You can’t keep Deputy Dana Cypress (Melanie Scrofano) down, but you sure can ground her with a bullet, as evidenced in the closing minutes of last week’s Revival episode, “Run Along Little Lamb.”
This week, it’s all about the consequences of that action as the Cypress family circles up around Dana in “Triage.” Sheriff Wayne (David James Elliott) is on the war path to find out who else was in the woods with Dana aside from the also shot (and now dead) Aaron Weimar, and Dana’s date, Dr. Ibrahim Ramin (Andy McQueen).
What we know is that Em Cypress (Romy Weltman) was also there, and she now knows that Aaron didn’t murder her on “Revival Day.” But then, who did?
In this week’s SYFY WIRE exclusive Revival post mortem, showrunner Aaron B. Koontz explains how taking Dana out of play gives Em the opportunity to shine, and makes the murder mystery far more vexing to solve.
Dana and Em Cypress swap places in Revival, Episode 5 “Triage”
Following up on the shocking shooting of Dana, this episode deals with the fallout of her emergency surgery, and more importantly, having Em pick up the investigation trail as her sister remains out of commission.
“It was a lot of fun to have someone who’s as charismatic as Mel and you’re throwing them in a hospital bed,” Koontz chuckles about banishing their lead actress to a hospital bed, while noting it was a unique challenge figuring out how to keep the show and character dynamic with Scrofano bedridden.
“What’s so interesting to us is this idea of people coming together to try to help Dana, not only physically, but also because things don’t look good for her in the aftermath of the shooting,” Koontz said. “Dana has been this protector of Em throughout her life in so many ways, and kept her sheltered along with her dad. And now Em finds this opportunity to say, ‘Maybe I can protect my sister.’ It’s a really beautiful arc.”
After a vulnerable moment of sister bonding when Dana wakes up from surgery, Em spends the majority of “Triage” traveling all over Wausau trying to connect the dots on the gunman in the woods. Was she the intended victim? Was it the same person who tried to kill her the first time?
“Heather Taylor is the writer of this episode and she did a really great job of crafting what would this look like from Em’s perspective?” Koontz said. “Em knows that she can’t solve this, probably, on her own, so she needs help. So, finding a reason to put her and Kay Mathurin [Maia Jae] together was a lot of fun as this unlikely duo getting into hijinks.”
Revival‘s whodunit in the Wausau woods
Koontz said they had a lot of fun setting up the “Who Shot Dana?” mystery within the existing mysteries taking place in Wausau. And they knew it was time to make it more complicated by taking Em’s former lover, Aaron Weimar, out of the list of suspects in the most dramatic way possible.
“When it comes to Aaron, I kept talking about him in the writers’ room, saying, ‘I keep thinking it’s Aaron,'” Koontz said. “We can try to deter the audience but I felt like I can’t sustain Aaron for 10 episodes. He’s too skeezy. I can feel the gaslighting going on — whether I believe him or not — with the ring in ‘Keeping Up Appearances.’ We try to do that well, and it does kind of deter you for a second. But I think if you continue to think about it, you just go back to him.
“So we were like, ‘Why don’t we just get this out of the way?'” Koontz continued. “Let’s trust our audience to be savvy and to probably think there’s something up with this guy. We’ll give you that, but let you know at the same time that it’s not that simple. There’s more to this.”
And it also let them remix what happened to the character in the original comic book in their own way. “Aaron does die early in the comic, but he’s not fully dead,” Koontz said. “They handle it very differently, but there is a great moment in the comic where you’re thinking [the murderer] is Aaron, and then you find him dead in a well. And so we wanted to recreate that by also adding layers of tension to all this, as we incapacitate Dana.”
Clearing the biggest suspect also makes the complexity of “Revival Day” even more twisty. “Now, it’s not necessarily about who killed Em, but how was Em killed? Why was Em killed?” Koontz laid out. “There’s a conspiracy around it now because we’re learning that there is more than one person involved, and who was on the phone with Aaron is going to be a big part of this mystery. Now, we’ve got a lot of suspects and we’ve got a lot of people that are in this town, so it was really fun to play with that and to say, ‘Okay, who could have done this, and who could be the shooter?'”
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.
