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Miles and Monroe have their umpteenth armed standoff, and once again, because they are desperately in love with each other, neither of them gets killed. They get flushed out of the Tower through it sewer system, punch each other a little, then Miles goes to help rescue Charlie and Rachel while Monroe discovers that Neville has taken charge of the militia. But before Neville can convene a kangaroo court to convict Monroe and then shoot him in the face, Miles frees him and Bass scampers off to the dark plains of Colorado.
Inside the Tower, Charlie, Rachel, Aaron, and Nora fight both Dan and his Tower-protecting pals and Neville and Jason and the militia troops. When she sets off an IED that blows up Dan and his crew, Nora is grievously wounded, but rather than getting her help, Rachel and Aaron go to turn the power on while Charlie just flails around ineffectually. Miles finds them, but before he can do much but make a constipated emotion face, Nora dies in his arms.
Rachel and Aaron manage to get to the control room on level twelve that holds the power switches. Aaron, who discovered that the Tower operating system is built on code he wrote in college, switches the power back on. Everyone we've met who isn't dead or at the Tower watches in delighted awe as their fans and lights and sophisticated weapons systems all switch back on.
But! Randall survived last week's Tower massacre, and he's locked himself inside the secret inner twelfth-floor room that controls all the (remaining? Still armed? Sure) missiles in the country. He immediately fires them all at Atlanta and Philadelphia, thus wiping out all the entrenched power on the East Coast, and then kills himself. And in Cuba, at fucking Guantanamo Bay, even, someone whose lackey addresses him as "Mr. President" is delighted to have power, the better to see his extensive collection of dead animals by.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously on Revolution: The lights went out, and everyone lost their shit--this time to a plinky acoustic soundtrack? WTF. Man, Miles needs a haircut.
We pick up where we left off in November, with Miles and Monroe in an armed standoff. Only the geography is a little different. They point their giant guns at each other and finger the triggers erotically, but before they can finally kill each other in a repressed homosexual suicide pact, Tower guards intrude, forcing Miles and Monroe to fight back and then flee with Nora, into what's either the Tower's sewer or its hydraulic power source. Naturally, the Tower guards follow them and shoot at them so they fall in the water. Nora surfaces and screams for Miles. Gosh! Do you think it's remotely possible that he drowned in the first five minutes of the episode?
Randall (still alive! Colm Feore is hard to kill) finds Dick Cheney's secret bunker, now stripped of weapons. He pulls a framed photo of George W. off the wall and smashes the glass, finding a swipe card behind the portrait.
Back in Tower Heights HQ, Grace is still fearmongering about how turning the power back on could make the nanites set the world on fire. Yes, but if you don't turn the power back on, I will never find out what Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt's babies look like, and you get in the way of that I will cut a bitch. One of the guards who was after Miles and Monroe reports to Dan that the dictator and his buddies have disappeared. Dan relates this information dispassionately, then tells Rachel if she tries to get to level twelve and turn the power back on, he'll kill her. Has no one realized that death threats don't work on a nihilist?
Neville comes into a tent to talk to Franklin about the revolution (ha-ha, get it? Ugh) he's fomenting. Franklin is somewhat less than bullish on Neville's chances of overthrowing Monroe, but Neville says he's going to let Franklin go rather than slaughter him, because he's not a capricious murderer like Monroe. He assures him he's going to send him home to his wife, but without his weapon--and then Neville picks up Franklin's gun, fires twice into the tent wall, then shoots Franklin dead. He plants the gun on Franklin and then is pointing his own weapon at him to make it look like Franklin drew on him when the others, including Jason, rush in. Man. Unless you are Giancarlo Esposito, it just does not pay to be darker than a glass of milk on this show.
Miles got flushed out of the Tower, apparently, because he's sprawled unconscious and sopping on a riverbank. He wakes up to Monroe's fist in his face. Nice of Bass to wait till he regained consciousness rather than just stomping his head in while he was blacked out. So now they fight. Again. Some more. Until they're interrupted by a gunshot from a sniper on a nearby ridge. Monroe identifies himself and tells the man to hold his fire, but this just pisses the guy off, because he shoots at Monroe again, missing, and then flees. You'd think target practice would have been part of the militia's training at some point. When Monroe turns back to Miles, he's fucked off somewhere.
