Welcome back, “Revenge” fans! Did you have a good break? That’s nice. You know who didn’t have a good break? Oh, practically everyone on this show. We open Season 2 in the depths of the ocean — rescuers are combing the wreckage of…the Amanda boat? What’s that doing down there?
Flashback to a few months ago: Emily is in Japan doing more training with Takeda (side note: Whose idea was it to recast him this season? The first Takeda was the s—. This new guy better be just as good. ), and there’s a new guy helping out too. They’ve got her tied to a pole halfway submerged in water— her job is to escape. She doesn’t quite make it at one point, falling unconscious under the waves. But here, in this dreamy state, she starts to recall a memory of she and her mother playing Marco Polo. When Takeda’s assistant sees she’s under and unties her hands, she’s mad — this is all part of the training, and she was close to unlocking a memory. Is this new assistant good or evil?
And here we go into the present: It’s been 60 days since the crash, Charlotte’s just about finished with an addiction program (guess she didn’t OD after all) and Daniel’s got a thing going on with Ashley. Jack’s sleeping on the Amanda boat but doesn’t want to tell real-Emily that he’s really going through some hardcore stuff. The Stowaway fails a health inspection and Declan kind of steps up to be the man about it. Ashley is now overseeing the Grayson property, and even she has now has her own eager-to-please assistant. Nolan’s taken up boxing, and he hasn’t heard from Em in 80 days — until she visits him to get his hand in going back to her revenge plot. She fills him in on what’s happened: Takeda was behind Amanda’s return, claiming he was training her to be his ally — but Emily can’t trust anyone these days, so she doesn’t know if she should believe that.
Nolan and Amanda get back to business, the goal today being finding out just what happened at the old hospital that Amanda’s (alive) mother was a patient in. It was closed mysteriously and bought out by an investment firm shortly after Amanda’s dad was arrested.
Back in Graysonville, Daniel’s been heavily drinking. Papa Grayson lifted the contingencies on Daniel’s trust fund so that he can reinvest in the company. Daniel wants to think about it though — he’s not too close with his dad these days and doesn’t want to become a mirror image of him.
Emily and Nolan break into the hospital on a search for her mother’s files (another side note: Why are they still there? Hasn’t anyone cleaned out this hospital and its paperwork since it was shut down?). Naturally they find everything right away: the room where Emily’s mom used to stay, and her file (it was under Wallace Clark — Wallace was her maiden name). Emily has some flashbacks to visiting her mother in the psych ward, where she was chained down to her bed, obviously in a bad state. She tells her husband David Clarke, who’s accompanying little Emily on the visit, that she didn’t want him to see her like this. Back to the present: Nolan and Emily go over her mother’s file, and notice that David came to visit, but also a woman named Charlotte — which they quickly realize that couldn’t have been the case because she had Parkinson’s. So who came to visit? Victoria! Emily thinks Victoria could have had her mom locked up in the psych ward, and there’s only one way to find out: Getting back on the Graysons’ good graces. Not an easy task, but if there’s anyone who’s capable of playing the fake-nice card, it’s Emily. She decides to go through Charlotte (they’re half-sisters, remember?), visiting her at rehab with flowers and telling her she’ll be at Victoria’s upcoming memorial.
Emily and Amanda reunite, and fake-Emily tells real-Emily that she’s now on a different path. Too bad real-Emily’s pregnant with Jack’s baby though, so she ain’t goin’ nowhere. And if everyone knows the truth about real-Emily, finding out the truth about fake-Emily isn’t too far behind. Jack breaks up the awkward little affair, and fake-Em slyly inserts a lie that Amanda asked her to be the baby’s godmother.
Back to Japan: Takeda listens as his assistant asks for the chance to “guide her back.” Here’s how that went down:
“You think you can succeed where I can’t?” he asks.
“I won’t allow her to make the same mistakes I did.”
“If you fail, the mission is over for both of you.”
We’ll surely be finding out more about them in the near future.
Time for Victoria’s memorial (like I’ve said, it wouldn’t be a “Revenge” episode without a big, splashy Hamptons party). Daniel’s there, drinking his sorrows away, and who strolls up to bring some drama to the day but Emily, looking feisty in a bright pink dress and dramatic lip. Daniel tells his dad he’s not going to reinvest in the company, and that if the company goes down he’s going down with it. Ashley has an awkward run-in with Emily, and then Daniel shows up to make things even more awkward. Kudos to Nolan for breaking the ice with some cocktails. Emily pulled one of those fake (or was it?) “Let’s do lunch!” things, and Ashley took her up on the offer.
Charlotte makes it to the memorial, escorted by her rehab doctor, and gets mad when she sees Ashley eulogizing her mother next to the unfinished artwork of Victoria that her lover painted for her. Charlotte decides to take the mic and gives a nice speech about how Victoria was more than auctions and to her, she was a mother whom she only realized she loved so much after she was gone. She also said that she’d stay sober as a tribute to her mother. Suddenly, Charlotte’s forced to leave the affair — her most recent drug test has come back positive, and she has to go back to rehab. Charlotte adamantly fights it — she says she’s clean — and blames her dad for a conspiracy theory to bring her down. Before she’s pulled away by her doctor escort, she grabs Emily and whispers something in her ear. We’re not sure what it is — until we see Emily make her way to an isolated cabin where a one VICTORIA GRAYSON IS LIVING IN HIDING.
Victoria tells Emily that the government is keeping her in hiding to build a case against Conrad for bringing her plane down. Charlotte’s the only one who knows (except now Emily). As for the doctor who brought her back to rehab? He’s on Conrad’s payroll: He rigged Charlotte’s drug test to get her back to rehab. And he’s just dying to know who keeps calling her cell while she’s there.
When Emily gets back to town, she tells Nolan everything, and she asks him to hook up a camera in Victoria’s cabin — as an homage to last season’s whale cam, this season’s shady hidden camera will take the form of a clam shell. Emily has done some background research on Charlotte’s rehab doctor and learns the truth about him — he’s been sued six times and goes by an assortment of names. She goes on to tell this to Victoria, who’s all like “Why are you being so nice to me?”
Before that though, while it’s still Emily and Nolan chatting about this huge development, Jack swings by. He’s frazzled about his life and tells Emily he wishes he could go back in time to when they were together the night Sammy died. Emily’s cold to him, though, saying “we can’t go back,” and then she twists the knife further by asking Jack to make sure Amanda’s baby is really his. Sure enough, this is just enough to make Jack paranoid, so he confronts real-Emily in the Stowaway and she’s shady about her whereabouts, prompting her to say she’ll get a paternity test.
In one particularly poignant scene toward the end, we see Emily overlooking the water, holding something in her hand — it’s a strap that was used to tie down her mother’s arms in the psych ward, and it’s inscribed with Emily’s infinity “revenge” symbol. She heads back inside, plops on the couch with Nolan, and uncovers some juicy stuff going on at Victoria’s: The white-haired man is there, apparently working for Victoria! She doesn’t like that Emily’s back, and wants to take her down — which she promptly orders the white-haired man to do. So, what does Victoria really want here? She wants Conrad to suffer, but Emily to as well. It seems like she cares for Charlotte, but who knows at this point. This is only the beginning, and I’m sure we’ve got a lot of drama left to unfold before we can start putting everything together. Until next week!
