Hack/Slash, Bigfoot, and Ninja Em
REVIVAL – Season 1 Episode 6 – (speculative recap) ⁓
Patty Cypress
A flashback shows Patty Cypress (Lara Jean Chorostecki) giving birth to Em in a home water birth. In attendance, along with a midwife, is her teenage daughter Dana (Reese Finlay), along with her husband Wayne (David James Elliott), and Wayne’s best friend Ken Dillisch (Conrad Coates), who was Sheriff at the time and is currently Mayor. Wayne is not in uniform, so what his job was at the time is unknown. When complications arise with baby Em, Wayne blames the home birth.
WAYNE: “We should’ve been in the city at a hospital! This is crazy!”
KEN: “She’s all about the nature. You can’t move her off it.”
WAYNE: “She thinks water’s so goddam special.”
KEN: “Well, you fell in love with that flower child.”
Reese Finlay in her TV debut as the teenage Dana Cypress
Anthony Check (C M Punk) decides that since Deputy McCray (Nathan Dales) is in police custody he needs to move his ‘stash’ (revivers who are being plundered for their body parts because they perpetually regenerate) out of Wasau. He also decides to take a female reviver along, and kidnaps both Jordan (Flora McInroy), and Em (Romy Weltman). Cooper (Hudson Wurster), who is not a reviver, is taken as a hostage.
Alone in his hotel room, Ibrahim spots this microorganism with his microscope. ‘There you are,’ he says.
In the course of his investigation into the death of Professor Weimer, Sheriff Cypress decides Rhodey (Kaleb Horn) is a suspicious character and tosses him into a detention facility with Myles Miller (Josh Cruddas) who is being experimented on without his consent.
Dana (Melanie Scrofano), who is still hospitalized, gets a visit from journalist May Tao (Katherine King So), who brings with her the files on the Blackdeer case. She suggests Dana was shot because she was getting too close to solving that case, and asks Dana to read her notes, but Dana doesn’t believe her and refuses. ]
Katherine King So as May Tao and Mark Little as Deputy Brent Gunderson — So will star as Caro McClellan in the upcoming romance ORDINARY GIRL IN A TIARA directed by Meeshelle Neal due to air on The CW this fall.
Ibrahim (Andy McQueen) drops by with donuts, which Dana can’t eat because she has a stomach wound so she imitates George Henderson’s pretend effort at being ‘super mean’ to Harry to get him to leave at the end of Harry and the Hendersons. “Get out of here,” she says. “Can’t you see I don’t want them anymore? Take them back where they came from.” (This may foreshadow a future choice Dana will need to make.) Then she asks Ibrahim to check on Cooper and her sister because Em isn’t answering her phone. When he gets to Dana’s house, he finds it ‘ravaged’ with a Hack/Slash comic pinned to the wall with a knife. (The main character in those comics is Cassandra Hack, whose mother killed herself and returned to life as a slasher called “The Lunch Lady”.)
Anthony Check calls Dana to explain his plans to get his stash, which now includes Em, out of town. “Your sister’s gone,” he explains, “but your little boy you could save. It’s your choice. I’ll take your silence as compliance. I’d write this down, if I were you. First truck will be at the Eastern Checkpoint at 4:35. Second truck, Southern Checkpoint at 4:45. License plates are RJM 1990 and VRD 7446. My men will call me once they’re safely across the border. And listen up: if I get so much as a whiff of your boys in blue, or my men don’t make that phone call, every last Cypress alive gets thrown into a wood chipper. You get it? Cypress trees? Wood chipper? All jokes aside, I’m serious as your ma’s cancer.”
Deputy McCray says he’s not afraid of the Check brothers. He’s deathly afraid of who they work for.
Dana gives Deputy Brent Gunderson (Mark Little) a playful punch on the arm and asks him to pull the car around. Then she asks the nurse for a Toradol shot to kill the pain. When Brent returns she notices blood on his uniform sleeve and realizes he was the shooter.
Brent blocks the door with a television cart and tries again to kill Dana, but Dana overpowers and kills him by dropping the television on his head. The film New York Ninja (or at least clips from it) played on the TV during the fight.
Dana sends her dad to one of the checkpoints while she heads to the other. She stops the truck with plate VRD 7446. Em, who is being transported in the other truck, escapes before it reaches the checkpoint, switches into ninja mode, and goes after the Check brothers, as does Dana.
Jordan prepares to leave.
Chained to a chair, Jordan summons power from something submerged in the creek where everything started. (We see the creek water bubble and glow.) She breaks her chains and heads outside just in time to meet Ibrahim, who tries to rescue her. But a creature of unknown origin arrives, and Jordan walks toward it, saying: “It’s all right, it’s for me” like she was getting a phone call from home. Then Jordan and the creature vanish.
Ibrahim watching Jordan depart.
Both Ibrahim and Cooper watch this event. Cooper is amazed and Ibrahim seems to have a religious experience. The Quran, a copy of which is visible in Ibrahim’s hotel room, says, in a possibly relevant passage not referred to on the show: “Your soul will be taken by the Angel of Death, who is in charge of you. Then to your Lord you will ˹all˺ be returned.”
In the end the Check brothers are no more, and Em, bleeding from the eyes, is healing Dana (who has been stabbed near her still-unhealed gunshot wound) with a laying on of hands. The power Em channels seems similar to what Jordan used to break her chains. The sheriff is not involved in the final conflict with the Checks, and likely still does not know that Em is a reviver.