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Things are escalating rather quickly in the Hamptons, which makes sense since there are only weeks between us and a Grayson wedding. Of course, there are about a thousand hurdles we've got to traverse before we finally find out who's standing over Emily with a gun in his or her hands. For now, we've got a handful of distractions.
Up first, is a distraction with a handsome, chiseled jaw. Patrick is a strange potential psychopath – even if his homicidal streak was in service of his mother, the rational solution is never "attempt to kill Conrad by messing with his brakes." Naturally, when Emily finds out he and Nolan are in overnight love (all the way overnight), she demands they break up, only she doesn't tell him the actual reason why. Eventually, this leads him to drink at the Stowaway, where Jack blurts out that Emily told him Patrick tried to kill Conrad. It takes them far too long to figure out that obviously, they're both separate triangle slices of Emily's inner circle and they're furious.
Jack agrees to stay friends with Nolan, but he wants the could-be murderer out of Nolan's life, she he tells Conrad the truth about the brake-tampering. In a flash, Patrick is headed out of town as Victoria White Fangs him, pushing him and shoving a bag of money at him until he leaves town. And while Nolan weeps over lasagna with Jack, Patrick's gone, gone, gone.
Meanwhile, two things have returned to the Graysons. After Conrad attempts to sell the Manor, Emily tampers with the city records so that it appears that shoreline is rapidly disappearing. Their real estate agent stops the sale of the home to a Saudi buyer with a pile of cash and then blacklists the house throughout the state. Emily will never lose the apparently integral piece of her plan. Huzzah.
But keeping the house isn't enough to make Victoria stay with Conrad, so Emily gives her another bone: Aidan leads her to a warehouse full of gold bars: the stolen Grayson fortune. Now Victoria and Conrad have a nice little busy-making project to keep them out of Emily's hair until the wedding… if it actually happens.
Charlotte has a plan of her own: She's renovating the Stowaway and uses it as an excuse to make Daniel run into his ex-girlfriend, who almost killed in a car accident. She's poor and can't pay her rehab bills because of a terrible settlement the Graysons drafted. Through a series of orchestrated events, Charlotte pushes Daniel and Sarah back together and gives Daniel a reason to remember what he loved about her so that his foundations with Emily might be shaken. (And Daniel's a puppy, so those foundations had better brace themselves.)
Of course, this is going to seriously mess with Emily's killer plan. And now that Jack and Nolan are furious with her, she's forced to do what she should have done all along: fill them in on all of it. Her peace offering is the details of her August 8th idea: she's going to frame Victoria for her own death. Of course, seeing as she can't ensure her relationship isn't compromised while she's not looking, who's to say that her faked death goes exactly as planned. We definitely don't have the full story yet. After all, we got tons of hints at how murderous Patrick might be in service of Victoria – and while Conrad "plucked" him away, we all know those pesky plucked hairs eventually grow back.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!It's high time we get a whiff of Emily's eventual plunge into the water, and Revenge is finally ready to deliver. But first, she has to give everyone else a chance to make a mess of things.
We open with one hell of a messy house at Nolan's. Emily sneaks away from Daniel in the morning and when she finds Nolan's house a wreck and Nolan asleep in the bathtub, she assumes the worst. But actually Nolan's having the best, most relaxing morning ever because he and Patrick finally consummated their relationship (apparently, they did so all over the house). Emily tells him he needs to break up with Patrick because he occasionally tries to kill people. Nolan is indignant because he thought Emily would somehow let him have his own life. Silly Nolan.
Meanwhile, Victoria has summoned the Grayson bunch for breakfast to discuss Emily and Daniel's wedding, assuming she's got a chance to mock Emily for her icy relationship with Daniel. Instead, Emily and Daniel are all smiles and PDA, announcing their plan to bring the whole family on their honeymoon, while Victoria has violin music playing that's not unlike Kate Winslet's brunch soundtrack on the Titanic. Subtle, Victoria.
The brunch is somewhat productive, however, because Conrad drops one helluva knowledge bomb. He's just sold Grayson Manor. This upsets Emily; the house is apparently integral to her takedown plan. Because the house was conveniently purchased by a "Saudi Royal" in cash, Emily has to get crafty to unravel the real estate deal.
