On tonight’s new episode of Neville and the Revolution, “One Riot, One Ranger”, it’s promotion time for Our Hero once again! This time he didn’t even have to try — just wandered near Secretary Allenford’s wagon at exactly the right moment. Sometimes even a master planner needs a helping hand from blind luck.

His mission, once he chose to accept it: join Allenford’s entourage and help escort her safely on a 578-mile wagon trip from Savannah to Washington DC. She still doesn’t trust him, but…she ends that line of thought with an implied “whatever”. Tom leaps at the chance since it aligns excellently with his plans to climb the Patriots’ corporate ladder and then demolish it from within. As expected, though, the trip is not without incident, as their wagon is intercepted by another team of ostensible Patriots. Correctly perceiving a trap, Neville fires milliseconds before their side can fire first, and the shootout is on.

Despite Tom’s marksmanship, Allenford takes a bullet and both take a tumble down a convenient steep hill away from the ambush scene, which presumably dwindles down to a zero-sum outcome without them. Tom begins to help her clean her wound, but stops short when she reveals what really just happened. Their attackers weren’t impostors, but genuine, card-carrying Patriots reporting directly to the Powers That Be. Allenford is now in hot water for protesting the Patriots’ “reprogramming centers”, in which young, healthy conscripts are subjected to various hallucinogen-based treatments that brainwash them into better soldiers/servants. So she’s surprisingly less of a monster than Tom had hoped.

Tom stops mid-treatment and begins to abandon her. The whole point of his long-term subterfuge is to get into the good graces of the bad guys responsible for nuking Philadelphia, Atlanta, and his wife. Staying by her side, he reasons, would not look well on his evil Patriots performance review and would spoil his infiltration plans altogether. Simply put: saving her life gains him nothing. Why even finish?

Allenford reveals her only lifesaving bargaining chip: she knows which reprogramming center is holding his son Jason.

That’s all she had to say. Suddenly they’re a team again! Call them the Despicable Duo.

And that was it for tonight’s episode of Neville Went Down to Georgia. Tune in next week to see where he and his new partner/pawn head next!

…

…as for the rest of the hour and Tom’s supporting cast:

Charlie and Monroe: The bitter enemies are now in Willoughby and rejoined with the rest of the cast. Miles is happy to see Charlie; Rachel thinks her daughter is stupid; and everybody wants Monroe dead eventually, but they’re all coming to terms with that whole “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” precept that a fully functional freedom-fighting alliance needs.

Miles: Still going by the alias “Stu Redman”, borrowed from Stephen King’s The Stand. His good sword-hand is still out of commission, but his sense of humor has emerged from the deep locker where he’s kept it stuffed since the middle of last season. This may or may not be coincidence, but I noticed tonight a new name in the creative staff: consulting producer and credited episode co-writer Bed Edlund, creator of The Tick and veteran of Angel and Firefly. On yet another possibly coincidental note, I chuckled more than once at this episode — the first time I’ve done so in a good while. Even Charlie made me laugh once. Charlie!

Aaron: After using his nanobot fireflies to set two henchmen on fire last week, Aaron tries cope in his usual manner: he runs away from his girlfriend. After a contemplative scene in a watercraft graveyard, he reveals this isn’t the first time the fireflies have torched someone on his impulse. Some of the ensuing discussion implies that the nanobots may have somehow transcended their original programming, which may not be a good thing.

Aaron’s girlfriend Cynthia: In this week’s flashback, we learn Aaron met Cynthia six months ago when she interviewed him for a teaching job. Later he met her husband Carl (Scots actor Adam Sinclair), the kind of stereotypical lout that’s been regularly jailed or killed in self-defense at the end of hundreds of Lifetime movies. When Aaron accidentally met Carl’s unnamed mistress while they’re indulging in their adultery quality time, they became his first unwitting victims, though he had no idea what was happening at the time. Understandably, Aaron is in no rush to tell Cynthia that he’s just figured out he’s responsible for her widowhood.

The ubiquitous Patriot henchman who nearly killed Titus Andover: Miles captures him with plans to extract a confession that might convince Texas to join Team Matheson against the Patriots. One cyanide suicide capsule later, that plan’s aborted and another recurring player is gone.

John Franklin Fry: Guest star Jim Beaver (Supernatural, Justified) is an honest-to-Norris Texas Ranger sent by General Carver, the as-yet-unseen head of the Republic of Texas, to negotiate a treaty with the Patriots. He’s also yet another character with a grudge against Miles (something something tried to kill him once), but they set that aside momentarily, as all of Miles’ former targets tend to do each time. When the Patriot henchman plan fails, Monroe steps up with a plan of his own: he shoots Fry in the back, recommends they frame the Patriots for his murder, and expects Texas will rush to become their allies. This is why former Presidents should spend the rest of their lives never being in charge of anything ever again.

Rachel: still alive, still bitter and murderous.

To be continued!

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If you missed all of last season and would rather read about Revolution than spend hours playing TV catchup, the MCC recap of the season 1 finale has links to MCC recaps of all first-season episodes, for better or for worse. MCC recaps for the current season of The Chronicles of Neville are listed below as handy reference for fellow members of the fan club. Thanks for reading!

9/25/2013: “Born in the U.S.A.”
10/2/2013: “There Will Be Blood”
10/9/2013: “Love Story”
10/16/2013: “Patriot Games“