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Rachel and Aaron managed to turn the power back off after a four-minute window, but they couldn't stop the bombs that Randall had fired at Philadelphia and Atlanta. So six months later, the Monroe Republic and the Georgia Federation are no more. Miles brought Rachel home to her father, Dr. Gene, in Texas, because she went just a little bit crazyballs after she failed to prevent Randall from incinerating like two million people.
Aaron lives nearby with the lovely new Mrs. Aaron, and Miles is undercover as mild-mannered "Stu," who certainly was never in charge of a genocidal militia, no sir! Everything is happy until a mob of bandits, led by surely evil Matt Ross, begins raiding Dr. Gene's town and murdering and raping. So Miles isn't going to stay undercover for long.
Up north in the Plains Nation, Charlie is having casual sex with bartenders when she takes breaks from her very serious business of searching for Monroe while clenching her enormous new teeth meaningfully. Monroe has joined a New Vegas fight club, and seems to be doing well on a diet of jerky and whores.
Back east in Savannah, Tom and Jason Neville have spent months searching for wife and mother Julia, but to no avail. Tom is depressed and suicidal, and convinced Julia must be dead because she would have waited for him in Atlanta until an intercontinental ballistic missile fell on her head. Tom's jerked out of his pity party when an envoy from the U.S. government, newly restored to the North American continent, arrives and blames the bombings on Monroe and Foster. Suddenly Tom has a new mission and a new enemy.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously on Revolution: So, this one time, Rachel, the most selfish woman in the world, discovered that her baby had a congenital heart defect. So she decided that it would be an awesome idea if her husband, Ben, gave the government this top-secret energy-blacking-out weapon he'd developed—with some tech stolen from the local neighborhood super genius, Aaron—and in exchange a government bigwig named Randall, would then get Ben and Rachel's baby into an experimental trial to fix his wonky heart. And also the top-secret energy-blacking-out weapon makes nanites, which are imaginary and which will also fix the baby's heart? Or his asthma? Maybe?
That baby lived and grew up to be the floppy-haired blond Danny. After Rachel ran off to live in prison with her brother-in-law Miles's ex-boyfriend, Monroe, and Ben went and got himself killed, Danny went and got himself kidnapped. Then Ben and Rachel's wretched daughter, Charlie, had to drag Miles out of his nice comfortable bar full of aged brown liquor and antique firearms to go free Danny. And then Danny got himself shot ten thousand times and apparently the magical nanites in him don't work on bullets. So the world still has no power and all of this was for nothing, except that Rachel caused millions and possibly billions of deaths because she is a selfish asshole. Oh, and Tom Neville used to torture people for Monroe but now he and his son Jason are outcasts on the run, and the president lives in Cuba. End of season one.
Beginning of Season 2! The power is switching on (magically…because the grid isn't decayed after fifteen years of disuse!) and the intercontinental ballistic missiles that Randall fired at Atlanta and Philadelphia are still on their way. Miles is counting down, super helpfully, while Aaron slaps at a computer like a monkey to try to turn the power off again.
We then jump to six months later, "somewhere in the Plains Nation." Apparently Mumford & Sons have reunited and they're playing Ozzy's greatest hits at a bar. A bartender is telling Charlie about the time the power switched on for four minutes. "People cried", he says. They said it was. "like seeing God". But he was passed out and missed the whole thing. "Where was she?" he asks. Charlie grins and oh man, she has gotten some Affleck-in-Armageddon-quality veneers in the past six months. Her acting is also in roughly the same condition as the power grid when she tells Jeff, the bartender, that the last thing she wants to talk about is the power. Seriously, it's like someone whacked Tracy Spiridakos over the head with a stunt sword and now she's learning her lines phonetically. Anyway, she and Jeff the bartender go have sleazy sex in the back room.
Willoughby, Texas. Miles comes out of a shed…or an abattoir, since he's covered in blood. Ack. He sets the shed on fire. He does not find himself a hanky and wipe off some of the blood. He looks as cheerful as he did the last time we saw him.
