Jam in Vermont was never going to happen

and neither was Standing in the Sun..

I grew up with Scandal. My mom used to watch Olivia Pope march through Washington in her tailored suits, demanding respect everywhere she went, hope burning in her eyes. She’d watch how Olivia had power — real power. The power to make the President of the United States of America kneel in front of her. She had power no other Black woman on television had, and I could see the inner child in my mom light up, almost in awe. I also think my mom knew that if she couldn’t become Olivia Pope herself, she’d give everything she had to her daughter so that she could conjure up that same power.

I grew up a little and started rewatching the show with different eyes. I was older now, I could finally sit through every scene without frantically searching for the remote every time Fitz got too close to Olivia, knowing damn well the remote was on the table the whole time. Anyway, like my mom, I loved Olivia for her look, her walk, her witty comebacks. However, something else had developed in me: I loved her for her mind, for her moral grayness, for the raw way she lived with her emotions. And like every Scandal viewer, I was deeply invested in the relationships she kept. Over the years, through each rewatch, my perspective shifted and I realized those changes were always tied to what I thought love was, how I’d experienced it and what I actually wanted from life.

On my first watch, I was a die hard Jake fan. The man was at her service at all times. He fell in love by looking straight into all the misery she hid from the world, and he chose to protect her from herself. To stand in the sun with her and remove every shadow around them. Maybe that reflected something in me — a need for a man to be devoted, to accept my darkness and somehow save me. From what exactly, I still don’t know.

It surprised me that on my next rewatch, barely a year later, I saw it completely differently. I understood, finally, that Fitz was the love of her life. The man literally admitted Olivia owned him. He watched the clock run out, damn it, he waged war for her ! A man with that kind of power, a man who could do almost anything at a moment’s notice, practically god on earth was in love and completely vulnerable for one woman. And he didn’t love her just because she was beautiful. He loved her for her excellence, her talent, the something in her that was bigger than her body, that fierce hunger for greatness that Papa Pope had planted in her from the very beginning.

Which brings me to Eli Pope and one of the most memorable, eye-opening scenes in the entire series in which he tells Olivia that she is not different than a thousand girls who have fallen in love with tactics of lying, greedy men, but that she often forgets they also want what she can wield: Power. And as Eli put it so precisely: power is the thing in charge. She had been raised not to fall into that trap, to not let them drain her of her gift and throw her into nothingness once they were done. She had to be twice as good to get half of what they had, and they knew it. They knew she was better than them, and that terrified them. That’s why Olivia was both their greatest weapon and their greatest threat.

Papa Pope’s speeches must have worked on me too, because on my next rewatch, I finally saw what Olivia had been hiding from us and from herself.

Jam in Vermont was never going to happen. The kids, the little house, the slow life, none of it. No matter how many times they confessed their love, no matter how safe Fitz made her feel, no matter how many times he chose her publicly, Olivia was never going to choose him back. Not really. Because Olivia Pope loved power more than she loved Fitz, more than she loved Jake, more, at certain points, than she loved her own father — the man she was willing to shoot because he was in her way. After all, she was a warrior and she would take down anything in her path. Olivia loved having every option in her hands, loved being able to move anyone like puppets. She loved being the queen of Washington. She didn’t fall for Fitz because he was good in bed. She fell for him because she saw greatness in him, greatness she had helped build. So because she had made him, she could not bear to watch her project fail.

And don’t get me started on standing in the sun with Jake. She fell for him because she recognized his strength. She used him, his assassin training, his instincts, his grit, whenever she needed it. She let him believe he could tame her, that he was the one man steady enough to hold her still. Olivia never went to Jake though, she retreated to him. Every single time she chose him, she was choosing rest, he was the place she went when Washington had wrung her out. And Jake, to his credit and his tragedy, knew it. Because even when they left, even when the sun was right there, he knew Olivia would always came back since she couldn’t help it.

I don’t think Olivia is evil. I think she simply could not be selfish, could not let her gift go to waste for the sake of her own happiness, could not watch the world burn while she stood in the sun doing nothing. She would rather be unhappy and steer a country in the right direction than be at peace and irrelevant. She would rather have died in that “West Angolan” prison than let Fitz start a war over her. She understood, eventually, that politics was her world. She had to be there, not just to participate, but to redirect it exactly the way she saw fit. And she did it brilliantly. Olivia wanted power to do good, and she always tried — at least at first — until power began to poison her. That’s what it does.

Olivia Carolyn Pope should not be remembered as a mistress who was good in bed. Scandal should not be reduced to a love triangle or a political drama with romantic subplots. That reading is entirely beside the point. Scandal is about power — about what people are willing to sacrifice to hold it, and what it costs them when they do.

What makes Olivia genuinely tragic and what the show tries to tell you, is that the corruption doesn’t arrive all at once instead, it carefully seeps in. She starts as someone who wants power to protect people, to fix what’s broken, to be the hand that steadies the republic when the men in charge are too cowardly or too compromised to do it themselves. And for a long time, that’s exactly what she is. But power has a logic of its own. It starts asking you to make small concessions — one lie here, one buried file there, one person sacrificed for the greater good. And Olivia, who was raised to be exceptional, who was told her whole life that the ends justified the means if the means were hers, said yes. Every time. Until she became Command. Until she was her father. Until the woman who once refused to let an innocent man go to prison was ordering assassinations. The show doesn’t frame this as a fall from grace so much as a slow, almost logical progression — which is what makes it so unsettling. Olivia didn’t become corrupt despite her values. She became corrupt because of them. Because she believed, truly, that she was the only one who could be trusted with that much power.

I see a lot of myself in Olivia. Not that I have a president losing his mind over me or a soldier at my feet, but I recognize her drive. I just hope the shadows don’t swallow me whole. Though maybe I’d let them, if it meant some people got to be okay.

I’m looking forward to rewatching Scandal again and discovering yet another version of myself in it. I don’t know if my opinion of her love life will change. But I know I will never reduce Olivia Pope to a mistress, or to Jake’s girlfriend, or to Fitz’s great love. She held Washington together on her own. She had the power to destroy it on a bad day. And I think that’s exactly what my mother and I always wanted: more power to decide.