Revival – Season 1 Episode 5 Recap & Review

The Review Geek

2 days ago

Triage
Episode 5 of Revival begins with Dana being shot. Ibrahim arrives shortly after, having heard the gunshot. Before losing consciousness, Dana begs him to protect Em and act as if she wasn't there at the scene.
Dana is rushed into surgery while Wayne begins looking into the truth behind her injury. The official police narrative is that Dana and Weimer had a struggle, and during the tussle, the gun accidentally went off, killing Weimer and injuring Dana.
Since Dana is Wayne's daughter, he's expected to recuse himself from the investigation, but he insists on staying updated.
Meanwhile, Ibrahim lies about Em's presence at the scene but struggles to maintain the deception. When speaking to Em, she assures him she'll find the real culprit soon. We also learn that the bullet she was shot with is still lodged inside her body.
Elsewhere, tensions rise between Wayne and the mayor, whose wife had been a reviver. Wayne had refused to exempt her from the mandatory tagging, and now the mayor threatens to oust Wayne in the next election.
Later, Em asks Kay to help her remove the bullet from her body. They take it to the mortuary, where Kay distracts the mortician while Em contaminates the bullet with Weimer's blood, hoping that when it's 'found,' it will mislead the police and redirect the investigation toward the real shooter.
Meanwhile, police uncover the connection between Dana and Weimer. His final messages before death were sent to Dana, summoning her to the woods.
At the same time, Em and Kay return to the crime scene to plant the altered bullet. In a parallel storyline, Blaine's anti-reviver movement gains traction. He storms into a reviver therapy session and provokes a reviver into attacking one of his followers, adding fuel to his propaganda.
Back at the lab, Wayne questions Ibrahim, and they discover that the lab team has been experimenting on a reviver. The subject was being tortured with snake venom in an attempt to uncover the cause of Revival Day and find ways to 'stop' the revivers.
Wayne tells the doctor to stop the experiments, but the governor, who's quite the anti-reviver, promotes her to lead the Wausau Project, replacing Ibrahim.
Meanwhile, a local citizen comes forward and tells Wayne that he heard four gunshots the night of the incident. He also claims to have seen the masked shooter and noticed a flashlight identical to those issued to police officers. This prompts Wayne to order a full investigation into all police firearms.
Eventually, the bullet planted by Em is recovered and tested. It matches the gun of Officer McCray, Dana's fellow officer. Dana is cleared, but the police also find a severed foot in McCray's vehicle as the episode ends.
The Episode Review
This episode features several subplots that push the narrative forward. There's McCray and the severed foot, Blaine's growing anti-reviver cult, the ongoing mystery of the masked shooter who attacked Dana and Weimer, and the increasingly disturbing scientific experiments on revivers. The show seems to be juggling a wide range of perspectives—scientific, religious, political, and humanistic.
But even with all that, the central mystery continues to suffer from glaring logical inconsistencies. A prime example is Em's entire scheme to plant the bullet that injured her, with Weimer's blood on it, to steer suspicion away from Dana. The problem? The police could, and should, have done the same testing on the bullet that killed Weimer or the one that injured Dana.
There's no justifiable reason why planting a bullet is more credible than simply analyzing the actual crime scene evidence. The whole subplot feels like a massive narrative shortcut.
By the end of the episode, we're told that the planted bullet didn't match Dana's gun, which supposedly clears her. But again, wouldn't the police have already done this kind of comparison with the bullets in Weimer's and Dana's bodies? It makes little sense and shows a lack of confidence in the viewer's ability to follow basic investigative logic.
Revival continues to push the boundaries of suspension of disbelief, often stretching things so far that even its strongest emotional or thematic moments begin to fall flat. The show has the potential to be a good enough mystery-thriller with a supernatural twist, but it repeatedly undermines itself with poorly constructed plot devices and a lack of narrative cohesion.
Let's hope that in future episodes, the show begins to treat its audience, and its premise, with a bit more care.
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