When Miles heads back to the fort where he's living, he's managed to wipe off the blood. Hey, Adam Beach lives there, too. And Aaron is still around and has found some way to trim his beard. A lady who seems to be the new Mrs. Aaron watches Miles walk silently past them and asks, "What's gotten into Stu?" Oh, we saw how well this worked out for poor Jim.
Rachel's house. She clips off a piece of aloe and applies it to a nasty open wound on a man's shoulder. He calls her "Doc," but she says the other man in the room is the doctor, she just helps out. She asks the man how he got hurt and he explains that his nylon jacket melted onto his skin. He was thirty miles from Atlanta when the bomb fell. Rachel flashes back to the control room and Randall pushing the button to launch the ICBMs: one of them managed to level Atlanta before they turned the power back on. The wounded man introduces himself as Neil Gibson, formerly of the Georgia Federation.
Rachel asks what's going on in the East, and the other man in the room (it's Stephen Collins, whom you might know as Reverend Camden from Seventh Heaven, or perhaps as Addison's dad from Private Practice) tells her to leave poor wounded Neil alone. Rachel calls him "Dad" and says she wants to know.
"Atlanta and Philadelphia are both gone", Neil says. Miles walks in and hears as Neil says the cities are dead zones from fallout. Georgia and Monroe troops all just wander around, not fighting. He says they should be happy to be in Texas. Miles doesn't look happy to be anywhere.
Savannah refugee camp, Georgia Federation. Neville hands a picture of Julia to a woman and asks if she's seen her. The lady has not. Jason tells his father they should take a break from searching till morning and maybe, you know, bathe or eat or something, since it doesn't look like they've been doing much of either. The camera zooms out and we see that the refugee camp goes all the way to the river.
Back at Doctor Reverend Camden's house, Miles is showing the doctor a nasty laceration on his hand, which he says came from an apple-slicing accident. Rachel tells him to be careful and merrily goes off to bed. The doctor starts suturing Miles's hand -- without any anesthetic, or any whiskey, for that matter -- and soliloquizes about Rachel as a teenager. She enjoyed black nail polish and shitty guys who dealt drugs and carried ninja throwing stars. Her dad was happy when she met Ben, because he seemed like such a nice, solid, non-drug-dealing fellow, but then when Rachel and Ben got married, Gene (that's Reverend Doctor Dad) noticed how Rachel looked at Miles. Aha! I am vindicated.
Miles swears that there's nothing happening between him and Rachel. Anymore. Dr. Gene is not real thrilled and seems tempted to sew Miles's hand to the other one, even though he says he owes Miles for bringing Rachel home. "The last thing Rachel needs is the wrong guy," Rev. Dr. Gene says.
Charlie has spent the night with Bartender Jeff. They make awkward morning-after small talk as he cooks something in a skillet over an open flame. He asks if she has family, and she says she doesn't, and he says she shouldn't bother trying to find her unit. He noticed the Monroe Militia brand on her wrist and volunteers that he was also conscripted. "I saw him a few weeks ago," Jeff says. "Monroe. He looked like cold hell warmed over." Charlie wants to know just where Jeff saw Monroe, and where he went.
Dr. Gene's kitchen. Rachel is scribbling in a notebook and having mad flashbacks to Randall's suicide. She's also wearing her wedding ring (again…still?). Gene comes in and closes her notebook, suggesting she put "the big book of crazy" away. Rachel rambles about trying to figure out what Randall's plan was. Gene thinks Randall was just a Timothy McVeigh–style psychopath, but she thinks he was following orders when he blew up the whole eastern seaboard. "From who?" Gene asks. Whom, good sir, whom.
Whoa. Some dudes are assembling cages in a basement -- big cages, equipped with handcuffs. A man in a dirty khaki uniform walks out the door and we see the building they're working in is the White House, with a downed helicopter on the front lawn.
