Note: Do not read on if you have not yet seen Season 2, Episode 8 of ABC's "Revenge," titled "Lineage."
This week's episode of "Revenge", aptly titled "Lineage," flashes back to the year 2006, showing our cast of avengers to be a little healthier and younger but with the same ol' problems.
Emily is working on her first assignment from Takeda: taking down a Russian trafficker of women and all around bad guy named Dimitri. At Dimitri's headquarters, which is ostensibly a bar, Emily meets Ashley Davenport. Having found her art degree to be useless, Ashley has resorted to being Dimitri's "companion" for the evening. Emily intercepts her in the bathroom, gives her a wad of cash, and tells her to save herself and never return. In exchange, Ashley must text Emily the exact time of Dimitri's arrival.
It is working on this plot that Emily meets Aidan, who has installed himself as a bartender at Dimitri's lair to avenge the disappearance of his sister, Colleen. He tries to protect Emily, but it ends up being the other way around -- this is Amanda Clarke, after all. She leads him to safety after he shoots Dimitri against her advice. He tells her he wants to be one of Takeda's trainees.
Meanwhile, Nolcorp celebrates going public with a champagne toast. Nolan sends everyone home to be with "someone special" for Thanksgiving, staying in the office for a romantic dinner with his special someone -- his CFO Marco. Unfortunately, romance is interrupted by business -- irresponsible business: an account that held half a billion dollars is suddenly empty. Nolan eventually explains that he gave the money to the daughter of David Clarke because it was the right thing to do, implications of it be damned. Marco can't understand this, and Nolan fires him -- from his job and from his, well, heart.
At the bar, Jack and Declan's father Carl fights for his business and to keep his sons safe. Jack overrides his father and tells Joe Ryan -- father of Kenny Ryan -- that they will pay the money they owe him. Things come to a head when Joe sets the bar on fire. A partner of Carl's, who had been similarly threatened by Joe, appears and shoots him; his little girl was in the ER after a hit and run.
At the Graysons, the quiet Thanksgiving Vic planned on having with her "two men" -- Conrad and Daniel -- is interrupted by the appearance of her mother, with whom she hasn't spoken in thirty-five years. Her mother has a new man in her life, which is apparently not unusual. After dropping a lot of not-so-subtle hints that her mother is an evil golddigger, Vic tells the story of being framed for a murder she didn't commit, spending six months in a psych ward, and finally getting kicked out of her mother's house at fifteen so her mother could keep her pedophile boyfriend and means of support.
The Graysons, however, are not a family to leave anything up to chance, and this appearance of Vic's mother was no coincidence. Vic and Conrad hired an actor to play her mother's new love interest, and arranged the ruining of it. Does Vic finally feel satisfaction, having thrown her mother to the curb with nowhere to go? "Ask me tomorrow," she tells Conrad. Does the ice queen feel remorse?
We also get a little insight into Daniel Grayson. He didn't want to go to business school, he wanted to pursue poetry -- and was good at it. That was six years ago, though; Conrad has since squashed his artistic dreams, and seated at the head of Grayson Global, Daniel has cooked up a plot that involves Nolan's past CF-lover Marco. Sounds juicy!
The episode closes with Aidan telling Emily that he isn't going anywhere this time. She sneaks out of bed to find the box that contains all of the info on her father, and more importantly, everything about who she was, prior to becoming Emily Thorne. As she gives it to Aidan, he gently catches her wrist, commenting on her tattoo. "Double infinity," she tells him. "The never ending journey."
"Revenge" airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.
What did you think of the Thanksgiving flashback episode? Doesn't Victoria's mother explain so much?
