The recent observational evidence of deviations from the Λ-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model points towards the presence of evolving dark energy, which is most naturally modeled as a cosmological scalar field driving the accelerated expansion. Despite this, I argue that the simplest scalar field proposals, quintessence, are not a good description of the cosmological data and that, if dark energy is driven by a scalar field, the cosmologically data strongly prefer more exotic scalar field proposals involving non-minimal couplings or non-canonical kinetic terms. However, such proposals invariably imply significant ancillary gravitational consequences which are disfavored by other (non-cosmological) data. In light of these results, I offer an assessment of the present and future of scalar field dark energy.