Miles saddles his horse while Rachel leans against a very well-maintained brick pillar and does not manage to mask her neediness when she asks why he's leaving so suddenly. He looks down at his injured hand, flashes back to the burning shed, and says he's had it with small-town life, you know? Needs to go somewhere where kids do the jitterbug and folks sell heroin in front of the Stop 'N' Shop. They hug and Rachel hopefully -- with just a glint of affable craziness in her eyes -- suggests that Miles stay rather than going. "Bad things happen when we're together," he says. And the soundtrack soars into that piercing little whistle that means flashback.
Six months ago. Adam Beach brings Dr. Gene out to see Miles, Charlie, and Aaron. He's stunned to see them, and hugs his granddaughter. Interrupting that tender reunion, Miles calls Gene's attention to Rachel, who looks like she hasn't washed her hair since Nixon. She mutters dully, "It's my fault. The bombs. I broke everything." Yeah. Nice to see she's finally taken responsibility.
Miles and his horse survey the burned-down shed. He hears a gunshot and through his binoculars sees some bandits attacking a family on a neighboring farm; they kill a man with an axe and drag a woman into the corn. Miles draws his sword and runs off to be a hero.
Suddenly he stops, mid-corn run, and looks around, confused, thinking he's lost the bandits. But he hasn't, and one of them tackles him and starts trying to gouge Miles's eyes out with his thumbs. Miles manages to grab his sword and kill the bandit, splashing blood all over his face again. For Billy Burke's sake, I hope corn syrup is good for the complexion.
In the dark (sigh…why is everything in the dark? This show makes my eyes hurt) Charlie approaches the wild west outpost of New Vegas. This is the third location on tonight's episode that's been scored with amateurish acoustic guitar, as if the whole United States has become Satan's coffee house. New Vegas seems pretty similar to Old Vegas (or at least the Vegas that was suitable for NBC): ladies in their underwear invite gentlemen into their trailer homes; a huckster is luring tourists to ogle at the spectacle of "the world-famous David Schwimmer, right here in this very tent! Performing live for you…the last surviving Friend is here this evening." Ha! That legitimately made me laugh. I hope Ross's study of unagi has served him well in this scary new world.
Charlie walks into a tent and watches some bare-knuckle fighting. It seems our old pal Sebastian Monroe has gone the beginning-of-Rambo-III route—shirtless, he's beating some guy to a grunting pulp. He seems to get no pleasure from it. It is significantly less awesome than the first time we saw Hugh Jackman playing Wolverine.
Willoughby. Aaron still (OH MY GOD, STILL) has one of those fucking MacGuffin pendants. He stares pensively at it. New Mrs. Aaron asks why he's pouting, and he says one of his fourth graders has polio. So, polio got out of the labs where it's locked up for safekeeping? Or people from regions of the world where polio is still a threat managed to walk/swim/dugout canoe their way to North America? Sure, Revolution, let me just whip out my degree in epidemiology or whatever. For the sake of my own peace of mind, I'm going to pretend that someone from an affected country was visiting the U.S. when the power went out and that person was Polio Patient Zero. Okay.
Mrs. Aaron Pollyannas that things will get better. She's still hopeful because of the power surge, and says if the lights turned on once, they can turn on again. Aaron has good reason to believe they won't, and goes out to gather firewood.
A firefly lands on Aaron's hand. He stares at it, and then notices that his yard is infested with fireflies. Like, in a spooky, unnatural way. And then they all disappear. You know, if I were Aaron I'd probably fling myself into the nearest gorge. Nothing good happens to Aaron.
He and Rachel walk down Main Street Willoughby and she tries to convince him they were just fireflies. He mentions some other animal weirdness, with a breed of fox and some cicadas. Ugh, cicadas. As they're bickering over whether or not the weirdness was caused by the events at the Tower, Miles and his horse shlep back through the town's front gate.
Miles has brought the dead body of the bandit to Dr. Gene's house, and tells Sheriff Adam Beach he has a serious problem, since this bandit has tattoos bragging about how many people he's killed. He's from "a war clan," Miles says. Oh, of course. A war clan. Because that's a thing. Miles says the bandits are like sharks, that they'll circle Dr. Gene's nice little town, taking small bites, and then come in for the kill. He asks how fast they can get the Texas Rangers in from Austin. Sheriff Adam says he sent a rider. They discuss fortifications, and Sheriff Adam (or Mason, as Dr. Gene addresses him), asks who the hell "Stu" thinks he is. Gene tells Mason to listen to Miles.
