Revolution, Season 2, Episode 9: “Everyone Says I Love You”
Written by Trey Callaway & Paul Grellong
Directed by Steve Boyum
Airs Wednesdays at 8pm (ET) on NBC
One of the golden rules in TV is that you can never really be sure someone’s dead if you’ve only heard about their demise. In Revolution, even that trope isn’t always surefire, since we’ve seen Aaron come back from the dead and Monroe reemerge from a buried casket after a heavy dose of drugs made him appear dead. So it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to see that Julia is alive and well and (gasp!) remarried, in the belief that Neville was actually deceased himself. She managed to escape Atlanta long before the bombs dropped at the end of Season 1, and found a new husband to provide her with food, shelter, and security.
That would, to some degree, nullify much of Neville’s mission this season to take revenge on the Patriots for killing Julia in the blasts. But that view would be shortsighted, as that storyline has reunited the characters with a new purpose: to play the long game and… well, we’re not quite sure, but the former Nevilles seem to be making a power move in Washington, now that they both look to be in trusted positions.
The action back in Texas is somewhat subdued compared with recent weeks, but Aaron finally nails down the all-important answers he’d been looking for. The nanobots (anthropomorphized in the shape of a childhood friend of Aaron’s) want to help him in exchange for giving them a consciousness when he turned on the power way back in the Tower. Aaron, scared and confused by his minions’ capacity to carry out pretty much any request for him, drives them away, but not before he convinces them to kill Dr. Horn and the rest of the Patriots bearing down on the group at a high school (perhaps not the wisest choice of setting for a shootout, given the violence at schools in recent years).
His decision to push away the nanobots could prove damaging to the gang. As we fade out, Cynthia is lying motionless, presumably dead after Horn shoots her. Miles is elsewhere in the building, passed out after the hand injury he suffered early in the season infected his arm. Miles is, of course, far more valuable to the show than Cynthia, who, as innocuous as she was, didn’t add much to the show other than someone for Aaron to really care about.
By Revolution‘s standards, this is a fairly straightforward episode. It neatly resolves some of the season’s main arcs so far and gives us more big questions for the rest of this year’s run, along with the requisite solid action and some lovely, albeit gloomy, imagery in the fog. Revolution might have seemed narratively dead after the first season, causing many viewers to drop it from their schedules, but its improvement is vast. And, as we all know in TV land, you never really know if someone’s dead until you see it with your own eyes.