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‘Revenge’ Season Finale Recap: Out With a Bang

Revenge, Nolan and Emily in chainsHour-long Drama 101: If your main characters seem ridiculously happy at the 45-minute mark, something devastating is about to happen. And Revenge plays by those rules like a girl scout. A murderous, impeccably dressed girl scout. When Emily and Nolan spent two whole minutes sheepishly smiling in the unperturbed daylight of their premature victory against the White-haired Man, there was no ominous “dun, dun, dunnnnnnn” in the background before the commercial break, but we knew it was coming.

Everything about the opening of the episode feels exactly like a season finale should. From minute one, we’re on Emily’s roller coaster to vengeance, starting with her 10-carat lie to Daniel. She’s ransacked her own house in order to steal Daniel’s Grayson Global laptop, but she’s the perfect liar and makes him think the white-haired man is the perp. Like clockwork, Conrad and Daniel have to scour Grayson Manor like panicked little mice and they find Emily’s hidden microphones, which they assume belong to the White-haired man since they also suspect he made the video of Emily and Daniel sleeping.

And while Emily’s halfway to victory with the Grayson laptop in her hands, she needs Nolan’s tech expertise. There’s just one small problem: He was kidnapped by Voldemort (which is what we shall continue calling the white-haired man until he gets a name) at the end of the last episode thanks to his cute, clumsy cable guy routine that wasn’t fooling anyone.

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Emily runs over to Nolan’s and engages in a video chat with the white-haired man, who demands she meet him. She serves up the evidence of the plane crash cover-up, but he’s a wise foe so he makes her chloroform herself and she winds up with her hands in cuffs. However, the cuff situation wasn’t nearly as dramatic as promos promised. It doesn’t take long for Emily to free herself like the Batgirl reincarnate she is when she sends the White-haired man to pick up the evidence before the authorities get to it.

By the time the baddie gets back, Emily has sent Nolan off with word about her love for Jack, in case she should die. But there is no way mega ninja Emily is going to die. She gets the man on his back and is about to end his life when she sees a flashback of her father telling her how wonderful it was that she was so loving and peaceful, she makes the biggest (albeit mystery-prolonging) mistake of her life: She lets Voldemort live.

Meanwhile, another mistake is coming back to bite her in the Krav Maga-trained butt: Ashley, with her ever present penchant for s**t-stirring, tells Daniel about Emily’s long-awaited full-on make-out kiss with Jack. As soon as she returns from her harrowing fight with Voldemort, she’s thrown into a lovers spat in which she admits to having feelings for Jack before handing over her engagement ring. As soon as her breakup with Daniel was easier than holding Nolan up against a wall Batman-style, it was fairly easy to expect that Amanda would return to create a big mess to stall Emily from her happy ending with Jack. I did not, however, see that baby bump coming. And while Amanda may have snared Jack and kept him from Emily with that bump but something tells me Jack’s not the baby daddy – Amanda’s not exactly the most reliable of sources regarding information of any sort. Jack’s going to go all (surprisingly) short, warf-dwelling Hulk monster when he finds out.

Meanwhile, Victoria is still on her own path to revenge, making a deal to fly to Washington to give her testimony to the SEC. She finally convinces Lydia to go with her, which forces her to turn her back on Conrad – even after he bought her cooperation with that insultingly small diamond. (When you have a mansion in the Hamptons that bears your family name instead of something simple like 134 Sandy Lane, you’d better be buying giant, gargantuan diamonds for your lady friends. No wonder Lydia ran.) When Conrad rushes to tell Victoria that getting on the plane would be the last thing she ever does, we’re not supposed to believe him, but something whispers “He’s right.” And when the nightly news informs him of his correct assumption, he swigs scotch and throws the only remaining friendly picture of both Victoria and Lydia into the fire. It appears he’s distraught over losing bother of them, because he may be a ruthless opportunist, but he loves all his ladies – even the ex-wife he so lovingly calls a harpy.

As for Victoria’s potentially final moments, the fabulous Grayson matriarch ascends the stairs to her chariot of SEC betrayal in glamorous slow motion, and it starts to feel like a farewell to the con maven. And when Voldemort quickly disappears under the plane, we knew it was only a matter of minutes until the crash and subsequent deaths start cropping up. It does however seem a little impossible that Victoria is dead (tell me, how are we supposed to live without her?), and since we didn’t actually see the plane crash in any capacity, we’re free to speculate about some grand deceit that allowed Victoria and her fabulous frenemy Lydia to live. It was bad enough going most of the season without the blonde husband-thief, but Revenge without Victoria is just the sad, sad ballad of Amanda Clarke pining after Jack and ruing her enemies’ successes.

Daniel is too busy moving on (at least it sure looks that way) with Ashley to be involved in all this plane crash mumbo jumbo, but it hits Emily hard. Already devastated by losing Jack to Amanda, Emily is further crushed by the fallen plane, because with Victoria goes all the evidence that can exonerate her father. Charlotte is also taking the news hard, and when she can’t get Declan to even speak to her in the wake of this tragedy thanks to her smear campaign on his new teen love interest, she goes head-first into her new band-aid: Potential death by Oxy. We’ll have to wait until next season to see if Sleeping Beauty will come back to us, but let’s remember that Lydia survived falling from her Manhattan penthouse onto a taxi, so the potential is pretty high.

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Recovery potential is also pretty high for the supposedly destroyed evidence because Nolan, the unstoppable computer wiz, is a few steps ahead. He backed up the evidence, and it comes with a video that changes everything: Emily’s mother is still alive and this quickly snowballing mystery concerns so many bigger parties above the Graysons. (I guess good ol’ Connie wasn’t lying about that when he told Ashley Victoria matters very little in this whole scheme.) The video shows Victoria opening this can of worms alongside Voldemort and Conrad, but Emily pauses it to clear the enigmatic remarks from Victoria. By the time she says “Roll it” to Nolan, we’ve all spilled our glasses of pinot noir in anxious anticipation of that exact command. But nope. Everything goes black. Curse you, you perfectly crafted season finale!

With the last 15 minutes of the episode, the series secured enough mystery to take it through at least the first half of the next season – a feat many of feared our beloved series wouldn’t manage. If the writers know what’s good for them, Emily’s mother won’t be some jailed victim of the Graysons and the ominous “Initiative,” she’ll be involved. Forcing Emily’s revenge lines to blur by pitting her against her mother would be a delicious twist, and even if I’m right and I see the whole thing coming.

Did you enjoy the Revenge season finale? How much do we want to bet that mama Clark is actually some sort of evil mastermind?

Follow Kelsea on Twitter @KelseaStahler

[Image: ABC]

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