Revolution Star Talks The This Week’s Shocking Death
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NBC’s Revolution has never been opposed to killing off a major character or two when they feel the need, especially this season. This year they’ve embraced the inherent ridiculousness of the show’s premise and upped the crazy factor exponentially, what with the brain washing, the kid killing, the conspiracies, and the nanotech running wild over everything. With the most recent episode, “Austin City Limits,” Revolution takes out one of their biggest characters yet, and one of the key players chimes in on what it means, and how it will impact the series moving forward.
If you haven’t watched this past Wednesday’s episode, stop reading, for the SPOILERS that lie ahead are great and many.
If you’ve been paying attention, you know that J.D. Pardo’s Jason Neville has been struggling with his own brainwashing, and that finally came to a head in Austin, Texas. When the patriots caught up with him and read that sequence of numbers tattooed inside his eye (ouch), he reverts to a mindless state where he’ll do whatever they tell him. When his on-again-off-again flame Charlie (Tracy Spiradakos) gets in his way, he tries to take her out. In what is one of the more brutal scenes from the show, he’s about to choke her to death when she puts a bullet straight in his chest. It’s the kind of moment that as you watch you think, how are they going to get around that, but that holy shit realization creeps in and you recognize that they really just killed him.
Spiridakos talked with TV Line about what it was like to film such a tough scene, both physically and emotionally. She says:
It was intense to film. All those parts were me. Even if you just see my face in certain parts of the close-up, that was JD there with his hands [on my neck]. It was intense physically, it was intense emotionally, as it should be based on who it was…. I’m so glad that it was portrayed in that way…
Killing off a major character, one that has been a big part of the story since the beginning when Charlie first met Jason in the woods, is bound to have far reaching ramifications, both for the character and the story. Spiradakos continues:
It definitely affects her arc for the rest of the season and, hopefully, going into Season 3, I’m sure it will carry forward. It’s just one of those things that’s so tragic. And also the amount of guilt that she has from what happened definitely carries forward with her for the rest of the season.
One thing we know for sure is that Jason’s father Tom Neville (Giancarlo Esposito) is not going to take this death lightly. He’s a pretty high strung, vengeance-minded individual to begin with, so it should be fun to watch him lose his shit and go on a kill crazy rampage. Charlie better watch out. Spirdakos said:
I can’t tell you about how he’s going to react, but I can tell you they do come face-to-face. He’s looking for Jason, and obviously, Charlie knows what happened. It’s really intense. I’m looking forward to seeing it.
While Jason’s death is going to echo throughout the rest of the season, I’m curious to see if NBC renews Revolution. Spiradakos mentioned it, but right now there it is unclear if there will be more to come when season two wraps up. The storytelling has been…erratic, and the ratings have not been great. Next week, on April 9, the network is preempting the new episode for a repeat of Law & Order: SVU. Now I’m no expert, but replacing a new episode of one show by showing an episode of another that has already aired, doesn’t bode well for an extended future.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens on that front. Are any of you out there still watching Revolution? I usually let three or four episodes go by and then catch up in one fell swoop, but it isn’t something I watch week to week. Despite all of the issues with the series, the one thing they’ve done consistently since the beginning is end episodes well, in a way that makes you want to see what happens next. At least that’s something.
