Revenge - Season 2 Episode 2 - Recap and Review - Resurrection
Well, Revenge has never been shy about putting its proverbial goods on the glass, and "Resurrection" is an episode chocked to the brim with everything this show does well, the intrigue and scheming, the politicking, and the lies. The glorious, succulent lies. Revenge tells remarkably complicated, yet coherent, stories considering its soap opera sensibilities. Many of the better soaps on TV throughout the years have a Machiavellian element, but I'm not sure it's been done as well as it is here in some time. Then again, maybe I'm just a mark for a good bit of "palace intrigue," and Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp) is as compelling a lead as one could ask for in a setting like this. That said, these people tinker with one another's lives with an effortlessness bordering on the supernatural. I know if I'm going to screw with somebody, I'm at least going to break a sweat over it. Of course, I imagine it's hard to sweat when you're ice cold.
Credit: ABC/Vivian Zink
Case in point: Victoria (Madeleine Stowe) stages her resurrection through a bold gambit, first stunning Conrad (Henry Czerny) by calling him directly (Czerny does a remarkable job in selling the shock), and then forming a tenuous alliance with him in order to stage her own abduction. While, at first, it might appear as though Victoria and Conrad are about to get their E.L. James on, with Victoria dumping out a duffel bag full of handcuffs onto the coffee table, Conrad proceeds to beat the high holy hell out of her, at her request, in order to frame the White-Haired Man (James Morrison) for kidnapping her on the night of the plane crash. Because Victoria is good at what she does, the plan works, and the White-Haired Man goes on the run, and now Victoria doesn't have to pay him for going to the trouble of obtaining passports and new identities for her and Charlotte (although both are useless to her now anyway, since neither of them are going to be going anywhere any time soon). The jury seems to be out as to just how much Charlotte knows of her mother's scheming. For one, she knows the kidnapping was staged, but was she part of the show that Emily and Nolan spied on, in which Victoria brought Charlotte to tears by telling her she only wanted her daughter's inheritance? Charlotte (Christa B. Allen) is that strange dichotomy of a character, bordering innocence and duplicity simultaneously. She's occasionally shown to have the capacity for social savvy, though she's often utilized to play a victim, caught in the crossfire of her parents' internecine war. You would think, at some point, Charlotte would stop taking people at their word, yet there's still a naivete to her character that keeps her eyes from ever fully opening. It's an intriguing arc, like an Emily Thorne in-the-making, less than a future Victoria.
Credit: ABC
Daniel (Josh Bowman), meanwhile, is floored when his mother resurfaces, though not as floored as one would expect. He shows more indignation at the revelation that his father is using Charlotte's doctor to keep her committed in order to steal her inheritance. Conrad states that if Daniel had just given him his trust fund, he wouldn't have had to steal Charlotte's inheritance. Of course, once Victoria resurfaces, he claims his theft of the inheritance was necessary to pay Victoria's ransom from her "kidnappers." I can't imagine that excuse will hold water with Daniel for very long, as "Resurrection" places Daniel back in his chivalrous, anti-Conrad role of early season one. He's resisted distractions from Ashley (Ashley Madekwe), whose social climbing aspirations are nurtured, and even exploited, by Conrad. In addition, he's given most of his funds, and even his car, to Charlotte, in recompense for her inheritance having been taken. It's the rare sweet moment when Daniel tells Charlotte that he's doing this because, when she was born, he promised Victoria he would "be nice to her." Sweetness is an exceedingly rare thing on Revenge, and taken in isolation, it doesn't actually seem that jarring.
Less sweet, however, are the dealings involving Amanda (Margarita Levieva), who's taken the paternity test and comes to Emily to get her to ensure the results. When the test comes back, the baby is shown to be Jack's. However, when Amanda calls Emily to find out what the real test results were, Emily lies and says the tests showed that Jack wasn't the father. We've seen Emily scheme before, but I don't know that we've seen her act this vindictive before. The Amanda problem is a problem she created herself, and so it seems uncharacteristically disingenuous for her to claim to agree that Amanda and Jack deserve at least a shot at happiness, only to then turn around and tell her a lie in order to torment her. It's almost stupid to say, but she does owe Amanda a lot. Amanda is the only reason the fictive Emily Thorne exists. And though Emily did pay Amanda more than enough money for five lifetimes to reimburse her for giving away her identity, Emily can't really complain about her being with Jack if that's not a trigger she's ever going to pull herself (maybe someday, sure, but not anytime soon. Girl's got revenging to do). Yes, Amanda is nuttier than squirrel s***, but if Amanda's conscience overrules her better judgment, she could really hurt Jack by telling him "truth," false though it is. And nobody likes to see Kyle from Roswell get hurt.
But that lapse of vindictiveness might be illustrative of a larger moral decay on Emily's part. She invites the White-Haired Man over to retrieve the Clam Cam evidence of Victoria's staged beating/kidnapping, which will exonerate him from any wrongdoing in Victoria's big plot. In exchange, Emily wants information about her mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh), which the White-Haired Man gives, in spades. Outside of the opening flashback (which utilizes INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart," thus immediately getting on my good side), we don't see much of Emily's mother. But the White-Haired Man's story triggers a flashback that details Victoria's visit (under the alias "Charlotte Clarke") to Em's mother in the psychiatric hospital. The White-Haired Man is revealed to be Federal Agent Gordon Murphy, and he and Victoria clue Emily's mother into what David Clarke has allegedly done, claiming that they need her to cooperate with them. Victoria assures Emily's mother that her daughter is safe, but adds that she clearly never knew David Clarke, continuing on a little-explored thread from last season: that we clearly don't know as much about David Clarke as we think. Or maybe Murphy embellished some of the details of the story?
Credit: ABC/Vivian Zink
Before Emily can get any more out of Agent Murphy, he tries to kill her deader than disco. Thankfully, Takeda's other revenge student (I guess enrollment must be down for his Revenge Academy if there's only one other) comes to the rescue, shooting Murphy dead. It's a fitting climax to an episode that's all over town, so to speak, and that's without even getting into the business with Nolan (Gabriel Mann) and accounting analyst Padma, who tells Nolan that his company desperately needs a CFO, since the company is being audited, in a storyline that just doesn't really fit anywhere in the episode as a whole. Doubly so for Declan's (Connor Paolo) dealings with a shady preppie kid named Trey Chandler, who asks him to hold onto a piece of jewelry for a few days. Trey stole the bracelet from his stepmother, and promises Declan the easiest $500 he'll ever make if he'll just hold onto the thing. I have no idea what the point of any of this is, but I'm sure it's part of a larger narrative fabric. It's just a shame that they can't seem to find anything to do with Declan, now that his irresponsibly quaffed hairdo is a thing of the past (and on that score, Jack is fast approaching the fuzzled scruffiness of a Dr. Seuss character with his "Man too beset by problems to shower" act). Emily and Daniel also have their first encounter(s) since their engagement fell through, and it's not nearly as awkward as you might expect (there's a genuine warmth between the two in these scenes, and I'm wondering how much of that was on the page, and how much is just the natural chemistry of real-life couple Emily VanCamp and Josh Bowman).
"Resurrection" promises big things in the weeks to come. Things are actually happening. There's change of a substantive nature. This is an encouraging development for a series that mortgages its very existence on the quality of its scheming and intrigue.
Credit: ABC