Scandal’s winter premiere, “Run,” picked up with Liv fighting to survive after being kidnapped by masked men from her apartment, right under Jake’s nose.

Scandal 4.10 “Run” Recap

When we last saw Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), she had cut ties with her father, Rowan, and was drinking wine and dancing in her apartment with Jake (Scott Foley), only to disappear in the minute it took Jake to get blankets from her bedroom. The winter premiere focused on explaining one thing and one thing only: what happened to Olivia Pope?

In a series of flashbacks, we see that Olivia was suddenly abducted by a masked man in black. The man grabbed Liv right out of her living room and dragged her into the apartment across the hall, where a group of four other men in black were waiting. They watched on monitors as Jake ran outside in his underwear, looking for Liv in all the wrong places. These men are professionals: they set up security cameras in Liv’s apartment and send Jake running after a planted getaway car to give them time to remove the surveillance equipment from the apartment. Jake leaves Liv’s apartment building thinking Liv is in the trunk of some car and without any knowledge of the cameras that had been placed in her apartment.

Liv is not dumb. In her neighbor’s apartment, she manages to take off her rings and stick them under the carpet for Huck (Guillermo Díaz), Quinn (Katie Lowes) and Jake to find, but it almost doesn’t matter – she’s quickly taken away. Liv’s kidnappers murder her next door neighbor and pose as EMTs to remove the body from the apartment, taking Liv along with her. Once in the ambulance, the men threaten Liv and taunt her. They ask her to beg for her life, but she refuses. She knows they are not in charge, and there’s no point arguing with them. They inject her with a drug and she passes out.

Where In The World Is Olivia Pope?

When she awakes, she’s trapped in a cell. There are a few windows by the roof, but nothing she can see out of or use to break out. Her cellmate, Ian (Jason Butler Harner), tells her that she’s never getting out. He was a journalist in Egypt, he says, when he was kidnaped and brought to the cell. He doesn’t know how long he has been there, nor where ‘there’ is. He assumes the prison is somewhere in the middle east, but there’s no real intel to support that theory. He’s given up hope of ever getting out, and he tells Liv that, even if her friends pay her ransom, the kidnappers will probably kill her anyways.

Despite her dire situation, Liv tries to remain hopeful that somebody will rescue her, and she wants Ian to believe it to. She promises to get him out of there.

Everyday, Liv is allowed five minutes in the bathroom down the hall. The guards – two white men – put her in handcuffs and walk her down the hall to the bathroom. They lock her in and wait outside for five minutes. After a certain amount of time in captivity, Liv notices a window above the sink in the bathroom, and decides to break herself out. She takes an underwire out from her bra and manages to jiggle the window open, supposedly to yell for help, but a guard catches her at the last minute.

The more hotheaded guard wants to kill Liv, right then and there, but the other one stops him. The man in charge won’t be happy if Liv dies, he says, but, he knows what they can do – they can kill Ian instead. The men drag Ian away, and Liv hears him beg for his life and then a gunshot rings out. The next time she gets to the bathroom, the window has been closed up.

Liv Kills To Escape

Desperate and sad, Liv dreams that Jake comes to rescue her. But then, her dream shifts and she isn’t with Jake at all. She’s in Vermont with Fitz (Tony Goldwyn), making jam and walking their dog. In her dream, Abby (Darby Stanchfield) suddenly appears, telling her that this isn’t real. Her fantasy life with Fitz isn’t real, and it isn’t going to help her escape her prison. She needs to save herself.

The next day, Liv stages a break out, knocking out one of her captors and killing another with a shot to the head. To her horror, when she breaks out of the prison, she discovers she isn’t in some foreign country at all. She’s on a soundstage, being kept captive in an elaborate movie-set by Ian – he isn’t a journalist at all, he’s the man in charge. He just needed to gain her trust to learn more about her. She volunteered information to Ian that she wouldn’t have told her captors. For example, that Fitz, the President, would do anything to save her, and that she had hoped that her father or Jake had put a tracking device inside her (they didn’t).

After Ian is done explaining himself, he walks Liv back to her cell.

Scandal airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on ABC.