Revenge - Recap: Daddy Issues

The nature of the injustice visited upon David Clarke (James Tupper) has prompted Emily (Emily VanCamp) to view her father through rose-colored glasses. Had he not been so unfairly taken from her, and at such a young age, Emily might have eventually come to understand the flawed man her father had been. David Clarke was a good man, but he was far from perfect, and that's something Emily Thorne has lost sight of over the years. Because if David Clarke was a fallible man whose choices put him in a position to be taken advantage of, then what is Emily really doing this for? Whom is she avenging? "Struggle" is the episode that shows us the internal struggle Emily is facing, as the father-daughter relationship that exists in the series is one between a living woman and her living memory of the man she recalls through the prism of youth. Only through coming to a more honest reckoning of the man her father had been can Emily move forward and fully avenge him.

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In falling prey to her increasingly dangerous blackouts, Emily is left with no choice but to accelerate her plan. At the top of the episode, she announces that she's going to do what she should have done a long time ago: "I'm gonna kill them all." This, of course, has Nolan (Gabriel Mann) freaking out. With nowhere else to turn, he tracks down Aiden (Barry Sloane) and convinces him that Emily needs his help, arguing that she's approaching the point of no return. Emily is compromising her mission, and her own life in the process. And so Aiden agrees, intending to make certain that the destruction of his relationship with Emily wasn't for nothing. She must succeed in her mission. Thus, we get a wonderful thing out of this: The Aiden Mathis School of Revenge Rehabilitation. Granted, that's not what it actually is, or what they actually called it, but I'd like to think Aiden has a future in helping at-risk youths whose revenge schemes aren't working out, simply by capturing them, tying them up, and dunking their heads in basins of water until they see reason. I mean, hey, it worked for Emily: Aiden keeps insisting that she's weak, and she's allowing her blackouts to rule her, making the trenchant observation that for all her talk of wanting to kill the Graysons, every single one of her blackouts has prompted her to attack one of her allies. Hell, she nearly got Aiden killed by planting Takeda's sword in his bedroom! And so Aiden repeatedly puts her head under water until she comes to realize that her blackouts are all psychological, and the origin of the blackouts all stem from one cause: her unresolved issues with her father.

This recognition is partially the result of the most recent blackout, in which Emily awakens with a knife in her hand, having defiled the double infinity symbol her father carved into the side of the beach house on the day he was arrested. She insists that she doesn't need to see a doctor, and that she'll just figure things out on her own, but it isn't until Aiden dunks her head in the water that she learns she actually remembers far more from the days leading up to her father's arrest than she realized. Aiden encourages her to delve deeper into her memories, no matter how uncomfortable they might be, and it's here that she discovers a kind of betrayal: on the night her father and Victoria (Madeleine Stowe) vowed to run away together, Emily caught them in bed together. Furious, David lashed out at Emily for the intrusion, causing her to flee the house in the middle of night. David chased after her and, after catching up to her, pleaded with her to accept Victoria into their family. However, Emily begged her father not to be fooled by Victoria, claiming that she couldn't be trusted. David doesn't understand where all this is coming from, and Emily doesn't really know herself, beyond the strange look Victoria gave her that night. So David chooses not to believe her; and even if he did, he's overpowered by love for Victoria, so he puts all his proverbial eggs in the Victoria Grayson basket...and comes out on the losing end. Basically, the blackouts are a residual effect of Emily's latent animosity towards her father for not listening to her, as this could have all been avoided if he had.

With Aiden's help, Emily is able to forgive her father and recognize that while he was deeply flawed in his own right, in no way did he deserve what happened to him. As Aiden tellingly notes, the only mistake David Clarke made was "loving the wrong woman." Aiden's encouragement is the last push she needs to get back on track, and they part ways with a final kiss, as if acknowledging what's been lost in the push towards this revenge goal. It's a bittersweet kiss, as there's still clearly something there between the two. But this is where it must end for now, and so they part. Of course, because everything Emily does seemingly comes back around to hurt her, a photo of this kiss is obtained by a private investigator hired by Daniel (Josh Bowman) to tail Emily and find out what she's been up to. Now he has the evidence he needs for a divorce, and it's evident he doesn't plan on making this as easy a parting as the one she had with Aiden.

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Yet while Emily's story is the most interesting, that doesn't mean the rest of the episode is lacking in compelling arcs. Granted, I'm not crazy about the storyline between Jack (Nick Wechsler) and Stevie Grayson (Gail O'Grady), who is Jack's birth mother. But it provides several pieces of insight: Stevie is admittedly a deeply troubled woman, having been ruled by alcoholism so severe that she had to seek treatment. She was in rehab when she first learned she was pregnant with Jack, and though she was on the road to recovery after having him, she was still far from being what one might call "well." And so she fled, and stayed away for thirty years out of a sense of guilt, shame, and the feeling that she didn't belong. Jack is initially cold towards her, but he eventually comes to an understanding that not everyone gets a second shot. It's a sweet little story that leads not only to a resurgent relationship between the mother and son, but also between Jack and Emily, as Jack has a heart-to-heart with her after all the hardship she's faced. They even speak later on the phone like old friends, and it's here that Emily hears something that sets her mind racing. When she learns that Stevie, a high-powered attorney, was a recovering alcoholic, she checks her father's journal (in the swank new, fingerprint-protected Infinity box Nolan got her) and learns that an alcoholic lawyer visited him in prison, showing great interest in his case. We see the flashback, and it is, indeed, Stevie who visits David Clarke in prison. Obviously, things didn't work out. But could there have been ulterior motives for the visit? The plot thickens.

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The rest of the episode features a mixture of arcs that further the parental theme of the episode. We get a rare and interesting team-up between Nolan and Victoria, who pretends to be planning the murder of Stevie Grayson in order to convince Patrick (Justin Hartley) that he needs to leave the Hamptons before his impulse to defend Victoria gets him into any more trouble (at the top of the episode, he goes to Jimmy Brennan's wake, spits on his picture, and gets his ass kicked in return). Nolan also helps Patrick get a start on a new life by prompting a world famous artist to offer him a job in his Tuscan studio. Sure, Patrick actually does have artistic talent, but it's made clear that without Nolan's involvement, Patrick wouldn't have been considered.

Credit: ABC

This all leads to the most poignant moment of the episode, as Victoria fights tears as Patrick breaks it to her that he's leaving -- only for Patrick to disappear from Victoria's room as it's revealed that she's actually listening to a goodbye voicemail, since Patrick couldn't bring himself to do it in person, for fear of wavering in his commitment. It's a devastating moment, and helps to further humanize Victoria (although she's plenty human already, by my count), yet it also helps to further illustrate the theme of the connection between children and their parents. It's far more effective than the show's attempt to illustrate that theme through Charlotte (Christa B. Allen) attempting to learn the ropes of corporate business from Conrad (Henry Czerny), who is preparing for the inevitable arrival of Margaux's business magnate father. But hey, not every storyline can be a winner.

Credit: ABC

"Struggle" is a damn fine episode of Revenge, adding one mystery ("Who is Stevie and what is she up to?") to replace the mystery the episode solves ("What's causing Emily's blackouts?"). The episode's unifying theme of the complicated relationships between parents and their children helped give each storyline a greater narrative weight, and I'd love to see the show utilize that kind of storytelling approach in the future, where each plot ties into one central theme. As it stands now, Revenge is building momentum as the second half of the season really begins to take off.