A Chip Off The Ol' Block

May 12th, 2014 6:57 PM

Call it a maxim; call it a proverb; heck, call it a kumquat for all I care, but this saying has never seemed truer to me: like father like son. Sometimes these words act as a laurel of honor around our heads; sometimes they act as the concrete flippers for our swimming lesson in the Hudson.

In three seasons of Revenge, Emily has worn that phrase like a pageant contestant wears a tiara, honored and proud to be worth of it. The last two weeks though, that saying has seemed less a tiara and more a crown of thorns.

Two weeks ago, Emily and her comrades went off the deep end. Who in their right mind thinks it's okay to kidnap anyone, let alone your half sister? What kind of twisted morally bended universe do you have to live in to think that's okay? In her quest for revenge, Emily has always had the tendency to play God with people's lives, but this was easily three steps over the line.

Personally, the kidnapping of Charlotte was more appalling than locking Victoria away in the loony bin. That might have been because after the kidnapping, anything seemed in play for Emily, especially considering how Victoria had just tightened the noose around Emily's inner circle so to speak.

While Emily's decent into Raskolnikovian criminal insanity has hastened recently, like father like son seems like it still shouldn't apply. After all, Revenge spent three seasons telling us that the noble David Clarke was set up, an innocent man who died in prison with the world believing that he was a devil. Why should Emily's increasingly erratic and violent tendencies change that? SPOILER ALERT!

David Clarke lives! Huh? Whaaa??? Not only does he live, but he isn't the noble do-gooder that he's been described as. Sure Conrad deserved to die, but in a chair with an injection after a court declared his guilt and not on a dark road stabbed in the gut by a knife. Good men don't do that - no matter how wronged they were.

Where ever we go from here (and with David Clarke alive, Conrad Grayson dead, and Victoria Grayson in a psychiatric word, I have no clue where that might be), it has become clear that child and father really are very much alike.