Stars: Emily VanCamp, Madeleine Stowe, Henry Czerny, Josh Bowman, Nick Wechsler, Gabriel Mann, Ashley Madekwe, Christa B. Allen, Connor Paolo
Writer: Dan Dworkin & Jay Beattie
Director: Matt Earl Beesley
Network: ABC, Wednesday nights, 10 p.m.
Original Telecast: January 18, 2012

“Commitment” is one of those episodes of REVENGE that feels like the story is going all over the place and not really getting anywhere. Part of it may be that Emily’s (Emily VanCamp) plan for revenge against Victoria and Conrad Grayson for the wrongful conviction of her father David Clarke (James Tupper) is creating a certain amount of collateral damage, this time to Charlotte (Christa B. Allen), Victoria’s daughter and Jack (Nick Wechsler).

With last week’s cliffhanger that Charlotte is probably David Clarke’s child, and thus Emily’s half sister, it’s no surprise that Conrad gets the video tape stolen from author Mason Treadwell’s home in which David confesses to the author about the baby. That, naturally, makes Conrad’s divorce from Victoria that much nastier, especially since DNA results confirm that Conrad is not Charlotte’s birth father.

To make things even nastier, Conrad tells Victoria that he will destroy her in the divorce and leave her penniless, then Conrad tells their son Daniel (Josh Bowman) to ask his mother about Charlotte. Oh, and Conrad sends Charlotte back to her mother as well, but doesn’t tell her why.

In the meantime, Victoria is taking the situation with Amanda (Margarita Levieva) into her own hands, and Jack gets the stuffin’s beat out of him as a result. This, in turn, gets Emily ready to back off a little on her plan. She’s not ready for Jack to get hurt. So she convinces Amanda to take off. Victoria has also gotten some DNA from Amanda to prove that she is or is not the real Amanda Clarke. Funny thing is, according to Victoria’s lawyer Ryan Huntley (James McCaffrey), Amanda and Charlotte are sisters. Huh? Amanda is the real Emily Thorne and Emily Thorne is the real Amanda Clarke.

Ah, back to last week, in which via flashback, we saw Emily in her pre-blonde days confronting Ryan about the Graysons having a hold on him. The flashback is repeated, but this time we fast forward to the present where we find Emily in a secret meeting with Ryan in which it appears Ryan is now working with her to bring down the Graysons and in which Ryan declares he believed Emily’s father to be innocent of bringing down the plane crash of which he was convicted.

With all this going on, that Daniel proposes to Emily and gets her to accept gets almost completely lost in the whole mess. So while Emily is at first ready to back off on the engagement because of the collateral damage issues, when Daniel tells her that Charlotte was the result of David Clarke raping his mother (which we know isn’t true because we’ve seen countless flashbacks of David’s and Victoria’s affair), Emily is back at him again. We’ll accept it as given that the lie is what Victoria told Daniel to explain what happened with Charlotte. Needless to say, Daniel is completely unaware that Emily is the real Amanda Clarke.

In short, the episode is so all over the place, it’s hard to keep track of who is doing what to whom and why, etc., etc. I feel winded just trying to get it all down. It may be in how the story is edited, it may be in the writing, but watching the episode made me feel a little like a pinball bouncing from here to here to here to here.

Things are building to a nice taut mid-season reveal regarding the shooting we saw in the pilot and heaven only knows how that will play out, given some of the conflicting things I heard from the cast members at last week’s Television Critics Association Press Tour. Can’t say more than that, but we’ll let it go. For now.

AGREE? DISAGREE? LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK – COMMENT BELOW!

Follow us on Twitter at ASSIGNMENT X
Fan us on Facebook at ASSIGNMENTX

Click on Link: TV Review -REVENGE  – Season 1 – “Perception”