Summary
“Chapter Two — The Revenant” thickens the plot with some solid action, plenty of mystery, and the return of a dead man back to the living.
This recap of La Revolution season 1, episode 2, “Chapter Two — The Revenant”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Following directly on from the ending of the first episode, we see “the dead” returning to the living — namely, Albert, fittingly Christ-like in appearance, which raises some obvious questions about how he survived a close-range shot to the head in full few of Elise. Albert has some telltale dodgy-looking wounds which suggest a kind of otherworldly toughness, reinforced by how easily and violently he dispatches his captors in the show’s first big action scene. Great, bloody, stylish stuff. “Chapter Two — The Revenant” is off to a rollicking start.
Meanwhile, Madeleine is missing after being left alone by the help. Elise finds her rather easily in the woods, but the young girl doesn’t think she has done anything wrong — she’s clearly lamenting her lack of freedom and the amount of screaming at home, where Donatien, son of the no-nonsense and openly sinister Charles de Montargis, is suffering badly from gangrene and requires his leg amputating. Donatien’s sister, Marie, is sick of her father, for obvious reasons, and confides in her cousin, Elise. Things are not going well in the de Montargis household, to say the least.
Things aren’t going particularly well for Oka either, but at least he’s alive. Joseph visits him and tells him that he knows he didn’t kill Rebecca or try to commit suicide, but he wants to know what caused the vision he experienced during their last encounter. He isn’t sold on voodoo as an explanation. As if to convince him, Oka reels off a load of personal information that he has no way of being privy to, and gives Joseph another vision, this one of another, mangled servant girl in a crumpled heap at the bottom of that verdant hole. (We saw her being tossed in at the end of the previous episode.) Joseph is incensed to learn that Oka’s execution has been moved forwards, clearly knowing what’s up. His opinions on voodoo and magic, in general, remain unclear, though it’s easy to imagine he’s becoming a bit more convinced.
Albert arrives in town and immediately runs afoul of a pickpocket, whom he asks about Oka. He then visits his adoptive father, the one with both a capital and a lower-case F, and he’s surprised to see his son, to say the least. It’ll be interesting to see how Joseph takes it. Speaking of which, he’s out looking for more clues, combing through some foliage where he’s accosted by Rebecca’s father, who holds an ax to his throat. When Joseph asks about Rebecca’s membership in the Fraternity, her father shares some of her idealism, which we heard about in the previous episode. Her father also claims to know that Oka isn’t his daughter’s killer. He says several girls have gone missing, not just her. Meanwhile, Albert tells his father he must set Oka free with the help of the Fraternity, and that if he doesn’t, nobody will survive what’s about to happen. Any explanation for his whereabouts or his apparent immortality, however, he doesn’t have time for.
Madeleine continues to dream in La Revolution season 1, episode 2. In her visions, she sees Albert, who seems to be able to see her in return. When she wakes, she signs Elise warning of an impending sickness that doesn’t bode well for any of them. Out in the woods, Madeleine sees Albert, initially as a horrifying masked figure, and then as himself. Things are getting weird.
Elsewhere, Elise learns from her father’s former apprentice about her uncle having ousted him. This is obviously going to set Elise on a path towards the Fraternity, which will coincidentally reunite her with Albert. In the night, Madeleine gives her the locket that Albert gave her, signing that he has come back, as she said he would. He said that Elise would know where to find him.
We subsequently learn that Charles is keeping his brother, Elise’s father, in the hovel where Rebecca was killed; we see the candlelight inside leaking out through the cross on the door. He is, as reported by the young lad earlier, deathly ill, and Charles is fronting like he’s trying to find him a cure. Are we to deduce from this scene, then, that the servant girls are being delivered as food? When Charles withdraws blood from his brother in a syringe, it’s blue, which doesn’t bode well for his health. We see Joseph examining a similar vial, determining it is indeed blood, but that it acts as a parasite. Joseph injects this blood into a rat that he and Katell catch; he knows it’s the blood of Rebecca’s real killer and believes that killer to be ill. The rat… doesn’t respond well to the transfusion.
After giving away what he knows about his daughter’s death, Rebecca’s father is accosted by the gendarmerie and made to pay for his loose lips, even though we get confirmation that he was right in his suspicions. All is becoming clearer now, as Joseph determines that Rebecca was killed by someone with a disease not dissimilar from rabies. We know that was the Count. We also know that the gendarmerie has set their sights on Joseph, knowing that Rebecca’s father confided in him. What’s even weirder, though, is that after its dissection and examination, the rat’s heart begins beating again.
This might well explain Albert’s regenerative capabilities, though we haven’t yet seen signs of any sickness in him. Elise returns to a place where they once spent the night, and Albert meets her there — though not alone. In the meantime, Joseph is led into the woods by Katell on the pretense of being introduced to someone who can help him prove Oka’s innocence, but Katell hands him over to the Fraternity — it turns out she’s a member. Both Joseph and Elise are inducted in an eerie get-together, during which Albert presents himself to both of them. Speaking of Albert, remember his blue veins from the beginning of the episode? Well, Charles strangles his son Donatien to death and then injects him with the Count’s blood, which brings him back from the dead with exactly the same kind of bulging blue arteries. It looks like we have another undead nobleman to worry about.
What did you think of La Revolution season 1, episode 2, “Chapter Two — The Revenant”? Comment below.