While Victoria is preparing to part with her home, she decides that rather than risking Conrad seizing her gallery in his quest for instant cash, she'll put it in Patrick's name. But her gift of trust in Patrick comes with a caveat: Victoria tells her son that she knows he tried to kill Conrad. While staring into his pretty, pretty eyes, she momentarily confuses the word "psychopathic" with "selfless" and praises her son for trying to protect her. She says she made sure Conrad will never know Patrick tried to kill him and then Patrick calls Victoria "mom" which makes her think he's just about this sweetest bloodthirsty guy that ever walked the earth. Aww?
Charlotte is becoming a mini-Victoria in service of her brother. She's taken to remodeling the Stowaway for greater profitability – something Jack used to be opposed to and suddenly doesn't mind. She gets Daniel into her web by asking him for business advice and having him pick up a cake at the bakery where his ex-girlfriend works. Fun fact: this is the ex-girlfriend he almost killed while driving drunk and who was paid to be silent by the evil Grayson lawyers. All it takes is one look at Daniel for her to make a scene and shame him in front of the entire bakery. While he got to run off into the sunset, she was left with years and years of rehab bills. Apparently, that settlement was full of lots of fancy language that screwed her big time.
Daniel is rightfully torn up over his run-in with Sarah, because unlike the rest of his family, he's not heartless. He's beating himself up for never trying harder to reach out to her and decides he's going to find the original settlement papers and figure out what's really in them. With that piece in place, Charlotte then calls the bakery and complains about Sarah so she gets fired and Daniel can feel even worse about her situation.
While Charlotte is trying to break up Emily's "relationship," Patrick is trying to keep his intact. He visits Nolan at home and tries to make amends. Patrick calls his attempt to kill Conrad impulsive and stupid, but we know better than to trust him. Then Nolan begins the typical breakup speech: We're great together, if only we met in another time and another place… yadda yadda yadda. And while Nolan wants to listen to Emily, Patrick is looking all romantic and swoony so they kiss instead of breaking up. Sorry, Ems.
Later that night, Daniel is reading the settlement in the city and Emily tells him to stay there because she's having the foundation repaired on their house. He's happy to stay so he can keep reading himself into a pit of despair. And Emily's happy because she likes when her lies work.
As soon as we see Aidan is involved at the house and that he's inexplicably making holes in Em's walls, it becomes clear that perhaps her beach house's "foundation problems" have something to do with the faulty file she switched out for Grayson Manor at the County Clerk's office. It also becomes clear that keeping Daniel away was just an excuse to have sex with Aidan while they bust down walls. Is anyone else wondering how the hell Emily got caught kissing Jack in the dead of winter at that house and somehow no one has noticed that she's literally busting through dry wall and having passionate sex with her supposed enemy now?
At the same moment, Nolan is looking to drown his sorrows with his old friend Jack. When he tells Jack that he's down because he had to break up with Patrick, Jack lets him in on a little "secret." Thanks to a call from Emily, he now knows that Patrick tried to kill Conrad. No longer preoccupied with losing someone he calls "the one" (really Nolan?), Nolan realizes that Jack must be in on Emily's true identity. That means he's not alone on the dark side, but Jack does not take it so well. (Also, it's just a little insulting to both of them that they didn't figure this out earlier.)
Over on the beach, Emily's fake foundation problems work wonders on the entirely gullible Morgan. Emily spins a yarn about the shifting sands on "this side of the island" and says she's just going to keep fixing the foundation of her house until she runs out of money (speaking of which, is she ever going to run out of money? Did she get a money tree in that care package from her papa?). This agent is apparently stupid enough to believe Em, and she runs straight to the County Clerk's office to get Emily's phony papers for Grayson Manor.
Now, Nolan is wallowing even more because a truth that should have bonded him to Jack actually made his buddy throw him out of his bar. But Nolan left his phone, so Jack's forced to come by the Nolan Estate. Nolan confesses that he's known about Emily and the plan since before David Clarke died and Jack loses it. He can't understand why they're both so connected to Emily -- oh, just perhaps the fact that she was once a sweet, little girl who lost her father to a pack of lies and the liars who spun them. No biggie. But because Jack isn't fully crazy, they agree to stay friends. And friends tell friends that Patrick is crazy and might kill again, so friend-Jack tells friend-Nolan he'll "take care of it" so Nolan won't have to break up with his potentially murderous boyfriend. And what's Jack's grand plan? He tells Conrad the truth about Patrick under the condition that they declare a ceasefire and that Conrad doesn't kill Patrick.
