Revenge: Revelations

We were shocked to find out, after the fact, that this episode was titled “Revelations,” because, from where we’re sitting, Pinthe episode was woefully short on that front. This seems to be the day where we complain about vagueness in our TV shows, but we’ve got to go with our guts on this one and relate the exact words we said when this episode ended: “Man, that was a slog to get through, wasn’t it?”

This isn’t a statement on the relative quality of the show when we say that the entire arc about Grayson Global taking over Nolan’s company bores us to tears. That’s just us and how we relate to business storylines. We’re a couple of pop culture bloggers, so that stuff interests us about as much as an extended arc on podiatry would. If anyone else found all that maneuvering and business talk interesting, more power to them, but we had trouble keeping our eyes open through the whole thing. And even now, we’re not entirely sure what the upshot is. Who’s in charge of what now?

It IS, however, a statement on the relative quality of the show when we state that Pinwe think the creators have seriously lost the plot. From the minute this show hit the air and took off, we wondered, like a lot of people, how the creators were going to sustain such a singularly focused storyline as Emily Thorne’s revenge on the people who ruined her father’s life and then killed him. We’re sorry to see that the answer to that conundrum was to put that part of the story on the back burner so that a whole bunch of other, tangentially-to-not-at-all related storylines could be introduced to the show. We suppose Daniel’s maneuvering and Jack’s bar problems somehow relate back to Emily’s main goals, but we’re having a hard time seeing how that’s possible.

And even Emily seems to be floundering. There was a lot of knowing looks and arched eyebrows traded between Aidan and Emily with this episode, as if they knew what was going on and it was all going according to plan, but for the life of us, we can’t make head or tails of it. When was the last time Emily really got some good old-fashioned revenge on Pinsomeone? When was the last time she got out her red Sharpie and X’d out someone’s face? We said with the last review that we thought the show was moving away from being about Emily’s revenge and turning toward a show about revenge in general and that looks to be the case here. We’re not enthused by the prospect. We’re just not all that invested in Daniel’s revenge against his parents or Kenny and his brother’s misguided revenge against the family they think is responsible for their father’s murder. It’s all shrug-inducing to us. Now we suppose Ashley will want to get revenge against … someone. And Nolan too. Meh. Give us more scenes of Victoria Grayson skeet-shooting in an utterly ridiculous, yet still fabulous outfit and we’ll continue to tune in, but more and more, we find ourselves squirming with impatience through each episode. Emily Thorne needs to be the center of this story and right now, she just feels like one in a huge group of players. Don’t even get us started on The Initiative.

We realize this is a cranky, and not terribly productive review of the show, but it’s just not inspiring us to examine the proceedings any further. This break is happening at just the right time and we hope when it comes back next month, things will be a little more focused.