Continuing Impressions of Revival Ep3: “Reality Check”
“Reality Check” Maybe Saved This Whole Series
“Reality Check” is—drum roll please—a great episode of Revival. Perhaps the first even good episode of Revival. It actually flowed properly and felt like it was utilizing the interesting questions at the heart of its premise while maintaining solid, cohesive plotlines. I wasn’t frustrated; I wasn’t thrown off. The episodic and the serialized nature of this story are finally working in harmony.
What do I mean by that? I mean, isolated stories of people dealing with coming back from the dead are interlocking with the ongoing mystery plot line. We get this little story of jealousy, cruelty, and faith being used as a justification for abusive, violent behavior, and it also tells us the backstory of one of the antagonists, while, in the same scene, no less, setting up another antagonist. And not only that, it also ties into the plotline about the little girl and her religious parents. Even if those two plotlines never directly affect each other, they do send ripples and give us, the audience, more to think about. We’re getting efficient writing that presents a concrete, nuanced theme. We’re getting what feels like a television show. “Reality Check” is such a step up.
And that’s not the only thematically rich vein that this episode is going for. Aspects of it had been presented previously, but now we’ve got a whole side plot about human rights that actually is going somewhere. A police officer, a scientist, and two different politicians all sit in a room and discuss how they’ll go about matters—and their terrible decisions are going to spin out into the narrative. I can see hints of what I assume the big season-ending climax will be, and that is not a bad thing.
Heck, even the character work is better in “Reality Check.” I actually buy all the relationships. The two sisters feel like sisters, not like a bundle of tropes. I still don’t know if the story is presenting stuff like suicidal ideation, drug use, disability representation, and more respectfully and accurately, but at the very least, the narrative clearly has empathy for people who have to deal with those things.
I even cared about the new, rushed romance plotline. There are a lot of problems with it—including the boyfriend having his own host of issues—but it was nice to see characters have moments of tenderness, of care. Revival has a lot of scenes where people are cruel to one another, or at least fearful of one another, but we get several quieter moments here, and it’s a nice change of pace. I still maintain that this series’ central idea is the best part, and showing the ways that people exist with immortality in more mundane situations is just as important to establishing a strong “high concept” story as the intense moments.
So, yeah, “Reality Check” is a good damn episode. I am actually excited to get to the next one. Oh, I’m still wary—I’m still quite concerned about where the story will go with all this—but it’s got my investment. When I’m not reviewing shows episodically, I typically watch the first three before I judge it, and this momentous rise in quality is exactly why.
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