Episode Report Card Kelsea Stahler: A | 51 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT So, We're Supposed to Turn on Emily, Right?
By Kelsea Stahler | Season 3 | Episode 2 | Aired on 10.06.2013
Despite Nolan’s protestations and the significant weight of Jack’s condemnation, Emily still goes after Father Paul. She lures him into a dank Manhattan apartment, knocks him out, takes photos of a prostitute gyrating on top of him, and drops them off in the church collection basket. Later, when she speaks to him, Father Paul says that he was mugged and robbed, but that he didn’t press charges because the criminal obviously needed his money more than he did. He is actually the best person to have ever appeared on this show.
And if that wasn’t enough to drive home Emily’s guilt, he then says the Graysons threw him out, then consoles her over the fact that her father won’t be able to walk her down the aisle, and helps find her a replacement for the unconditional love she missed as a child. While he’s walking her around the soup kitchen he helps run – because he’s actually a living saint – Emily’s dastardly deed comes to completion. She finds the will to stop it, but only just as another priest walks into the kitchen (you know, where all official priest business goes down) to fire Father Paul in front of everyone. Perhaps this mistake will help her learn? A little? A teeny, tiny smidge?
Hell, even Daniel is better than Emily these days. He’s fiercely dedicated to protecting his rotten family simply because they’re his family. He refuses to cheat on his fiancé even though it appears it could cost him a job. And he only takes that job (eventually) under the condition that he can relocate the business to the Hamptons so he can stay close to his family and his fiancé, actual business sense be damned – no major magazine could develop the relationships it needed when it’s that far outside of the city. Daniel is a sweet puppy of a guy, and it’s starting to feel like Emily doesn’t even deserve to be his fake fiancé.
Emily does her best to come back from the evil brink, using a Catholic church to ask her deceased father for forgiveness. She’s interrupted by Conrad, whose recent losses have convinced him to take Father Paul up on his soul-cleansing offer. When he realizes that Father Paul no longer works at the Parish, he’s deflated. Father Paul was his last hope and the last person he could really open up to. Not only did Emily do something terrible, she basically shot her own revenge plan in the foot when she got rid of Paul. Her plan? Find Father Paul. Not to get him his job back or make things right, but to use him as a pawn to get Conrad to confess all of his sins. Sure, it’s better than her raining fire from the sky, but it still proves that Emily might just be on a path to heartlessness.