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"You might have gathered by this point that we love Scandal, and we just can&amp;#039;t wait for the second season to hit UK screens on Thursday. To celebrate, we&amp;#039;ve already brought you a chat with Kerry Washington, and now it&amp;#039;s time for the second part of our interview with exec producer Betsy Beers (you can read the first part here.) The second half of our discussion covered all sorts from Olivia Pope&amp;#039;s stunning fashion sense to what&amp;#039;s coming up for David and Quinn (who is she?) and why this season might be a bit, well, &amp;quot;steamalicious&amp;quot;. Oo-er!  I have to say I love Kerry&amp;#039;s knitwear in the show. She wears it so well, I&amp;#039;m a little obsessed. &amp;quot;Her knitwear? Yeah! What&amp;#039;s your favourite?&amp;quot; I can&amp;#039;t decide - I just love all the cream stuff she wears at home. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re good sweaters. I&amp;#039;m obsessed with sweaters too! There is a Donna Karan sweater that she wears at home that I literally have fixated on. And when you see season two, she gets another one that is super juicy. Also her sheets - her bed looks amazing.  &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a scene in season two which takes place in bed, and all I did was stare at the sheets and everybody thought there was something wrong with me! I don&amp;#039;t know, there&amp;#039;s something so sumptuous about her sweaters and her sheets and her pyjamas.&amp;quot; She always looks so cosy. &amp;quot;She does, she does! I actually started as a result of Scandal, instead of wearing a bathrobe, wearing sweaters around at home in my leisure. And my poor husband was very confused! I said, &amp;#039;It&amp;#039;s what Olivia Pope does&amp;#039;.&amp;quot;  She&amp;#039;s the sort of person... &amp;quot;... You want to emulate! Absolutely. We have a terrific costume designer whose name is Lyn Paolo, who with Kerry has actually made a lot of choices as to what the style of Olivia&amp;#039;s clothing is. And you&amp;#039;ll see an adjustment that starts to take place in season two which will indicate a character shift at one point, which is going to be fun.&amp;quot; You mentioned a scene in bed - I don&amp;#039;t know if it&amp;#039;s alone, with Fitz, with someone else... &amp;quot;That scene is alone. That&amp;#039;s why I was looking at the sheets! However, there is plenty of steam coming. A lot, a lot of steamy stuff is coming. Very steamy stuff. You won&amp;#039;t be disappointed in the steam quotient of season two!&amp;quot; So very steamy then? &amp;quot;I would say steamalicious!&amp;quot; I mean, we&amp;#039;ve been talking for a while and we still haven&amp;#039;t even mentioned the cliffhanger with Quinn. &amp;quot;Who is Quinn Perkins? Who do you think Quinn Perkins is? Quinn Perkins has a reason to hide - has a very, very large reason to hide, which has massive... There is a massive ripple effect through all of season two and Quinn Perkins is one of the things at the heart of the major initial plot of season two. When you find out more about what happened to Quinn Perkins it will astonish you, and it&amp;#039;s the beginning of a puzzle.&amp;quot; So it&amp;#039;s something that carries on throughout the season? &amp;quot;We will tell you beginning of season two who Quinn Perkins is - we are not going to stretch this out. You will know exactly who Quinn Perkins is. What that means for the rest of the season, you do not know, and you&amp;#039;re going to want to watch.&amp;quot;  When I&amp;#039;m watching the programme, and hearing you say that just now, it kind of reminds me of shows like Damages. Were there any influences that fed into Scandal? &amp;quot;Yeah! You know what, I don&amp;#039;t know if Damages had any influence directly on the show. I think that there&amp;#039;s generally a feeling that what [creator] Shonda [Rhimes] was doing was creating her own high stakes, high pressure world. So I feel like it&amp;#039;s more of because the job is so unique, it feels even more fraught and more high pressure because a crisis takes place over an amazingly rapid period of time. Sometimes you have no time before a crisis breaks.  &amp;quot;I think the urgency on our show really comes from the premise, which is, &amp;#039;I only have a certain amount of time to solve this crisis before all hell breaks loose&amp;#039;. That&amp;#039;s why they talk so fast - they don&amp;#039;t have time! They don&amp;#039;t have time for the emotion, they don&amp;#039;t have time for any of that. That&amp;#039;s why the pace keeps up.  &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll notice when you watch season one, the only time the show slows down is when Fitz and Olivia are together. She said, &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s just take a minute&amp;#039; - that was actually a minute. If you time it, that was literally a full minute. And we timed it, and Shonda was very, very clear that she references the amount of time that they&amp;#039;re going to sit there and it&amp;#039;s exactly that length of time. And that really sad music plays, which you&amp;#039;ll hear again in season two - that&amp;#039;s a continuing theme.&amp;quot; I wanted to ask you about the pace, because you can kind of keep that fast pace over seven episodes. How is it keeping that sustained over a longer second season? &amp;quot;Oh, it gets faster. It&amp;#039;s faster! How do they keep it up? I think that the storytelling for Shonda and the writers is very energetic and I think they&amp;#039;re really enjoying crafting all the twists and turns. Shonda loves complications and conflicts; she loves characters who are active and who are constantly confronting their worst fears. And when you start at a place like that when you&amp;#039;re writing drama, the world is your oyster because you&amp;#039;re not scared of the conflict and the drama, and she drives right into it like a freight train.  &amp;quot;So what&amp;#039;s terrific about season two is the freight train gets faster and faster and faster, and the other great thing is there&amp;#039;s an endless number of amazingly gigantic scandals which can take place - both for guests of the week, but also for our participants - that I think will keep you guessing. And it&amp;#039;s great because it means we have material for seasons to come.&amp;quot;  So is there still that crisis of a week format with an overriding story? &amp;quot;I think what you&amp;#039;ll see is similar to season one - that we start with crisis of the week for the first bunch of episodes. And then the sort of crisis or scandal of the moment, which might be seven episodes... In the second season, there&amp;#039;s a scandal that lasts about 13 episodes and then a different major scandal for the last nine episodes. That scandal sort of takes over, and the cases of the week fall apart, fall away. You focus on that scandal.  &amp;quot;And then as we gear another scandal up, cases of the week pop back in again. So it&amp;#039;s a layered show - there&amp;#039;s always Fitz and Olivia, what will happen with their love, the major scandal, and then the cases of the week. So we have a lot of balls in the air.&amp;quot; I know we&amp;#039;re running out of time, but I just wanted to talk about David Rosen. I can&amp;#039;t decide how I feel about him - is he a good guy or just getting in the way? &amp;quot;I know, right? He could be just a big pain in the butt.&amp;quot; Does he play into things a bit more in season two? &amp;quot;He does, he does. David Rosen&amp;#039;s really only getting warmed up in season one. David Rosen gets a lot of story in season two, and I&amp;#039;m going to say David Rosen wears the white hat and drives forward with the white hat and then some very shocking, surprising things happen with David Rosen.&amp;quot; So obviously I&amp;#039;m excited about season two, but what teasers could you give us? &amp;quot;The season two teasers that I can give you are that you are going to see something by episode eight or nine that you will not believe that anybody does on a television show that fast, which is a very large, shocking event. You will see every single one of these relationships tested, you&amp;#039;re going to see loyalties shift and change, the stakes are going to get insanely high, and there may be some casualties.&amp;quot; Scandal returns with its second season in the UK on Thursday (July 4) at 9pm on More4. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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