Emily Thorne’s “Revengenda” is coming to an end. On Wednesday, showrunner and executive producer Sunil Nayar confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that the upcoming fourth season finale of ABC’s Revenge will effectively serve as the series finale.
“We can officially tell our fans that this will be the end of the story,” Nayar told EW. “We’ve been talking to the network and we all just wanted to make sure that we felt very confident. Now that everybody has seen the finale—which is fabulous—everybody understands that as much as we all adore the show, it has hit exactly the mark it needed to to end. This is the series finale of Revenge that will be airing in a couple weeks.”
Though technically speaking this is a series cancellation on the network’s part (Nayer has previously publicly stated that he had ideas to keep the show going for additional seasons), it surely doesn’t feel like one. In fact, this axing (or dare I say, red sharpie takedown) is very much in the same vein as what Fox did with Prison Break in 2009. Revenge has simply reached its conclusion, properly exhausting itself creatively over a solid amount of time. Though four seasons doesn’t sound very long (Lost, for example, bowed out after six seasons), Revenge set out to tell a tale that naturally could only sustain itself for a limited run.
–Spoilers start here–
From the start, it was protagonist Emily Thorne’s hell-bent mission to make the Grayson family pay for wrongfully accusing her father of being a terrorist. Today, three of the four Graysons are dead (most recently co-star Madeline Stowe–Victoria, Queen of the Hamptons–offed herself) and Emily’s father David Clarke (surprise!) is alive and his name has been cleared. Though the showrunner had plans to keep things chugging along, it’s simply hard to imagine Emily’s scheming to continue without Victoria, the proverbial thorn in her side. And on top of all this, Emily is no longer Emily; this season she formally came out as Amanda Clarke.
So what’s on the water-logged horizon for our favorite Hamptonites? The series is coming full circle now that Emily has been framed for a murder she did not commit (carried out from the grave by Victoria, no less!). Other dangling threads: David Clarke is undergoing cancer treatment, and then, of course, there’s Jack. Will the two lovebirds finally connect romantically and make it last? This is something I’ve been waiting for ever since that incredibly emotional and memorable scene between Emily and Jack on the pier in season one, where Jack proclaimed his feelings for her: “I feel like this feeling comes along once or twice in a lifetime, if we’re very lucky…” That one. If you take the final episode’s title into consideration, your inner-shipper might start to falter.
–Spoilers end here–
The series finale is titled “Two Graves” (airing May 10), and if can harken back to the pilot for a minute, you’ll remember that it opened with this Confucius quote: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” After everything that she’s accomplished, will Emily meet her maker in the end?
“There are epic emotional moments in the finale,” says Nayar. “There are really shocking things that happen in the finale. It’s a tricky thing because the fans are such passionate lovers of the show and we really want to give them what they want, but the hard part about a finale in a show like this is you want to give them some of what they want, some of what they don’t know they want yet and some of what they never expected, and it needs to be a perfect mix of all those things. I truly believe our finale is the perfect mix of all those three things. I think they’re going to be extremely satisfied.”
Fans should know that Nayer and his creative team put the season four closer together not being fully aware that it would eventually serve as the series ender. And so a cliffhanger remains, despite promised closure. Nayer elaborates: “There’s a tiny little cliffhanger in the series finale. We don’t want people to get weary of the stories we’re telling, so we felt like they deserve an ending to this novel that Mike Kelley started four years ago. I really feel like the last couple chapters are worthy of the first many.”
So we bid farewell to the conniving Graysons, the two-faced Emily Thorne, her soul mate Jack Porter, and let’s not forget the one and only Nolan Ross. Over the course of four seasons, Revenge took its loyal fanbase on a thrilling, emotionally charged ride. After an audacious start, the show rode creative highs (red sharpie take down episodes!) and lows (read: The Convoluted Initiative). In the end, though, there’s no denying all of that addicting dialogue and its soapy, twisty, sexy, flair for the dramatic.