Flashback, ten years after the blackout. It's Miles's birthday and he and Monroe are having drinks in a café. In an attempt to be casual and devil-may-care, they have unbuttoned the very top buttons of their chokingly high-collared military jackets and are reminiscing about a one-legged stripper they met in Fort Lauderdale for Miles's twenty-first birthday. It's kind of adorable in a bro-ey sort of way, until a bomb smashes in the window of the café.
Good to see Apple wireless keyboards survive after the apocalypse. Aaron taps his way through a bunch of code, and whatever he sees alarms him, because he hauls Grace over to show her what he found: something he wrote at MIT. Of course, it is his code, she confirms. Turns out the university sold Aaron's code to the Department of Defense, and that's the basis of the Tower's OS. Aaron is comically peevish about the intellectual property theft, and Rachel protests that she didn't know anything about it. Grace asks Aaron why he thought Ben found him out of the millions of people wandering the wilds of East Chicagoland--Aaron was under the impression that it was just a happy coincidence! Aaron. Catch up, dummy.
Neville has loaded up the entrance to the Tower with about eight billion pounds of explosives, which gives Jason a sad, because he still hasn't gotten Charlie to touch his bathing suit area. Neville's all, masturbate on your own time, you're the only one I can trust out here so let's work together and hope we'll see your mom again someday, hmm? Jason tries to bargain for Rachel and Charlie's lives, but before Neville can lie through his teeth and agree, a soldier runs up with a report of a Monroe sighting.
Tower. Rachel decides to have a little heart-to-heart with Grace about Danny's premature birth. She rhapsodizes about her precious wee baby and tries to convince Grace to help her maybe murder everyone on earth because her kid died. Grace reminds Rachel that lots of people's kids died (including Grace's asthmatic son, probably), and refuses to help set the planet on fire, even if it's a billion-to-one chance. So Rachel chloroforms Grace and shoves her in a cabinet. She pulls the swipe card Randall had earlier (or one just like it--where did she get that?) from her pocket and gives Charlie and Aaron, who just showed up, Meaningful Looks of Let's Go Burn Everything Down, Motherfuckers.
Miles walks a lonely road, the only road that he has ever known. He flashes back to the aftermath of that café bombing: Nora's sitting by his bed when he wakes up, face scratched up but otherwise looking pretty okay. He asks what happened, and Monroe tells him it was the rebels. As he rants about the ungrateful bastards who want to bring back the United States, Nora makes her best I'm Not Guilty face. Miles gets out of bed, with some help, and looks out the window, where militia soldiers are stacking five coffins in a wagon. Five bombers? Miles asks. Monroe elaborates that one coffin holds the bomber, and the other four hold his wife and kids. Ah...so the Butcher of Baltimore finally grows a conscience over the deaths of three children?
Tower. Aaron is still fiddling with the code and bitching about how it was stolen from him. He says there's a virtual back door built into the code, which Rachel doesn't seem to understand all of a sudden (wasn't she a super tech genius like five minutes ago?). Aaron elaborates that he thinks the blackout went worldwide on purpose rather than by accident. Nora finds them (guess she didn't get flushed down the big Tower toilet) and hugs Charlie. Rachel asks where Miles is.
He's getting tackled by Monroe again. Miles knocks Monroe down and trudges off to try and help Rachel and Charlie. Monroe's all, I LOVE YOU COME BACK SO I CAN SHOW YOU HOW MUCH MY FIST LOVES YOUR FACE while Miles points out that they've done this like fourteen times already and also Monroe might want to go deal with that little mutiny problem he has. Monroe just howls behind him about how Miles was the one who ruined their idyllic life of massacring civilians by trying to kill him five years ago. Miles stops and listens to the crazy man.
