The good news: Mason Treadwell appears in this week’s Revenge, and he drops a giant revelation (as he is wont to do.) The bad news: The delightfully spiteful author doesn’t show up until the very end of the hour; until then, we’re forced to watch as a character we met last week gets revenge on a character we meet this week – oh, and Emily lets Nolan down in a major way. Let’s review the major developments that took place in “Victory.”
FOSTER MOMMY DEAREST | Emily’s foster brother Eli has been in touch with Mrs. Hayward, the woman who treated them terribly (withheld food and water, threw them in a dungeon-like room in her basement) and scammed the system when they were children in her care. He wants the Amanda Clarke Foundation to give Hayward some money so she can keep her home… even though, as Conrad and Victoria point out, Amanda nearly burned it down years ago. Eli spouts something about forgiveness and redemption, and that’s enough for the Graysons to back his plan. Conrad also sees the gift – and the press conference at which it will be presented – as a boon for his gubernatorial campaign. When Em asks Eli what’s really up, he says that Mrs. Hayward withheld letters from David Clarke to his daughter and he’s just making good on his promise always to protect her.
Nolan fills in the gaps: David’s letters to Amanda refuted everything in Mason’s book; when she didn’t respond to them, he started keeping the journals that Nolan later delivered. Emily says something along the lines of, “If I had had those letters then I might not have lit the fire and I might have had a better life and Amanda might not have died and yadda yadda blergh.” Yes, or… things would’ve turned out exactly the same or worse. Live in the now, Ems. She accompanies Eli to Mrs. Hayward’s home, where we – and not Emily – hear Eli and Mrs. H have a conversation that makes it seem like they’re in cahoots to fleece the Graysons’ foundation. But at the press conference to announce the gift, Eli pulls the old switcheroo on the foul foster mom when he denounces her mistreatment of her wards – and has even gone as far as populating the audience with his fellow foster siblings. But then she outs Eli as the one who actually set the fire for which Amanda/Emily took the blame (he restarted a blaze she’d let die down, for those of you as confused as I initially was). I get the feeling the show wants us to be very excited about these twists; am I alone in feeling kind of meh about them?
VICTORIA’S SECRET | Before he leaves town, Eli somehow tortures Mrs. H into telling him that she told the letters to “some guy” years before. (Side note: Anyone else think this part of the narrative seemed a little rushed? I mean, I didn’t need to actually see Eli pulling out Mrs. H’s fingernails or whatever he did, but maybe we could’ve gotten a little more than just a faceless whimper coming from her basement torture chamber?) That sends Emily to visit our favorite “true” crime author in the clink. “What, no cake?” he snarks as they sit on opposite sides of the glass. Mason Treadwell, I heart you. He reminds her that the letters – like everything else he owned – went up in flames when she set his house aflame last season. But he remembers the gist of the missives, in which David feared for his daughter’s well-being in a system that he knew was not great… because a close friend who’d gotten pregnant as a teenager also had had to give up a child. Yup, he’s talking about Charlotte and her first kid, to whom she gave birth when she was 16. With a mischievous smile, Emily promises to exploit that info for all it’s worth.
DADMA IS ALIVE! | A video proving her father is still alive impels Padma to go along with The Initiative’s directions to bring them Carrion. Noles begs Emily for help but she pawns him off on Aiden, promising to be there when the exchange goes down. But when The Initiative moves up the meeting time, she can’t come because she’s… at lunch with Daniel.
Wait, what? Even if I buy that Emily is indulging Daniel’s cloak-and-dagger meal plans (what good is it to refer to her by a different name on the phone if you’re going to dine at a very public restaurant?), I’m supposed to believe she couldn’t make up some excuse to slip away and help one of her closest friends? While we’re on the subject of stuff that I just couldn’t get behind, let’s talk about Nolan and Padma’s “I love you” exchange. Gabriel Mann and Dilshad Vadsaria do a lovely job with the characters, but they just haven’t had enough screen time together this season for me to get broken up about them never seeing each other after Padma and her pop go on the run.
Anyway, the exchange goes down — with Carrion housed in a GPS-concealing flash drive that looks like a giant turtle (did Nolan think an international terrorist group would be charmed by its sense of whimsy?) Of course The Initiative grabs Padma, too, and ditches the flash drive’s GPS component. Based on a text he gets, Nolan figures out that the Falcon is now working for The Initiative. (Wait, wasn’t the superhacker working for the Graysons last week?) Emily apologizes for not being there when Nolan needed her and promises she will next time — y’know, if she doesn’t have brunch plans or whatever.
Along those lines, Daniel receives a photo of him and Emily at their allegedly covert lunch, and there are two bullets in the envelope. Cut to Victoria putting away her jewelry box, which holds a box of ammunition that’s missing two bullets. Vicky, you sly little minx, what are you up to now?
PORTER WANTS PAYBACK | Things between Jack and Emily? Still chilly. Things between Jack and Kenny? Heating up, after Declan steals Trey’s cell phone and uses it to set up a meeting between Jack and the surviving Ryan brother. (So Jack did believe Nolan last week about Kenny buying the speedboat? I could’ve sworn Porter was just playing along.) Kenny says he doesn’t know anything about the boat or anything Nate had planned, but he does know that his brother taped all interactions between Conrad and himself as insurance. After Jack hears them, he’s even more sure that the Graysons need to go down for Amanda’s murder. So he accepts Conrad’s offer to become the Grayson campaign’s equivalent of Joe the Plumber – working from the inside and all that.
Now it’s your turn. Were you happy to see the Red Sharpie getting a workout this week? Were you surprised that everything seemed to be OK between Charlotte and Declan after her flirtation with Eli last week? Sound off in the comments!
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