No! Huck, played by Guillermo Diaz, does it not die in “Scandal” — but it’s kind of a close call in the show’s penultimate season. Let me explain.
“Scandal,” Shonda Rhimes’ raunchy, soapy political drama that ran for seven seasons from 2012 to 2018, stars Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope, a powerful DC “fixer” (based on real-life figure Judy Smith), but Olivia is surrounded by a whole group of supporting actors who all have their own rich backstories. One of those players is Huck, real name Diego Muñoz (pin it), a tech expert who helps Olivia solve personal and political problems at the behest of powerful clients of Olivia Pope & Associates. Throughout “Scandal,” Huck goes through some pretty harrowing times, but none of it comes close to his near-death experience in the show’s sixth season.
During this season, Huck’s secretly evil girlfriend Meg Mitchell (Phoebe Neidhardt) – who works for her OPA colleague and friend Abby Whelan (Darby Stanchfield), unbeknownst to Huck and everyone else – shoots Huck, pushes him into a car, and drives that car into a lake, forcing him out. Huck barely survives, but it’s a close match, and his best friend at OPA, Quinn Perkins (Katie Lowes), ultimately kills Meg in a fit of rage over what happened to Huck.
At the very end of “Scandal”, Huck is alive and simply ready to leave OPA, like everyone else. So what else should we know about Huck in general?
Who is Huck in Scandal?
In the very first episode of “Scandal,” we meet most of the main cast of Olivia Pope & Associates who stay with us until the end of the series: Quinn, Huck, Abby, and Olivia herself (along with two other characters, Henry Ian Cusick’s Stephen Finch and Columbus Short’s Harrison Wright, who don’t make it very far in the series overall). Huck is, by far, the quietest and least revealing of himself; it takes forever learn something concrete about him, which makes sense once you TO DO discover its story. (Put a pin in there.)
Although Huck’s work at OPA appears at first to be limited to “computers”, it turns out that he is a skilled spy, a highly trained agent, and, worst of all, a passionate executioner. Even though he constantly tried to calm the part of him that love torturing people for information, Huck happily and even giddyly pulls out his gruesome torture kit and sets to work extracting information from everyone in Olivia’s name. (He even does it to Quinn at one point. It’s… not great.) Unfortunately, Huck is also betrayed by almost every woman he seduces, including the aforementioned Meg and an early series girlfriend named Becky Flynn (Susan Pourfar), who accuses Huck of attempted assassination against the sitting President of the United States, Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn).
Okay, I think I’ve danced around that enough. “Scandal” is a messed up show (and I generally mean that in a good way), but truth be told, Huck’s devastating story is the most devastating thing in the entire series.
Huck’s tragic story is one of the saddest things about Scandal
In the season 2 episode “Seven Fifty-Two”, we go back five years before this season’s timeline and see Olivia giving money to an unhoused man on the subway platform. This, combined with a present-day storyline in which Huck (who suffers from severe PTSD) is in a near-catatonic state and can only pronounce the number “752”, opens the door to his origin story. Long before he met Olivia, Huck’s name was Diego Muñoz and he was a decorated Marine veteran, married to a woman named Kim (Jasika Nicole). Kim and Huck have a son named Javi, but meanwhile, Huck is hiding a secret; While serving the country, Huck was recruited by a secret cell known only as B6-13, controlled by a man whose name is not revealed at this time, played by Broadway legend and “Justice League” alum Joe Morton. In his work with B6-13, Huck discovers his love for torture, but he is also personally tortured by the knowledge that he must hide his family – because anyone involved with B6-13 is expected to remain completely solitary.
After Huck comes home one day to find his B6-13 colleague – and fellow torturer and assassin – Charlie (George Newbern) in the kitchen with Kim and Javi, he realizes that he has put his family in mortal danger. Huck is placed in a room in B6-13 known as “the Hole” and separated from his family, but Charlie lets him go free instead of killing him, leaving Huck to live on the streets of DC and beg on the subway. One day, when he sees Javi and Kim on the platform, it’s 7:52 in the evening… which is why he is obsessed with this number forever.
