Revenge Season 2 “Resurrection” Review – “The bitch is back”

The Queen of the Hamptons, Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe) could never stay away from her throne for long.  After all, no matter how hard she tries, the princess-in-waiting, Ashley (Ashley Medekwe) still has a long way to go before she could fill those big heels.

Here are a few things we learned from “Resurrection”, aka Victoria’s second coming.

Emily is caught napping

Emily (Emily VanCamp) has been having more flashbacks about her mother, Kara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) of late.  This time, Kara has taken five year-old Amanda for a drive, singing along, appropriately, to INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart”.  But a pleasant dream turns dark when Kara becomes Victoria, and Emily wakes up choking her new roomie, Nolan (Gabriel Mann), who was trying to wake her up from her nightmare.  It just goes to show that even in her sleep, Emily can be dangerous.

Ashley the Puppet

Last summer, Ashley bemoaned the fact that she had picked the wrong Harvard boy to sleep with when her then-boyfriend, Tyler, turned out to be a psycho and not the millionaire that he claimed to be.  This summer, she is sleeping with Daniel (Josh Bowman), who recently inherited $632million from his mother, Victoria, after they thought she died in a plane explosion.

She is also working for Conrad (Henry Czerny), the master manipulator who is basically paying her to keep his son out of his way.  Unfortunately for Ashley, she did not count on Daniel being a good brother, giving away all his money to his little sister, Charlotte (Christa B. Allen) after Conrad had her declared a drug addict and incompetent.  Sorry dear, but off to the pool house you go!

Daniel to the rescue

Thanks to a well-timed tip-off from ex-fiancee, Emily, Daniel does some digging into the doctor who is treating Charlotte at the rehab center.  Dr Thomas (Todd Grinnell) has a history of keeping his patients on extended stays to pad his bills.  Big brother storms in to demand the good doctor recant his statement to the court that granted Conrad control over Charlotte’s inheritance and says he is taking her home.  What he didn’t count on was Charlotte choosing to leave with Emily, who just happened to be visiting at the same time.  Never mind, Daniel is happy he has done his part to save his sister from being locked up.

Jack is Fauxmanda’s baby daddy

After planting the seed of doubt in Jack’s (Nick Wechsler) mind that Amanda’s (Margarita Levieva) baby might not be his, Emily agrees to help Amanda make sure the paternity test results show that Jack is indeed the baby daddy.  When the test results come back positive, Emily tells Amanda that she had rigged the results, only she didn’t.  So Jack really is the father.  And Jack goes back to being the crazy-in-love bar owner who is going to accept his responsibility and play happy family with the girl he has been in love with since he was a kid.

A new side of Declan?

Mysterious new school bud, Trey Chandler (Michael Nardelli) turns up at the marina to chat up Declan (Connor Paolo) on his boat where he has been sleeping since Amanda moved in with his brother.  Trey invites Declan to go hang out with his gang to gawk at girls but he declines.  He has responsibilities as part-owner/employee of the Stowaway Tavern which he sees ultimately as his ticket out of town.

Stalker Trey turns up again at night, when Declan is taking out the trash, and offers him $500 to hold on to a valuable piece of jewelry he stole from his stepmother for a couple of days.  No matter how suspicious Declan might be of Trey’s motives, the offer of some big bucks was too good to pass, and Declan accepts.  What is Trey up to?

Nolan dresses down

Have we been too busy admiring the way Nolan carries off the double popped-up collars last summer that we did not notice he wanders around without pants?  I’ve always joked that news anchors on TV only wear the top half of their suits and are probably pantless under the news desk.  Apparently this is how Nolan dresses for video conferences with his employees at Nolcorp, even when they are discussing why the company is being audited.  This proves to be a little bit of a problem when one of his eager employees, Padma Lahari (Dilshad Vadsaria), unexpectedly turns up at Emily’s house.

Padma is trying to convince Nolan to hire a CFO to clean up their accounts before the audit.  Nolan-the-control-freak decides he is not interested in candidates with long list of qualifications and convinces Padma that he will hire a CFO only if she agrees to accept the job. Deal done.  Will this blossom into something more in the future?  I, for one, think Nolan deserves some lovin’ this season.

The White Haired Man is back

The WHM (James Morrison) will do anything for money, including murder and helping Victoria and Charlotte disappear with new identities.  What a sense of humor he has, then, to have given them new names Veronica and Samantha Clarke – after all, Charlotte is really David Clarke’s (James Tupper) daughter.  But when Victoria fails to come up with the cash to pay him for their getaway, he holds her new IDs for ransom.  What he didn’t count on was that Victoria has other ideas about how she can return from the dead, and it’s a damned clever idea that nobody saw coming.

Conrad has blood on his hands, literally, and the Queen is resurrected

I wonder how long Conrad has been waiting for the opportunity to beat up his ex-wife?  Accustomed to having others do his dirty work for him (remember Frank Stevens?), he was caught unprepared when he receives a phone call from Victoria to inform him that she was very much alive.  When he turns up at her safehouse, he has with him a bag containing handcuffs, zip-ties and what looked to be something straight out of Christian Grey’s Red Room of Pain (try Google if you don’t know what this means).

Victoria’s cunning plan was to concoct a story that she had been kidnapped and held for ransom by the WHM after the plane explosion.  Her story to the police, when they arrived with Conrad, sirens blaring, was that the WHM beat her up and tied her to the radiator when Conrad failed to show up with the ransom money.  Victoria is always capable of telling tales, and with Conrad’s co-operation, it’s a pretty convincing story, although what will the Feds say now that she is officially back from the dead?

Aiden’s got Emily’s back

Aiden (Barry Sloane), Takeda’s sidekick, who left Japan to ensure Emily stays on course with their mission (whatever that is!), is carefully keeping an eye on her – with a telescope and hiding in the hills.  But he managed to come out in the open long enough to attend the Grayson Global investors meeting as Takeda’s representative.  I must declare, Aiden cleans up rather nicely in a suit, too.

Just before the police arrived at Victoria’s house, the WHM spotted the clam-cam on her mantle near where she was tied up.  Let’s not forget he spotted the photo frame cam Emily had planted in Conrad’s office as well, back when she was still engaged to Daniel.  So it did not take long for him to figure out that Emily would have evidence that would clear him of the crimes he was being accused of.  Emily is prepared to do a deal with him – he can have the footage from clam-cam if he tells her what happened to her mother.

Just to toy with us, the WHM admits to Emily that he was supposed to kill her mother after he took her out of the Angel of Mercy Hospital where she was held in the psychiatric ward, but things did not go according to plan, and he tries to kill Emily before he tells her the rest of the story.  BAM! Aiden comes out of nowhere and shoots WHM to save Emily.

And so, as the story goes, until next time folks!

Written by Valerie Leung.  Read her blog LibragirlRules.com and follow her on Twitter @valshopaholic to share your Revenge theories!

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