Episode Report Card Kelsea Stahler: C- | 35 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT Same Old Story, Same Old Song and Dance
By Kelsea Stahler | Season 3 | Episode 15 | Aired on 03.16.2014
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.It's amazing how far Revenge has brought us, just to circle back to the place we started.
Though Emily's blackouts from last week provided a potential long-term storyline, they were conveniently cleared up in a jiffy this week. Apparently, the episodes aren't genetic, they're happening because Emily still hasn't come to terms with the fact that her father loved Victoria. Get over it already, woman. When Emily says that her new mission is a rather simple blanket goal – "kill 'em all" – Nolan gets worried. Next thing we know, Aidan is kidnapping her, tying her up, and repeatedly dunking her in water to shake the blackouts out of her. Eventually, she has an epiphany and decides that everything is her father's fault. Always blaming someone else, Emily. Always.
Aidan tells her the obvious: David Clarke simply has a terrible picker and falls for the wrong women (Aidan might know a thing or two about that). Emily agrees and hops back on the revenge horse that she rode into the pilot episode: clearing her father's name. She's even got a new blast from the past witness – just like she did back in Season 1. She conveniently remembers that her father mentioned knowing an alcoholic lawyer in his journals and she knows it's Stevie. We've just come so far, haven't we?
And we know that Stevie was an alcoholic because in yet another Jack-is-annoyingly-stubborn storyline, Jack is refusing to deal with Stevie and her announcement about her being his mother. She earns some credit when someone tries to buy Jack's dream house out from under him and she fixes it so Jack can have it back, but it's her story about being an alcoholic that really wins him over. She says that the Graysons were her alcohol trigger – least surprising revelation ever – but that she's ready to face them now. That's certainly the way to Jack's barricaded, little heart.
Meanwhile, Victoria's having a rough week. First, Patrick gets in a fight at Brennan's funeral when he's dumb enough to call the guy a rapist in front of his tough guy friends. Victoria is furious, so she teams up with Nolan, of all people, to save Patrick by shipping him off. They pay an artist from Italy to offer him an apprenticeship, which he accepts because he wants to make Victoria proud and stop doing dark things to protect her. At least the expulsion of this storyline means we can stop visiting the weekly "Why do you do everything wrong all the time, Patrick?" moment. Thank God for that.
Of course, that doesn't really help out with Victoria's other headache: Stevie is digging her claws into Grayson Manor. Victoria says she's going to block Stevie's plans by getting the home declared a historical landmark – why? Because it was built before Victoria's first botox injection? Pretty sure there's no real reason this mansion could qualify as a landmark since it was built after Conrad's divorce from Stevie, which I'm guessing didn't happen a century ago. Ridiculous original plan or not, however, Victoria plans to take Stevie down, which is good, because I was starting to think she was going soft with all that Patrick stuff. Okay, not really. She did just watch a man die with glee.
Finally there's the episode's cherry on top: Daniel's obsession with catching Emily doing something wrong leads him to hire a private investigator who shows him proof of Aidan and Emily's romance. They've only kissed on about a million Hamptons beaches without getting caught at this point. It's about damn time.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We open on Emily destroying the infinity symbol her father carved on the porch -- the one she rubs her fingers over every time she questions why she does anything. Naturally, we learn that it's the work of another blackout. Only Emily isn't willing to get medical attention; she tells Nolan that she needs to finish what she started. When Nolan is confused, she delivers that one-liner ABC has used on every Revenge promo for months: "I'm gonna kill 'em all."
Meanwhile, Stevie is set on earning her place in the Hamptons back. First, she visits Jack as he gets the news that he lost his house due to an all-cash offer. Stevie begs Jack to hear her out and offers him a box of photos of her with Jack as a baby. She says that Carl Sr. sent her mementos over the years like sailing ribbons and such so that she could bear being away. But when she inevitably chalks her absence up to a "secret" that's too "complicated" to reveal, Jack tells her to leave.
So she then moves on to Grayson Manor, to make sure Victoria is packing things up. Of course, Victoria thinks she can get her lawyers to pull some shady tricks to get her to keep the house. Too bad Stevie is a big-deal lawyer who knows that Victoria's legal team is full of it. How could Victoria be so sloppy?
Somewhere on Long Island, Patrick is attending Jimmy Brennan's memorial service at a dive bar. Because he's got a death wish, Patrick decides this is a great place and time to declare Brennan a rapist and spit on his photo. He gets his ass handed to him quite literally, but for someone who just got "beaten bloody by a bunch of thugs" in the previous scene, Patrick sure looks good when his mother shows up to reprimand him. Still, it leads Victoria to the right conclusion: Patrick doesn't care if he lives or dies.
Because he's got nothing else going on, Daniel hires a private investigator to follow Emily and find out what she's doing with Conrad. He doesn't need one for the man himself because he's got Charlotte planted in Conrad's office as his intern. Conrad's fake daughter playing his Gal Friday? Not creepy at all.
After Aidan gets a little intervention chat from Nolan, he decides maybe he'll forgive Emily for trying to kill him after all and help her break out of her new self-destructive pattern. When Emily sneaks into Conrad's South Fork Inn room with a choke wire in her hands -- part of the "kill 'em all" plan -- Aidan comes in just as she scurries under the bed. He knows her well, so he reaches under the bed and pulls her out. Next thing she knows, Emily is tied up in a warehouse with Aidan, who says she's safe from herself and tells her he's going to use Takaeda's favorite memory-jogging technique to get her to see the truth. He grabs her and dunks her in a tank of water. Apparently, this is a gesture of love in this freaky revenge-driven world.