Monroe's all butthurt that Miles never gave him an explanation for why he tried to assassinate him. Murdering children might have had something to do with it, Miles says, but Monroe just waaahs that he did it all for Miles because he loooooves him. Miles, dump this motherfucker already. Before they can kill each other or rip their pants off and go to town, a helicopter finds them and opens fire. Miles and Monroe run for the woods in opposite directions, Monroe plowing directly into the fist of a man in a militia uniform.
Nora explains the Miles-got-flushed problem to Rachel as they both deal with the awkward "sooooo, we both slept with Miles" tension that's vibrating through the scene. They come to the end of the surprisingly spacious ventilation shaft they're walking through, which is opposite a stairway to level twelve. In their way: Dan and a bunch of others. But Nora has an idea.
Soldiers dump Monroe in a tent, at Neville's feet. Neville grins chillingly and says, "General. There's been a change in management."
The explosives at the Tower entrance go off and Captain Riley picks his way through the rubble. The door isn't exactly open, but there's light coming from underneath it.
Monroe, tied to a post, wants to chat with Neville about how he got to Colorado. Neville laughs that Miles brought him here, isn't that funny? Monroe swears to kill Neville and Julia, but Monroe gets right to the elephant in the room, in a fashion that is so delightful I will transcribe it: "Sir. I could never say this under your employ. But you have become foolish and deranged. And you have a borderline erotic fixation on Miles Matheson. There. I said it. I feel better."
Borderline? Borderline? I'm pretty sure Monroe has a slam book tucked away in his rucksack with "Mrs. Sebastian Matheson" scribbled all over it. He probably sleeps cuddled up to a tattered pair of Miles's boxers. Anyway. Monroe taunts Neville to shoot him, but Neville demurs that civilized people have trials before shooting others in the face. It's kind of awesome how grandiose and power-drunk Neville has gotten so quickly. Jason enters to tell Neville about the door, and they go off to see what they can see. I think it's a bad thing to leave Monroe to his own devices, no?
Tower. Dan and his itchy-fingered friends creep silently through the corridors of level eleven. Charlie, Nora, and the others are hiding around a corner. Dan steps agilely over a trip wire, so there goes Nora's great plan. Instead she flings a fire extinguisher at Dan's right-hand man, who shoots it out of the air with a coilgun, triggering the booby trap Nora had set. Fire erupts in the hallway, incinerating or disabling Dan's entire crew. And Nora takes a good hit to the gut, either from the coilgun or from a piece of her incendiary device.
Monroe prison tent. Miles has found his way back to camp, and in his infinite fucking perversion, cuts the ties binding Monroe's hands. He starts on his own monologue about why he hasn't been able to kill Monroe any of the many, many, many times he's had the option of saving the entire northeastern United States from this mass-murdering kookoo pants, and sums it up with "We're still brothers. And as much as I hate that--and I tell you I do--that's never going to change." So convenient of Miles to forget that Monroe killed his ACTUAL BROTHER. Miles tells Monroe to run, then hollers, "Monroe's escaping!" Monroe flees into the woods, while Miles makes a break for the door to the Tower.
Grace is awake. She comes out of the room she was knocked out in and runs directly into Neville, Jason, and a detachment of soldiers. Neville recognizes Grace.
Nora's still bleeding everywhere. Charlie wants to go back to the infirmary, but Rachel has spotted the militia and in a case of one person's life versus her precious mission to avenge Danny, guess who loses. Death-wish Nora takes Rachel's side while Charlie stomps her foot childishly, all but screaming WHY DO YOU STILL LOVE DANNY MORE THAN ME?! You all know I can't stand Charlie, but she has a point. She's alive (as is Nora, for the moment) and Danny is not. Rachel is a terrible person, because she just tells them to lock the door, takes Aaron with her and fucks off to set the world on fire.
A militia soldier finds the locked door to Charlie and Nora's room, bursts in, and is about to shoot Nora when Charlie bashes him over the head with a vase. She tries to fight with this guy who's like three times her size, and is losing heartily, but just in time Miles pops up to stab the guy in the throat. Charlie flails around on the floor, wheezing, while Miles frets over Nora's hideous gut wound. She suicidally tells him to go help Rachel, but Miles just gravels that he's not leaving her to bleed to death.
