I keep meaning to talk about Revenge, but I am just a flaily, squee-filled mess at the end of each episode, which makes it hard to plug it in an intelligent manner that it deserves.  Before I start a list of why this show is making everything else currently on TV seem drab in comparison, I offer the following disclaimer:

Dear World, I have a huge thing for revenge narratives, as long as they're being headed by women.  I have been obsessed with Medea since middle school, and my instant love for heroines willing to make the world PAY for what it did to them has never, ever lessened even a bit.  And the more I consume fiction where women are supposed to forgive, forget, move on, the more this love grows. Be it the “Roaring Rampage of Revenge” kind or the "Better Served Cold" type, from The Oresteia to Kill Bill, I have probably loved them all.

Revenge opens with the following Chinese proverb, “He who seeks vengeance must dig two graves: one for his enemy and one for himself.”  This is a huge part of why I love revenge narratives, because um, HI WORLD, I have a thing for obsessive, self-destructive heroines.  I also have a thing for stoic heroines who keep their emotions and issues buried so deeply that you almost believe they don’t have any until everything threatens to come crashing down. And I love morally ambiguous older women in positions of power. This show gives me all of this with Bechdel passing and a pretty solid script.

Based loosely on Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Revenge updates this story and reimagines it with a woman as its protagonist. When she was a young girl, Amanda Clarke’s father was framed for a crime he didn’t commit, a conspiracy that a large number of people in the Hamptons seem to have been in on.  In the pilot, Amanda, now calling herself Emily Throne (and referred to as such by the rest of this review), returns to the Hamptons and starts working on making herself an important part of the community so she can take it apart from the inside.

Heading Emily’s list of people who need to be brought down is Victoria Grayson, the queen of the Hamtons’ social circle, the woman her father loved and who betrayed him. However, things aren’t as simple as Emily’s single-minded quest for vengeance has led her to believe, and this show does particularly well with developing multiple points of view and letting us see different sides to the story we initially get from Emily.

Stereotype-breaking complex characterization of morally ambiguous women is especially what makes me love this show. It pulls no punches in Emily’s hardcoreness, and even as I find myself surprised by the depths to which she's willing to sink, I find myself falling more and more in love with her, and just being FLAILY over her awesome, awesome BRAIN.  It’s taken Emily years to work her plan into perfection and as more and more of it unravels, it’s fascinating to see the layers being added to her characterization, even as she remains incredibly chilling and creepy in her pursuit.

And then there's Victoria Grayson, who, like Emily, maintains a horde of her own secrets, keeping a perfect façade in place as the decides the fate of others in the community and in her life.  She's wonderfully complex, manipulative and vulnerable in turns.  She is easily the most sympathetically developed character in the entire series, and I love how this show is spending so much time on developing the complexity of its primary antagonist. We don’t yet know the reasons for which Victoria did what she did, but we’ve been provided with enough information to find her sympathetic and to know that she had her reasons, which is quite a feat. Most importantly, this show is firmly focused on characterization as its primary concern, and while maintaining plot suspense is something it does very well, it never sacrifices characterization to service plot twists/suspense.

The way these two women manipulate their environments and the people around them -- the ones they're using for their own gains and especially the ones they love -- is ridiculously fun to watch.  They aren’t the only women in the show, or the only ones central to the arc, but they are, predictably, the ones most pertinent to my own interests. Emily, who has dedicated so much of her life to vengeance that she can’t do anything but finish what she started, and Victoria, who is wonderfully complex, sympathetic, and unwillingly to give up any of her power, are both being developed in complex, parallel arcs, and I can’t wait to see where their journeys lead.

So, in conclusion, WATCH THIS SHOW.

So I'm making my Saturday productive by doing the world a favor and spreading "The Inside" love. We're doing a group watch in about an hour on AIM, and here are all the reasons you should watch this show at some point in your life or tonight with us:


1). It's the only show ever that serves primarily as a character study. Think of what "Helpless" and "Restless" do for Buffy, what "The Choice" does for Aeryn, or what "Scar" does for Kara, and this show? Does that for Rebecca every single episode. Every episode digs just a little deeper into her issues/psyche, and the picture doesn't become complete until the last episode, and even then, it's open to interpretation.

2). Rebecca Locke. Starts out as a Broken Bird, but kind of deconstructs the trope in the way she's portrayed. The show is constructed so that Rebecca is completely cool and collected, and given her past issues, you (and Paul, gah) keep expecting her to...break given how fiction usually handles broken birds? But somewhere along the way, you realize that she's not waiting to break as much as that she just put herself together hastily after she was broken and isn't quite right because of that, but she's definitely not broken. I like to refer to her as a Mended Bird. <3

3). This show is a fun study on the functionality of crazy/off-balance people. In this universe, the messed up people are the ones who know/accept their own issues, and the sane ones are the ones who delude themselves/others constantly and are disappointed consistently because of their own expectations.

4). Situations that would lead other procedurals to put the heroine in the male gaze/male narrative are constructed so it doesn't happen. Rebecca is almost de-sexualized in terms of the show being aware of that issue with procedurals (this is not to say that this doesn't exist as an issue elsewhere in the show), and the only time when we see that a character possibly gets Rebecca better than she herself does, that character is another woman, while the show constantly proves the men to be wrong about Rebecca.

5). This show is a wonderful study of the constructs of identity as modernism and post-modernism see it. The modern idea of identity is that people have an inherent identity, and all the masks that they put on for certain situations lead to a fragmentation of the psyche/identity. The post-modernism is all about the fragmentation and holds that all of the masks and the fragments are equally valid aspects of one's personality and what make up the full identity. And Rebecca is...stuck somewhere in between and open to interpretation, as are other characters.


The premise, which could've easily been a cliched, cheesy crime drama in the hands of a lesser genius becomes an unsettling study of a fractured identity and the facets of the human psyche under Tim Minear's pen.

6). Rebecca is our protagonist, but she's...elusive like the best background characters, and she keeps you guessing. She's almost like Laura Palmer from "Twin Peaks" where her story is given to us in fragments making up a whole piece, but this story is hers, and not being told through a male gaze narrative structure.

7). A descent narrative is a narrative in which the protagonist makes either a literal or a symbolic journey to the Underworld/hell/Hades. "The Inside" works almost like an ascent narrative, where Rebecca is possibly already in hell, and it's about her finding her way out of it. And it's not so much about coming out on the top triumphantly as much as it's about clawing your way out slowly and sometimes falling deeper into it.

Disclaimer: This show is not fail free, of course. But it does make efforts to eliminate fail from most situations that the other shows would not put that kind of thought into. All in all, the cases every week are often deeply predictable, but the show makes no attempt to make them all...mysterious? Because the cases themselves are not as important as how they affect Rebecca and the others and how they're used to reveal their layers. This show is less a procedural and more a character study/psychological thriller that happens to use that format.


Viewing/downloading information: You can find all the episodes in a megaupload folder here, and you should get them. This show is not avaliable on DVDs, and the creators encourage you to get it online, which is unfortunately the only way to watch it.

Also, some of us are about to watch the pilot episode as a group on AIM, and if you're on, you're welcome to join us. Just send me an IM at "helltoships" and I'll send you an invite to the group chat. We'll watch in about an hour (at 9:15ish, CEN). You can download the pilot here or stream it here.

ETA: Links no longer working, but I will upload somewhere else if there's interest.