Revenge - Season 2 Episode 4 - Recap and Review - Intuition
It feels almost arbitrary how Revenge just decided to kick things into overdrive this week with "Intuition," an episode that's pretty much past the whole "dinner and a movie" dance and is interested in just getting to the damn hotel room already. Last week's episode provided a bit of a breather after the first two episodes of the season seemed to go out of their way to pack in as much soaptastic developments as possible in a short time frame. It really felt like we were reshuffling the deck in preparation for some big happenings in the future. I just didn't expect that said happenings would happen so soon.
Credit: ABC
"Intuition" is an episode that moves with a sense of purpose, and this is because Emily (Emily VanCamp) is so driven that the hour feels as though it breezes by any time we stop to focus on her (which is far less often this week than is sensible). Emily is intent on discovering what happened to her mother, and so she confronts Aiden (Barry Sloane) to figure out what he knows. He plays stupid, however, which leads to Emily utilizing Amanda (Margarita Levieva) as her inroad to drawing her mother's whereabouts out of Victoria (Madeleine Stowe). Unsurprisingly, this entire scheme turns into the latest in a long line of excuses for the Graysons to throw a party (not since The Tudors has a show gone this far out of its way to throw a party each week. I love it). In this case, the party is a baby shower for Amanda, who brings her stripper friends in order to provide a distraction. Emily attempts to Cyrano de Bergerac her way through the confrontation between Amanda and Victoria, guiding her through via earpiece. Unfortunately, the feed cuts out right when the going gets good, with Amanda (in a surprisingly authentic bit of acting, considering she didn't even want to do this for Emily to begin with) accuses Victoria of knowing more about her mother than she's leading on. Turns out what Victoria knows is that Amanda's mother tried to kill her when she was a little girl. A struggle over the roll call from the psychiatric ward leads to Amanda falling over the rail of the Grayson home's second floor.
The last ten minutes of the episode are among the most well-structured in the show's run. I've never really hidden the fact that I don't care much for Amanda as a character, even though I've found myself pitying her the last two weeks (and even this week, where she finds herself still on the outs with Jack, and having to move in with Emily, who immediately pounces on her to get her help with her latest scheme. Amanda pretty much had Emily pegged when she tells her that she'll never be finished with this, whether or not she achieves the next goal). But the show does a tremendous job in making her potential death have real weight. It forces Jack (Nick Wechsler) and Declan (Connor Paolo) to temporarily make amends under the auspices of fear and grief, while there's something of a truce between Declan and Charlotte (Christa B. Allen), with the younger of the two Porter brothers offering her his jacket. Most importantly of all, however, is how Amanda's fall reunites Emily with her mother, in a manner of speaking. Amanda is in a medically-induced coma, while her baby boy (delivered via emergency C-section) is still in recovery. News of Amanda's fall is picked up on the radio, and because it's TV and the news you need to hear always comes on just as you're turning the dial, Amanda's mother hears about it and makes for the hospital.
As Emily wanders through the hospital, she comes across Kara (Jennifer Jason Leigh), her mother, at Amanda's bedside, singing to her. I really wasn't expecting that moment of recognition in Emily's eyes to be as poignant as it was. Maybe it's just the Spanish soap opera sensibilities of my upbringing, but I guess I expected there would be a ton of tears, and loads of shouting. I'm glad that it was more subdued than all that, though I suppose it could go still go in the melodramatic direction, since this was a one-way reunion. Kara doesn't know that "Amanda" isn't her daughter, which should lead to some pretty tense moments where mother and daughter all but brush against one another without mother realizing the significance. Of course, when I say that Emily's moment of recognition is poignant, it's as much because of her flashback as it is because of the search finally paying off, to a certain degree. When Emily sees her mother, it triggers a repressed memory in which she and her mother are swimming out at sea. We can hear David Clarke shouting frantically from the shore. Kara tells young Amanda that they're going to play one last water game: they're going to pretend to sleep underwater. It's genuinely chilling, and all the more so when you consider how deep Emily's subconscious had to go to be able to repress the trauma of her mother attempting to kill her. If nothing else, it illustrates why David Clarke, according to Victoria, cited Kara as the source of all his problems. Kara, for her part, seems adept at playing the game herself, as she knows Aiden is a fake, and stunguns him (because he had to come back, like a moron) and locks him in Murphy's hotel room as she goes off to search for our late white-haired friend before hearing the fateful radio broadcast and changing course. Emily's mother is back in the Hamptons, and she thinks her daughter's life is in the balance. I suppose if Emily's secret gets out, it just might be.
Credit: ABC
The rest of the episode kind of feels insubstantial by comparison, even though there's a lot of interesting stuff happening. Daniel (Josh Bowman) discovers that his father is having Ashley (Ashley Madekwe) spy on him. However, Ashley has an attack of conscience and decides she doesn't want to spy for Conrad (Henry Czerny) anymore, perhaps because she feels she owes Daniel for placing his trust in her (by telling Ashley that his mother's kidnapping was a fraud; a ploy to win Ashley's trust, I presume - maybe Danny Boy is actually better at the game than we think?). Meanwhile, Nolan (Gabriel Mann) discovers via Padma (Dilshad Vadsaria) that his father has passed away, leading to the most emotional arc we've really gotten from Nolan thus far, as he goes to the storage shelter where all of his father's worldly possessions are collected to both reconnect and say goodbye. Oh, and also to flirt with Padma, in a relationship that's actually very sweet, and pretty much confirms that his sexuality doesn't just swing in one direction (insert requisite "What Makes You Beautiful" joke here). Lastly, we discover that Declan is being grifted by that Trey kid, who's in league with the man whose house they allegedly robbed, in a scheme to extort money from the Porters to keep the man from going to the police. It's an interesting twist, but I'm still having trouble mustering up any Give A Damn for this plot thread.
Overall, I'd say "Intuition" is dynamite just for its second half, which really hits the gas and doesn't look back. Emily is now in a position where she can't sit around deliberating her next move. She's in a real "piss or get off the pot" situation, since it's hard to tell what's going to happen next that could potentially throw a wrench in her carefully-laid plans. This is great for drama, but bad for Emily. Probably won't be too great for Jack either, who runs the risk of discovering that his Amanda isn't really his Amanda - and Heaven forbid he find out that kid isn't his. But if those possibilities weren't looming on the horizon, Revenge wouldn't be nearly as fun as it is, or as resonant.