With Charlie on point, Miles carries Nora in slow motion to the infirmary. Charlie decides it's a good idea to stare back at Miles and Nora rather than looking where she's going as they do this, but before they can get to the infirmary, Nora dies in Miles's arms. Minority body count: RIP, Nicholas, Jim, Alec, Franklin, and Nora. Charlie and Miles cry over Nora, but it's okay, guys, she's in a better place, seducing teenage football players in Dillon, Texas. It's nice there. Miles gets all trembly and emotional and I swear he's like an eyelash from screaming, "KHAAAAAAN!!!"
Level twelve. Everyone manages to get there all at once: Grace; Rachel and Aaron; Neville, Jason, and the soldiers; Miles and Charlie. Neville tells Rachel to freeze and he won't shoot her because he promised Jason. Before Neville can take Rachel and Aaron into custody, Miles and Charlie open fire on him and his men. Grace watches all this from, like, a cubbyhole somewhere. Rachel runs for the Special Room Where the Power Lives, and swipes herself, Aaron, Charlie, and Miles in with her card. Rachel asks after Nora, and Charlie snaps that she's dead, Mom. Ah. Well. Those two minutes of feeling like Bratniss was a good person were really taxing on me.
Aaron finds the right computer, somehow, and does his nerdy typey thing. Outside the room, Neville sends a soldier to get the explosives so they can blow the door open and kill everyone inside. He asks if Jason has a problem with that. Wouldn't Jason enjoy electricity? He's a twenty-ish-year-old man who's never had access to Internet porn. Those old copies of Penthouse have got to be pretty ragged by now.
More high-stakes typing. Aaron gets to the final prompt and stops, asking what will happen if Grace is right and they end the world. Well...you won't care, I guess. Because you'll be dead. But on the upside, no more ass chafing. Aaron pushes the button.
The shot is a wide one of Planet Earth. Lights start flickering back on all over the continents. In a candlelit room, Julia Neville looks up as her ceiling fan comes on. Priscilla Pittman, doing dishes, smiles at her daughter and then looks up, puzzled, when her kitchen lights switch on. President Foster is all FUCK YEAH, TURN THE FRIDGE ON AND MAKE ME SOME ICEBOX PIE. No, actually, she tells her second-in-command to get the tanks and choppers ready to obliterate Philadelphia.
In the Tower control room, Aaron and Rachel watch the screens displaying power across America. Outside, Monroe is alone in the middle of a vast plane as a vicious, awe-inspiring lightning storm heats up.
Charlie, Rachel, Miles, and Aaron look at each other, all, what now? Rachel apologizes for Nora's death. And then Randall, in a glassed-in separate room, shoots the key-swipe panel that lets others access his room. Rachel's surprised to see him, since everyone who was with him got made into spaghetti sauce last week. He thanks them for turning the power on and villains about how Aaron helped him achieve his mysterious goals, which apparently do not include power for everyone. And then he flips some switches labeled "override." Miles is trying to smash or shoot his way through the glass to get at Randall, to no effect.
Randall pushes a comically huge, glowing red button, and outside in different locations a bunch of bay doors begin opening: he's launching intercontinental ballistic missiles at Atlanta and Philadelphia. (Why not California? Is Randall Team Affleck?) Randall shoots the red button and monologues some more about burning down the old so new things can grow. He drops a bunch of clichés about uniting the nation, since a house divided and all that. Rachel makes her cryface. "I'm a patriot, Rachel," Randall finishes, and then shoots himself in the head. Rachel, Miles, Charlie, and Aaron watch helplessly as the screen displays the missiles moving toward Atlanta and Philadelphia.
In a room full of stuffed animal heads, a man turns a lamp on and off repeatedly. A huge American flag is under glass on one wall. A lackey tells him, "Sir, Randall Flynn did it. It's time to go home, Mr. President." We don't see the man's face. I guess Ben Affleck is season's special guest star. The shot pans out across a harbor and the card on the screen reads: United States Colony, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Oh, for fuck's sake.