convinces the doctor to forgo the formal examination since they all know it was a heart attack. Rowan is on the move to track down Maya until his team is boxed in by agents working for the President. Fitz plans to detain him until Olivia’s mom is free. He wants to know why he was ordered to shoot down that plane if Maya was already in custody. He also reveals the intimate details of what he does with Olivia. This has Rowan going off on him for never having had to work for anything. He says Fitz isn’t in love with his daughter. He simply loves that Olivia is his way out. If he’s with her, he no longer has to be his father’s son. He calls the President a small, insignificant boy. Mellie is ecstatic that Daniel Douglas is dead. Cyrus is less enthused as he engages in some early morning drinking. He spills the details about how the devil came to Sally. He knows that they are the devil in this particular situation. Mellie orders Cyrus to pull it together. That’s not going to be easy since James thinks he might be a murderer. He relays his concerns to David Rosen, who isn’t interested in helping the man who almost destroyed his career. Olivia uses the Fitz Phone when she realizes the president is holding her father in the basement of the Pentagon. She joins the two of them. She knows there was a bomb on the plane. Rowan/Eli/Command made a judgment call to shoot it down to kill 329 people instead of the thousands that would have perished if it detonated over London. As it turns out, Maya lied. She tricked her husband into killing those passengers. Olivia orders Fitz to have her mom arrested the second she gets off the plane. Rowan is set free to continue doing B-613. As for Maya, her plane never made it to Hong Kong. It was found in Mongolia. The entire crew has been murdered. There’s no sign of Maya. She’s in the wind. Olivia believes someone will likely pay for what went down with her father. She tries to warn Jake, but he’s only interested in kissing her. It’s a goodbye kiss. Jake says “I love you” before walking out the door. Charlie tries to tell Quinn that a girl like her was never meant to be normal. He wants her to get some rest. Quinn lies down in bed next to him, but sneaks away while Charlie sleeps. She returns to the Pope & Associates offices. She makes a beeline to Huck, who is not sorry for what he did. This sends her back into Charlie’s arms. In other news, Cyrus lets James know that he’s still the love of his life. He’s hoping that he still loves him, too. James agrees to stay with Cyrus if he’s named White House Press Secretary. Deal! Mellie lets Sally know that they are taking care of everything. She makes it clear that now is not the time to leave the family. Sally tries to tell Leo Bergen that she’s not going to run for president. She ends up spilling the news that she killed Daniel Douglas. Leo is furious that she called the White House for help. He says, “You kill someone… you call me.” In other news, a woman who worked as a contractor for the NSA contacts David. She has a recording of the vice president’s call to Cyrus after killing her husband. Olivia calls her father. She wants to know if he was trying to protect Olivia from who her mother was. He offers to talk to her about other things at Sunday dinner because she’s never going to get the answers she’s looking for from him. He heads back to work, but someone else is behind his desk. It’s Jake. He’s the new head of B-613. Fitz lets him know via phone that the two of them will make a heck of a team. Finally, Maya calls Olivia. She won’t reveal her location. She only tells her daughter that she will see her real soon. We then see that Maya makes this call from just outside the White House.

__________________

Chaos spreads at the White House when they learn that Sally is not resigning as Vice President, but rather plans to run against Fitz as a third party because she can’t support his immoral road. She won't stop being the Vice President, and Fitz wants the Governor of California, Andrew Nichols, to be his new VP. Olivia is back in the White House as Fitz's campaign manager, and Leo raises new claims about Olivia and Fitz's relationship. Therefore, Mellie asks Olivia to find a man so the attention surrounding the rumor about the affair passes. Cyrus tells Olivia that Jake is now the new command of B613. The media starts digging into the news that Sally's husband never had an autopsy, being fed by an anonymous source named Publius (which is James), and OPA tries to get answers from the woman who conducted the autopsy. However, Cyrus tries to put a stop to this by having Quinn and Charlie kidnap the woman's daughter. Meanwhile, David and James plan to reveal the truth about Daniel Douglas, James saying that Cyrus is a monster needed to be brought down. Rowan makes a threat to Olivia that Fitz won't make it to his second term having him as an enemy and helps Leo Bergen. At the announcement of the new VP, it is revealed that Mellie and Andrew used to be together. Olivia decides to have Jake as her pretended boyfriend. Harrison is terrified that Adnan Salif is coming for him - but then they sleep together.

__________________