Revenge bounded back for its second season premiere (moving over to Sunday and up an hour) with an episode that was equal parts silly and awesome.
First up, we’re eight weeks past the events of the finale in Hamptons-time, but because they’re wicked like that, the episode opens with a flash forward to Labor Day weekend and Jack’s boat in pieces, sunken below the water, and a mystery arm discovered among the wreckage. NO!
Dial it back to the “present” and Emily is going through some sort of weird visualization-while-drowning thing to tap her memories of her mother and Takeda (a recast Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) is not amused. There’s also an unnamed dude in the mix with Takeda, who cuts a very pissed off Emily loose. She admits to Takeda what she was doing and he pretty much tells her she’s on her own if she fails. Not too long after, unnamed dude sets off for the Hamptons behind Emily to keep an eye on her. It’s fairly clear, though, that Takeda’s on her shit list for his Amanda shenanigans.
Emily arrives in New York as Nolan is mid-boxing lesson and they pick up right where they left off as partners in crime. They head back to the Hamptons and research the hospital Emily saw in her vision and head upstate to find it deserted. Emily recalls that her mom was confined to the psych ward and then finds the family infinity symbol on one of the restraining straps. Nolan finds visitor logs that show her mom was alive well after her presumed death and that David and Victoria had visited her. And, the Graysons shuttered the hospital in 1993 as part of their laundry list of no good very bad things.
Charlotte survived her OD and is 60-days clean but we find out pretty quickly that while that seems to be too good to be true and too easy, she’s clean because Victoria is alive and she’s the only one who knows—part of a ruse to help Charlotte get her money. Charlotte spills it to Emily when Grayson fakes her blood test to keep her locked up.
Jack and Amanda are feeling their way around impending parenthood and she’s a stage 5 clinger while he’s sleeping and drinking on the boat. He breaks away long enough to go see Emily and she finally asks the million dollar Q about whether he’s sure the baby is his, so HOPEFULLY we’ll actually get an answer to that. In the land of YAWN, Daniel and Ashley are shacked up with zero chemistry and he’s deep in the bottle again and prone to staring down at Emily’s house. Emily has a stilted cordial greeting with them and they part after agreeing to have lunch (on the 10th of Never, I’m guessing).
Thanks to another handy webcam in bric-a-brac, Emily and Nolan discover that Victoria is in liege with the white haired man, blew up her own plane, and has sights on doing in Emily next.
And we’re off!
I like that they just jumped back in. I think I called it last year that if this went over one season, we’d be getting a revenge arc a year so that was true. I hope we find out Emily’s mom is still alive because Jennifer Jason Leigh is badass.
There was no shortage of great one liners from Nolan. My favorite was his very droll query to Emily about whether Victoria mght be looking up at them from somewhere as they entered a memorial auction in her honor. Also loved that he just scoped Emily’s number of available bedrooms and ensconced himself as her roomie. So glad they know which relationship is the draw here. If we can’t get Jack back in the picture reasonably soon, I’ll take Nolan as her Guy Friday. Sidebar: also hilarious is Nolan staying in a hug with Jack just a scoche too long.
Revenge airs Sundays at 9 pm ET on City TV in Canada and on ABC in in the U.S. (in a lineup that’s now apparently underwritten by Dior). You can catch episodes online, and as Melissa covered, view the new character angle videos.
Photo Courtesy of ABC.
I came into Revenge very late in the game. It was and wasn’t on my radar last year when it premiered. A week before Season 2’s premiere I marathoned Season 1 on Netflix. I could not stop watching. It’s amazing!!!!!!
The twists and turns are sooo unexpected. Very awesome. Hope you write up more Revenge episode posts.