“Scandal,” the Kerry Washington-starring ABC political thriller very loosely based about around the real life crisis manager Judy Smith who represented Monica Lewinsky during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, is in its fourth tense season.

Washington’s character, Olivia Pope, deals calmly with just about any crisis, except perhaps the family kind, which is a problem in Episode 19 of Season 4, as her father, Rowan Pope, returns to the series, according to Spoilers Guide. 

Olivia will try to take down her father, but it means that Fitz will get hurt as a result. This is a situation her father makes her realize. 

Rowan, played by veteran actor Joe Morton, is a force she can't easily counter.

An ex-commanding officer in the CIA, Rowan has deeply interfered with his daughter's personal as well as public life, always wreaking havoc along the way, and in an upcoming episode titled "I’m Just a Bill" the shady patriarch is back in action.

Over his long and lauded career, Morton has played characters as diverse as a runaway alien slave in John Sayles' 1984 film “The Brother From Another Planet” and a medical professor in 2004’s paranoid thriller "Breaking Dawn.”

Despite his consistent record of achievement, Morton has had to deal with his fair share of race-based road bumps, and in his case it had to do with not acting or sounding to some like a stereotypical black person.

Morton spoke to the Huffington Post about the problems he would get when auditioning for a part.

"I would walk into a room and this voice would come out and they would think, 'Oh, you’re not urban enough, not southern enough, not black enough.' All that kind of stuff. So that was a shock for me,” said the actor who some might recall as the Kryptonite-obsessed scientist on “Smallville.”

Morton, who, after having lived around the world, started public school in Harlem at the age of 10, found that he did not have much in common with the kids around him.

"I was, at the time, speaking ... three different languages. I spoke English, Japanese and German at that time. I didn’t play basketball because I’d learned how to ice skate," said the actor who in 2014 won an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for his role in “Scandal.”

The new episode will air Thursday, April 16.