[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Revival Season 1 Episode 4 “Run Along Little Lamb.”]
Up until the final moments of the Thursday, July 3, episode of Revival, besides what caused the Revival Event (anyone who died within a two-week period came back to life), the big mystery was who killed Em (Romy Weltman), resulting in her being a Reviver. Now, another Cypress is at the middle of at least an attempted murder mystery.
At the end of the episode, Em confronts her professor, Aaron (Gianpaolo Venuta), with whom she’d been having an affair before her death. He didn’t mean to hurt her, he insists and she begins strangling him. But then he tells her he didn’t kill her, though he did take her from the bridge that night. She was special, he explains … only to then be shot. Dana (Melanie Scrofano) then runs over to her sister, only to be shot as well. Em uses Dana’s gun to fire back. The episode ends with Dana seemingly dying …
“Anything can happen in sci-fi,” Melanie Scrofano tells TV Insider of Dana’s fate. “I will say that it’s really a great moment for the sisters because now Em’s in charge. She’s literally in her sister’s hands. And I think moments like that are when you really learn more about yourself, but [also] about each other. And I think as the story progresses, Dana starts to realize how much her sister has to offer. There’s a real growth between them.”
Executive producer Aaron B. Koontz explains, “There was an element of this in the comic, but we took it further. It’s really fun to watch a character get unstuck. When we were in the writers’ room, we’re like, ‘Let’s get stuck. Let’s put ourselves in a horrible spot. How can we take our main character and not just shoot her in the leg or the arm?’ By the way, Dana’s really shot, and it’s bad. ‘Okay, so how do we get her unstuck? How do we as writers get unstuck out of that?’ It was a really fun journey for us to have.”
He cautions against thinking that you might have figured out the answer. “We’ve thought probably about what you might think that answer is, and then we pull the rug into another answer and we’re going to continue doing that,” he says. “We really tried to deconstruct the tropes of this in a wonderful way and what that is and what those audience expectations are. We love challenging ourselves with things like that.”
Dana getting shot comes just as things seem to be progressing between her and CDC scientist Ibrahim (Andy McQueen); the two were on their way to a date when they took this detour.
“We wanted to have this sort of will they, won’t they thing with Dana and Ibrahim. They’ve got this great chemistry and so it’s funny that every time they try to actually do something with this, they get interrupted by something in this world,” says executive producer Luke Boyce. “This is obviously an even bigger sense of that, but it’s also how we’re drawing Ibrahim into the Cypress drama, right? Ibrahim is there in Wausau to find out what happened on revival day, but now what this is going to do is this is going to draw Ibrahim into the very central drama of Dana and Em. And I’m very excited for you to see how that comes out in Episode 5.”
Lavivier Productions/SYFY
Adds Koontz, “Andy McQueen is such a wonderful actor. He absolutely kills it, especially in future episodes. When you see what he does, it’s really, really exciting. But it’s a fish out of water story where he’s stuck. He’s also different. This is a Muslim man in a small town, so he has this kind of connection to revivers, which is a really interesting perspective of, what it’s like to feel like an other, what it’s like to not feel welcome. And then also this big CDC scientist dude that’s there and what does that mean? So him coming in and with Dana, it’s just a really, really fun, their chemistry is off the charts as we continue going.”
What do you think will happen next with Dana after she was shot and Dana and Ibrahim’s potential romance? Let us know in the comments section below.
Revival, Thursdays, 10/9c, Syfy