In this week’s new Revival on SYFY, Wausau, Wisconsin is truly freaked out in the wake of “Reviver” Arlene Stankiewicz’s (Nicky Guadagni) funeral invasion and subsequent incineration by Blaine Abel (Steven Ogg). And so the “Reviver” registry is officially started so that all who returned from the dead are to be cataloged and monitored, per the town and Governor June Harris (Shauna Macdonald). Sheriff Wayne (David James Elliott) takes it upon himself to canvas for the registry and some truths are revealed.
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The other big twists is confirmation that something decidedly non-human is lurking around town. Cooper (Hudson Wurster) and his young “Reviver” friend Jordan (Flora McInroy) have a close encounter with it during their backyard camping.
In this week’s SYFY WIRE exclusive Revival post mortem, showrunner Aaron B. Koontz and James Elliott dig into some of the most dramatic moments of “Run Along Little Lamb.”
David James Elliott on Wayne’s confrontation with a “Reviver”
Since Revival Day, Sheriff Wayne has been running around his town barely keeping his citizens calm as uncertainty sets in about who “Revivers” are and what they can do since they’ve come back to life.
With the mandated “Reviver” registry enacted, it seems like a pretty black and white situation to enforce. But Wayne finds out the hard way this episode when long-time family friend Diane confides to him that she is a “Reviver” too. She was a huge help to the Cypress family after Wayne’s wife died, and so she asks him to keep her off the registry.
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Up to that point, Wayne hasn’t had much empathy for “Revivers” or those who have been hiding their status. He doesn’t even know that his own daughter, Em Cypress (Romy Weltman), is a “Reviver,” but he gets a taste of how complex a revelation it can be when Diane begs him to protect her secret.
“I love that scene because you really get to see who he is inside and what drives him,” James Elliott said of that fraught conversation. “It’s a moment that’s so emotionally piercing. I had to dig in to play that and I just love the scene. As far as character goes, it was very revealing.”
Asked if it opens the door to future conflict regarding the registry, the actor said it certainly provides a window into Wayne’s impending struggles. “It’s the scene that will tell us what he not only has to wrestle with externally, but what we see internally and how it affects him,” he said. “Then we watch his life play out, and the secrets in his past. These 10 episodes that we shot are so dense with all the characters and all this backstory and stuff that plays out. I guess you could call it a compendium of character and a compendium of life. There’s no one-dimensional zombie story here. It’s a really complex story.”
What’s that thing creeping around the outskirts of Wausau?
If you heard a strange sound in the pilot when Cooper got out of the car at the farm, or in this episode, you saw something in the mirror or that odd impression in the tent fabric, showrunner Aaron B. Koontz wants you to know you’re not crazy. And if you’re a Revival comic book reader, he said what you’ve been waiting for is coming very soon.
In Revival Issue #1, there’s a specific reveal of something new in Wausau that the series has yet to introduce. Koontz said that when they read the comic they knew it was pivotal and had to be part of the show, but introduced in a new way.
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“It’s a little bit of a rope, a dope, if you will,” Koontz said of their intention to woo viewers into another important facet to this story. “How do you bring someone in to what feels like more of a traditional murder mystery at first, and then we just get a little weirder as we go along?” he said of the show’s premise. “And then at the end, you’ll be like, “What the hell am I watching?” That’s the hope that we’re gonna get to, which is what the comic does so well. But [the comic creators] just throw you right into the weirdness in the first issue.
“We’ll continue to tease something that’s there,” he said of the unseen thing. “And it’s not until you see this touching the [tent] that you’re like, “Whoa, wait, wait, wait! There’s something out there.” We want you to feel this presence looming and getting closer. It’s the killer coming toward the door that you feel like…it’s coming.”
Revival drops new episodes weekly on SYFY every Thursday at 10 p.m. ET. Every episode will be available to stream on Peacock exactly one week after airing.