Back east, Neville is staring at his wife's picture and playing with his gun. Jason asks what's going on; his father has resigned himself to never finding Julia. He doesn't think she'd ever leave Atlanta, because she promised to wait for Tom. So she must've died when the bomb fell. Jason tells his father to give him the gun; Tom cocks it. Jason tries to shame Tom into continuing to live. They play should-I-commit-suicide chicken for a little while, until shouting from outside distracts them both.
The refugees are watching a boat sailing up the Savannah River. "Those aren't rebels," Jason observes. Nope, Tom doesn't think so either. Uh, rebels…against whom? The Monroe Republic doesn't exist anymore. The government of Georgia wouldn't seem to either. The rebellion kind of won, in that respect.
Flashback to four months ago. Miles and Charlie are talking in the dark in front of Grandpa Reverend Dr. Gene's house. Charlie wants to leave and go have dirty sex with bartenders rather than tending to her crazypants mother. Miles is all, eh, can't fault you on that one. "Try and keep your stupid to a minimum," he says, and he might as well have asked her to breathe with her mouth closed.
Charlie watches Monroe across the fight club tent. He has a skanky blonde lady on his arm, who slavishly asks how he takes such a beating every night. "It's better than my last job," he snarks. Charlie follows them. A dude who's too tall and whose cheekbones are too lovely for him to be an extra watches her.
Monroe puts some diamonds (his payment from fight club?) down on a roulette board. The croupier spins the wheel and Monroe loses. Blonde lady's all, "You used to be cute." A squirrelly guy hits on Charlie and she asks about Monroe. He calls him "Jimmy King, from back east, I think." Squirrelly guy runs the sports book, he explains. Charlie shakes out some diamonds, and Squirrelly protests that "Jimmy" isn't fighting tonight. "It's not a bet," Charlie says. I didn't know Jimmy also moonlights as a gigolo, but times are tough.
Rachel finds Miles where he's happiest: on the barricades, with a torch, brooding. He says Sheriff Mason has no idea what he's in for, and suggests they run before things get bad. But she insists on sticking around so Charlie will know how to find them. She blathers about Charlie, then apologizes to Miles for Nora's death. Yeah, that's right! She caused that, too. Ugh, Rachel, you are the worst. Miles completely lets her off the hook, because he is just stupid in love with her, isn't he?
"Jimmy" Monroe reads a flyer about the Philadelphia holocaust. Someone knocks on his door and it's Squirrelly, telling him about the girl who wants to meet him. Monroe drags himself out of his trailer. In the shadows, Charlie takes aim with her crossbow. She fires, but the nice-cheekbones guy from earlier knocks Monroe unconscious just before the bolt would have hit him. The bolt sinks into a post and Cheekbones and his friend haul Monroe off and chuck him in a wagon. They skedaddle while Charlie opens her eyes really wide and pretends to have an emotion.
At the Savannah refugee camp, a lady introduces herself as Secretary Justine Allenford, from the United States government. She expositions that after the blackout, the government was forced to flee to Cuba by warlords like Monroe and Foster. (Unless Monroe basically turned the U.S. military against the government, I don't see how that's particularly likely, but whatever). She blames the destruction of Atlanta and Philadelphia on Monroe and Foster, and says now the government has returned to help, however they can. A man in the crowd asks if the president is alive. He is, Justine says, and he's making his way to the White House. Justine invites everyone -- even the rebels -- to rejoin with the cause of the United States. Oh, she does not seem on the up and up, does she? Somewhere a Reaganite just had an orgasm.