Victoria is temporarily distracted from her formerly estranged son when she starts to suspect that Conrad is keeping the profits from the sale of Grayson Manor. Lucky for her, Morgan comes in with the fake documents planted by Emily; Ms. Thorne made it look as if the shore has reduced by 30 feet in the last 20 years. Morgan drops the sale and she says she's putting Grayson Manor on a real estate black list. And Conrad loses again when Victoria decides she's moving out and away from him. This is a problem for Emily because the reason she needed Grayson Manor unsold is because she needed Victoria in it.
Unfortunately, Charlotte's got another problem for Emily brewing at the Stowaway, where she's relaunched the bar with miraculous success. (We know she "grew up" in Europe, but did she suddenly turn 30 and earn a degree in business, too?) Charlotte hired Sarah after getting her fired, and the jilted ex is adorably baking like a sad Cinderella while Charlotte turns Daniel's head in her direction and whispers in his ear about how the Graysons screwed her out of the money she needed for rehab, etc. Finally, Charlotte has Victoria-ed her way to a solution for her Emily problem (who she supposedly didn't hate last week, but teenagers are known to be fickle… and not run restaurants and create actual business plans, so who knows what's going on here).
All this leads Daniel to apologize to Sarah and when he does so, he takes a walk down sweet, sweet memory lane and stares into Sarah's eyes wistfully until she tells him that, in a nutshell, she still hates him to her very core. This of course, only makes him more determined to work it out.
Emily, still blind to Charlotte's plan, visits Nolan to ensure that he broke up with Patrick. He tells Em that Jack is at the Graysons' telling Conrad about Patrick's brake-tampering, so yeah… it's pretty much over. Rather than noticing that Nolan is destroyed by all of this, she reams him out for hiding Jack and "going rogue" from her. She's going on and on about needing Patrick for her plan and wanting to keep the inner circle as concentric circles instead of one big happy and Nolan rightfully points out that she sounds insane. (And it only took him two seasons to notice!) He says he needed someone to talk to, because hello, he's a human. She obtusely suggests that she's there for him, when all she's ever done is tell him to "be rational," which basically makes her a terrible friend. And that's sad, because all he ever wanted to gain from of helping Emily was her friendship. And with that, everyone's hearts just shattered into smithereens.
But Emily's sort of starting to set things right. She has Aidan show Victoria "the missing Grayson fortune" -- a room full of racks of gold bars… or really high quality chocolate. (What? It looked really, really fake. So sue me.) She immediately goes to Conrad and confronts him about the piles of gold he's been hiding, but he actually has no idea where they are because Aidan's the one who stole them in the first place, muahaha. Luckily, Conrad's got a very good momentary excuse to sidestep her accusation: he knows that Patrick is the one who tried to kill him. And Conrad says he's not going to kill Patrick, he's just going to "pluck him" away forever, like an eyebrow hair -- but Conrad, my dear, those things always come back.
With that, Victoria is forced to White Fang the only thing she's ever loved this season: her illegitimate son. Victoria throws a bag of money and a plane ticket at Patrick, tells him "Go!" (just shy of "Go on, git! Nobody wants you here!") and then actually pushes him towards his car like he's some kind of wild animal. Patrick eventually drives away, leaving Victoria to bicker with Conrad about how they got all their money back suddenly. Emily and Aidan have given these two unruly children an afternoon art project to keep them busy until the wedding. Muahaha?
But Em's far from happy. Her resolve is shaken now that Nolan is so upset with her. Aidan points out that it will only be a few weeks until her revenge is complete, and then they will leave the Hamptons and be together forever and ever and ever. So she does the only thing she can to keep her other, disgruntled minions in line…
She tells them the truth. Emily visits Nolan and Jack during their boys' night and says that since they're so important to her, in their "last few weeks" together she wants to be honest with them. In order to fulfill her revenge plan properly, they're going to have to accept her goin' on and gittin'. Why? Oh, just because she's planning to fake her own death on August 8th and pin the whole thing on Victoria. It would probably get pretty weird if she was making out with Daniel at her beach house while Victoria rotted in jail for killing her, no? And of course, this is the only (and I mean only) acceptable reason for Emily inviting her in-laws to come on her honeymoon with her. She'd either have to be insane, or trying to frame them for murder, right?
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