[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Revival Season 1 Episode 2 “Keeping Up Appearances.”]
The town of Wausau has forever been changed on the new Syfy series Revival. Suddenly, people who died within a two-week period came back to life, for the most part, seemingly normal. (They do heal from any postmortem injuries.) The premiere ended with the shocking reveal that one of the daughters of the town’s sheriff, Wayne (David James Elliott), is a reviver. But as Em (Romy Weltman) tells her sister Dana (Melanie Scrofano), she doesn’t want their dad (also Dana’s boss!) to know.
So far, Dana is keeping that from Wayne. And, in Episode 2, Wayne warns Dana about grabbing Em (who has Osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease). He also decides he wants to lock up revivers. And given what he doesn’t know about his own daughter, TV Insider had to ask the executive producers Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce how his attitude would change if he knew about Em. It’s a question that will be asked in a future episode, Koontz reveals.
“That’s the thing, right? That’s what makes it so interesting for Em to be a reviver,” explains Boyce. “You’ve got the Cypress dynamic where, initially in the series, Dana’s taking this outside perspective of them. She just wants a case about it. She just finds it interesting. Whereas Wayne has this very strong opinion about them, and both of those are forced into a very real, personal, close understanding of it because this person that they both have had to protect their whole lives and have been overprotective of got murdered. It’s not just that she’s a reviver. It’s that the worst possible thing they could imagine — their sister, daughter getting hurt this way — actually happened. So that creates just interesting conflict. It creates interesting storytelling.”
Adds Koontz, “Wayne also, I think, is still dealing with — and we talk about this in the first couple episodes — his wife’s death of just a couple of years ago. And I think the idea that, ‘These people have come back, but my wife can’t come back,’ starts to create this animosity of, it hurts. It hurts because now he’s having to deal with his wife’s death every time he sees one of these people, but yet he’s not able to look through that judgment that’s there to even understand or have the wherewithal to understand that maybe someone else close to him could be this.”
What do you think of Revival so far? Let us know in the comments section below.
Revival, Thursdays, 10/9c, Syfy