Episode Report Card Pablo G: A- | 3 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Homecoming
By Pablo G | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.21.2011
Nolan sits alone outside at a table that might be outside his mansion (there are weird statues of dolphins behind him), watching video of the party on his iPad. He somehow managed to catch Daniel and his friend about to do coke before Amanda bumped into Daniel, complete with audio. Nolan's interrupted by a phone call from Jack about selling his boat. They hang up after coming to an agreement and Jack is left sad with only Sammy to give him comfort. Nolan, meanwhile, notices Amanda in the video, pauses it and stretch zooms his iPad on her face. He smirks to himself.
Amanda comes home to a dark, drafty home -- the kind of place that has either been broken into or is about to be host to an unwelcome guest. On cue, Nolan appears behind Amanda and greets her as "Amanda." In a patronizing tone he tells Amanda he almost didn't recognize her. She responds by kneeing him and slamming him up against a wooden column. "Do you know how easy it would be for me crush your windpipe?" Nolan gets her to back off by invoking her father's memory and asking how he can help. Nolan: "No one wants this imperious cadre of toxic phonies to eat it more than yours truly." He witnessed first-hand what the Graysons did to Amanda's father and thinks they're too hard-core for Amanda to take on alone. She says she can handle it just fine and will take him down if he gets in her way. He reminds her he just wants to help, and also reminds her he can be just as powerful an enemy as any of them. Before he leaves, he cements his spineless lackey role by bringing up the fact Jack still carries a torch for little Amanda Clarke. Amanda: "Amanda Clarke no longer exists."
FLASHBACK: A teenage Amanda is emancipated from incarceration on her birthday at a juvenile facility for girls. She has long, black, "Emily The Strange" hair and wears a black hoodie out the front barbed wire gate of the compound where she's met by a black Escalade. A younger Nolan gets out and greets her with a gift from her father. Amanda doesn't care much for that since she hasn't seen her father in ten years. Nolan's face goes blank when he realizes Amanda doesn't know her father passed away six weeks ago. Even so, Amanda believes her father was a murderer and a liar. Nolan insists she should see what's inside the gift -- it's a large wooden box with the infinity X infinity symbol carved on the top -- because there was more to the story than she knows. As she opens the box and sees evidence everything she's known might be wrong, Nolan explains Amanda's father was the first to believe in him and invest in his company. Since Amanda is now 18, she's officially forty-nine percent owner of his company. Nolan jokes that she doesn't have to come to the board meetings held every other week. She ignores him and reads a letter from her father that was a provision that anticipated she wouldn't be reading it unless she was free and he was dead. The voice-over of the letter carries us out of the /FLASHBACK and brings us back to Memorial Day evening. Amanda is going through the items in the box -- letters and journals from over the years exonerating her father and explaining who was responsible for his downfall. David letter voice-over: "All I ask is that you promise to do the one thing that's been so hard for me to do: forgive." Amanda's not down with that. Amanda voice-over: "When deception cuts this deep, someone has to pay. My father's chance to bring justice to the truly guilty was stolen from him. His only option was to forgive. I have others." She marks a red "X" on Lydia's face in a Grayson Corporation company photo.