I jokingly remarked in a comment a few weeks ago that if Revenge hooked up Nolan and Patrick, every episode would get an A. While I can’t follow through on that half-serious promise—I have to at least pretend to be a professional, here—their pairing in this episode (and all the circumstances surrounding it) gave me so much joy I almost want to. After a fairly dismal season two and a shaky season premiere, Revenge is solidly, consistently delightful again, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
What’s working so much better this season is that although there are still plenty of double-crossing and ulterior motives to go around, the motivation as to why people are keeping secrets and playing games feels far more personal than the abstract mess that was the Initiative. Take Patrick: It’s more than obvious he isn’t everything he portrays himself to be, but the show has been very judicious at giving us any actual information about him, allowing him to hang out in the background being dapper and mysterious for a while before starting to unravel the mystery. By taking his mystery and having it be something Nolan is tasked to solve—and perhaps solve via a torrid affair—well, that’s just fun. At this point, Nolan knows more about Patrick than we do due to his visit with Patrick’s ex-wife, and his initial move on him is obviously an angle. The genius of the scene is how it ultimately seems as if it’s an angle for Patrick, too, and we the audience are the ones getting played by both of them. Note how Patrick initially pulls back from Nolan’s advance, quickly considering the situation before reciprocating. There are far more layers going on here than just two very attractive men making out, and that’s what makes it great. (The making out isn’t terrible, either.)
Patrick is also intriguing because whatever is really going on with him, the show is doing a great job of showing just how much it will destroy Victoria when she ultimately finds out. His little scheme with Victoria this week to implicate the owner of her favorite art gallery in trafficking stolen paintings in order to take over as owner of the gallery herself just cemented Victoria’s dependence on this new child, the one child who hasn’t abandoned her or been poisoned by her duplicity yet. As Conrad and her other two children push her further and further away, Victoria clings to Patrick like an emotional life raft. Victoria might not be the warmest soul, but I find myself feeling strangely sorry for her this season.
And then there’s Conrad, who is somehow always the luckiest evil bastard in all the land. Not only does he walk away from an accident that killed his passenger, but he also finds out his initial Huntington’s diagnosis was a mistake. He announces this news in perfectly dramatic Conrad fashion, dumping his pills—the pills Emily provided, mind you—on the floor and grinding them into powder to put an exclamation point on his freedom from terminal illness. He’s really quite something in the whole episode, blaming the accident on Father Paul’s driving (when he was actually at the wheel) and then saying this near-death experience gave him the sudden clarity not to confess all his misdeeds, clarity that he originally got because of a terminal illness. It’s classic Conrad self-aggrandizing bullshit, and it’s awesome.