Aaron stares out his window at the fireflies. He reassures Mrs. Aaron that "Stu" doesn't overreact, and says he'll stay up to keep watch. Elsewhere in town, the people of Willoughby are holing up in a barn for safety. Mrs. Aaron is very sweet when she says she doesn't deserve him. He's all, you must've done something horrible to deserve me! She says he's sweet, and shows him a scar on her forearm and decides now is the point in their relationship when he should know how she got it…her husband came after her with a paring knife. "Sweet is a valuable thing", she says, and then invites him to the bedroom for some hummina-hummina.
But when Aaron follows her into the bedroom, there's a bandit there who's grabbed Mrs. Aaron in a chokehold. Aaron leaps on the bandit and frees Mrs. Aaron, tells her to run, then grabs his weapon of choice (a baseball bat). The bandit has a sword. They fight. The bandit slices Aaron across the chest and flees out the window.
Mrs. Aaron runs screaming to Rachel and Miles for help. Back at Casa Aaron, they find him on the floor, bleeding. Miles tells Mrs. Aaron to alert the sheriff, and to get Dr. Gene. Rachel puts pressure on Aaron's wound and rips down the curtains to use as a bandage.
The bandits drag screaming women out of the barn. Between this and SVU, NBC has a really nice three-hour block of horrifying violence against women for your viewing pleasure. Ack. Miles interrupts the bandits and, in not so many words, challenges one of them to a duel. He manages to stab the bandit he was fighting with, then shoots the ones who are running off with the women. Mason's there as backup; he tells a bandit to let go of the woman he's holding, and when the bad guy doesn't obey quickly enough, Miles all but slices off his head.
The freed women run back toward Willoughby. But they're not in the clear. A still-standing bandit knocks Mason unconscious, and then there are dozens of bandits staring Miles down.
Dr. Gene runs into the room at Aaron's house. Mrs. Aaron is in the doorway, crying quietly, while Rachel shouts at Aaron not to die. He dies anyway. Oh, Aaron. You were far from the most obnoxious part of this show. Mrs. Aaron throws herself, crying, on Aaron's body.
Savannah. Tom Neville opens a straight razor, and rather than cutting his own throat, makes the I-believe-in-me gesture of deciding to shave. Jason comes in and tells his father he looks better. "I feel better," Tom says, adding, "Man just needs a purpose, is all." Jason wants to know what's made him decide to live. Tom cites what Secretary Justine said about "incontrovertible proof" that Monroe and Foster launched the bombs, and reminds Jason (and us) that about six people still alive -- including both Nevilles -- know that's a lie. He knows better than to trust the convenient appearance of the government, with their handshakes and smiles. He thinks Randall was working with them (and we know he's right, as proved by the last line of the season-one finale, "Sir, Randall Flynn did it. It's time to go home, Mr. President"), and says the government was responsible for the bombs—and for Julia's death. You know, I think I like Crazy Vengeance Neville.
The bandits march Mason and Miles back through Willoughby. A couple of townspeople are strung up on a gibbet, which isn't a comforting sight to Miles. In the barn, a whole huge group of bandits is arrayed, and none of them have found the purpose Tom Neville has to return to sensible, socially acceptable standards of grooming.
Coming forward out of the crowd: it's Matt Ross, last seen as on American Horror Story and as terrifying cult scion Alby Grant on Big Love (and most recently by me as adorable, harmless Raji in PCU, which was on VH1 all weekend). Oh, Lord, this cannot be good. That big pale face of Matt Ross's just means pure evil now. He greets Mason and introduces himself as Titus Andover. "This is my family," he says. So he's not so different from Alby Grant, I gather. Titus offers Miles and Mason some sweet tea.
Casa Aaron. Gene tells Rachel the whackjobs are gone. She asks about Miles and Mason, and Gene has nothing to tell her. On the porch, Mrs. Aaron cries. And then she sees the fireflies. Inside, Rachel stares numbly at Aaron's dead body. And then Aaron's eyes open and he gasps.
Coming up this season: Aaron's alive, because nanites, obviously. Matt Ross is crazy evil. Monroe and Charlie might be crazy in love. And there are rats. Tons and tons of rats. Ack.