It’s season finale time on Scandal! And you know what that means: questions, answers, and more questions.

Last week ended with the revelation that Maya Pope had planted a bomb to go off during the funeral of a veteran congressman (who might as well have been named Senator Plot Device). Although Cyrus learned that this was about to happen in time to stop it, he neglected to tell the President, and instead stalled while others filled up the soon to be exploded church in anticipation of the service, including President Grant’s rival in the upcoming election, Vice President Sally Langston. Thursdaynight’s finale, “The Price of Free and Fair Elections” (not as cool a title as last week’s “Flesh and Blood,” but much cooler than the the week before that’s “The Fluffer,” and one that ultimately worked well in context), started with Cyrus having a crisis of conscience, and immediately reversing his decision to let Sally Langston die a fiery death, along with everyone else at the funeral. The church ends up getting evacuated just in time, but not without a few people getting hurt by the explosion on their way out. This ends up being a great moment for Sally, who sticks around, looking a little worse for wear but ready to help any injured parties. This makes for a great photo op, and when all the major news channels cut to Sally at the site of the explosion rather than the President’s speech about what just happened, everyone’s pretty sure the election is over. As the Grant administration and Pope & Associates collectively prepare for the worst, Olivia takes a moment to visit her father, who was stabbed by her mother in the last episode, in the hospital. She tells her father about the ensuing election failure, and while he admits he doesn’t like the President, he tells her he wishes there was something he could do to help him win, because he knows how much it means to her.

From there, the episode picks up quite a bit. The night before the election, President Grant is set to end his campaign trail by making what everyone is sure will be his last speech as Commander in Chief, with his family by his side. But when he takes the podium, his son, Jerry, begins to convulse. He is rushed to the hospital, but it’s too late. Jerry dies of a seizure. An autopsy report informs the President that his son had a chemical reaction to something which must have been injected into his bloodstream. The tide turns in the election, and it becomes clear that President Grant will win, but only because of his son’s murder. Rowan tells the President he knows it was Maya who did this, and that if he’s reinstated as the head of B-613, he will track her down and bring her to justice. Sure enough, by the end of the episode, he has her in trapped in B-613’s classic prisoner hole. After all that has happened, Olivia decides to pack up and leave Pope & Associates, taking her father up on the offer he made at the beginning of the season; a new identity, and a fresh start. Jake Ballard decides he wants to come with her, and they fly off into the sunset. But before things come to a close, Harrison (of all people) realizes something isn’t right. He asks Rowan why Maya would kill the President’s son, since she usually kills for money, not ideals. He tells Rowan that out of everybody, he came out on top: he’s back in command at B-613, Olivia is estranged from the President, and Maya is in captivity once again. Rowan points a gun at Harrison and tells him this is such a waste of young, black talent. As Olivia and Jake fly away to their new lives, Olivia gets a call from the President. She ignores it.

Wow, I’m exhausted just thinking about the whole thing. What made “The Price of Free and Fair Elections” a fairly interesting Scandal episode is that the first half was extremely uneventful, while the second half never let up.

I was sort of confused by Cyrus’s actions at the end of last week’s episode, but the idea that he would at least consider letting a lot of innocent people die just to get Sally out of the way basically makes sense. Cyrus and Olivia both go through a lot of self-pity in this episode, although their emotions aren’t unwarranted. To be sure, both of them have done pretty shameful things in the name of politics. The scene where Olivia literally says “I’m the scandal, and the best way to deal with the scandal is to shut it down,” was definitely over the top, but if Shonda Rhimes (who co-wrote this episode) is trying to make a comment on her creation, her observations are extremely apt. Olivia is the whole show; there is no Scandal without Olivia Pope, and as harsh as it might sound, Olivia was right when she said that everything bad that happens around her is her fault. But that’s the burden of being a protagonist. She can try to shut Scandal down by flying away for the summer, but when the show comes back in the fall, Olivia will have to come back, and the whirlwind of problems around her will surely resume. The fact that she’s realized this, however, made her character more interesting in this episode than she has been all season.

As far as the episode’s big twist, although we didn’t know little Jerry very well, killing off a kid is undeniably cold-blooded. It got the show where it needed to be, but I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted that turn of events. Rowan’s involvement in the murder was predictable,  but not out of character. I had begun to wonder if he had something up his sleeve earlier in the episode when he tells Olivia he wished he could help her, but when he confronts the President in the hospital, asking to be reinstated and assuring him he’ll track down Maya, I was basically sure he was the one who killed the kid.

While we’re talking about Maya, I just have to ask, where the hell did she come from in that scene where she pops up and confronts Olivia? Much like her appearance at the office last week, the way she just appeared was too random to ignore. All of a sudden, on the eve of the election, she comes to Olivia and tells her she tried to kill the President for her, which was a bit of a letdown in the long run, since her desire for her daughter to be “free” of Fitzgerald Grant seems a bit too simple of an explanation for all the planning and scheming Maya did throughout the season. But at least the show gave us a reason for Maya’s actions. It did a much poorer job of explaining how she got apprehended at the end. Like I said, this is a woman who can seemingly go unnoticed anywhere. I get that Rowan is a super-spy and can track people pretty easily, but Maya has been running around D.C. for most of this season, and the idea that Rowan couldn’t catch her before she stabbed him is a little much. Unless of course the stabbing was all part of his brilliant plan, which, hey, maybe it was. Like I said, the guy is a super-spy.

Also shouts out to Tom, the secret service agent who also turned out to be a member of B-613, for executing Rowan’s orders and covertly injecting the President’s son with whatever creepy chemical it was that killed him. We may have learned that he was playing both sides of the field earlier in the season, but I wouldn’t have expected the show to utilize that detail this cleverly.

I also have to give this episode props for making me feel something for President Grant other than frustration, which up until this point is the only emotion I’ve been able to feel toward him all season. Of course, I was still pretty frustrated with him throughout most of this episode. For instance, Olivia goes blabbing to him, and he finally learns of his wife’s rape, which prompts him to be tender to her for the first time in a long time. Yet minutes later, he’s on the phone with Olivia, telling her that because of this new information, they can’t be together “yet.” Olivia’s response, “I wouldn’t want you if, knowing what you know, you left her now,” was a remarkably appropriate reaction on her part, since she’s usually no more able to resist President Grant than I am to resist ice cream (I really like ice cream). But for the President to basically say he has to put in a few sympathy hours with his wife before he can chuck her to the curb anyway was kind of messed up. And yet, in the scene where he walks into the Oval Office alone, shaking, reaching for a drink, devastated by the death of his son and remembering all the suffering his office has already caused him and his family in one term, I actually felt for the guy. This was also a very well-directed episode (courtesy of Tom Verica), and the slow-paced shots juxtaposed with the President’s somber flashbacks, set to the tune of The Temptations’ “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” (probably the best soul choice Scandal has ever made for a season ender), made for a very effective sequence. Nevertheless, Grant’s last scene of the season is him on the phone asking for Olivia, which reignited my frustration for him all over again, but what can you do.

By the way, I have to say that I really like that Olivia is going to try to leave her old life behind, to get away from the President and her feelings for him, even though I know that she’ll get pulled back into some kind of craziness at the beginning of next season. But I still don’t buy that she wants to start over with Jake Ballard. Again, he killed James, a man whose daughter she is Godmother to. Need I say more?

Oh, before I go I guess I should mention that Jake sent David Rosen all of B-613’s files before skipping town, and Huck found his family after having kinky sex with Quinn. But this is basically how I feel about all of their problems at this point.