Four weeks after it latest Major Character Death, Revolution returned at last with tonight’s new episode, “$#!& Happens”. That’s the actual title, character-for-character. I think it’s pronounced “Dollarsharptokand Happens” and may be a reference to an old Sigur Ros album.

In this grim installment: Miles falls from grace; Charlie breaks some bad news to the last person in the world she needs to see; Bass and Rachel finally find common ground; and Aaron introduces the nanobots to ’80s Top-40 rock. It’s anyone’s guess as to who tonight’s biggest loser was.

How did our cast fare this week? Follow along:

Miles Matheson and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day: After foiling the assassination attempt on Texas Governor Carver, the surviving team of Miles, Bass, Charlie, and Connor escape Austin by wagon, but find themselves followed by Texas Rangers convinced that Miles was in on it somehow, even though he shot the primary, underage assassin on stage in sight of more than a few witnesses. Bass, Charlie, and Connor bail out and make their way back to Willoughby on foot while Miles distracts the Rangers’ attention away from them.

Miles’ merry wagon chase ends abruptly when he’s flipped over by a dislodged bumper in his path that bears an old sticker with the episode title printed on it. This’ll be even cooler if episode titles appear in future episodes as Easter eggs, kinda like Alfred Hitchcock cameos or Observer appearances. Anyway: wagon crashes; Rangers advance; they fight and fight and fight. Miles barely wins against the best swordsman he’s faced in quite a while, but limps away with an ugly sword-slash across his abdomen that erupts on cue every time the camera points at it, like an eager little science-fair volcano. Eww.

Things go from uncomfortable to life-threatening when a woozy Miles stumbles across the remains of an old church or house or somesuch, falls through what’s left of its creaky floor, lands with a thud in the basement, and watches helplessly as his disturbance causes enough vibration to knock over the last surviving ground-level wall, which snugly covers the entire basement hole and effectively leaves him entombed and cut off from human contact.

Escape attempts fail one by one. Using various long objects as levers to raise the fallen wall won’t work if you’re weak from blood loss. Basement windows won’t shatter if the owners apparently paid good money for the super-strong, tornado-proof panes. The first aid kit is empty, so he builds a fire with a smashed guitar as kindling and uses his heated sword to cauterize his wound, albeit temporarily and with no small amount of agony. Not even the former homeowner’s “Hang in there, kitty!” poster fills him with enough inspiration to break free and cartwheel to safety.

He takes a break from his basement jailbreak to wallow in self-pity and have a flashback that explains a mystery that’s been vexing fans for months: the strange scene from the second-season premiere in which a bloodied Miles emerged from a shack in the middle of the night and watched it burn. At last, the story is told:

The evening after a war clan overran Willoughby, Miles spent the evening drinking and then followed a shadowy figure into the shack. That figure: his brother, the late Ben Matheson (a returning Tim Guinee!), who’s been dead since the pilot.

Dead Ben scolds him for hooking up with his wife Rachel — at least once before he died — telling him, “You’re an animal and people around you suffer because of it,” and encouraging to him to go away and leave Our Heroes forever. Cut to the sight of Rachel and Charlie, dead but unmoving in a heap over to one side. Drunk Miles responds by exiting the shack, setting it on fire, and probably writing it off as a hallucination.

And now you know the rest of the story. Almost.

Back in the present, Miles feels his condition worsening, scrawls “I’M SORRY” on a wall, and ominously checks his ammo. All is helplessness…until the sight of one tiny guitar pick on the floor summons a warm old memory of a young Rachel — before the blackout, maybe even before Ben. Emboldened by this random inspiration and directly saved by music, Miles grabs an aerosol can, sprays its contents all over the ceiling, cobbles together a makeshift torch, and lights every flammable inch of building materials over his head. The burning parts disintegrate; the non-flammable parts collapse without their support and come crashing down, nearly crushing him.

Final scene: Miles crawls up and out of the hole, hopefully emotionally as well as physically. Because reasons to live, or Twue Wuv, or whatever works.

Aaron Pittman, helpless nanobot gofer: This week: the nanobots, still using Aaron’s wife Priscilla as their vehicle/hostage, insist on experiencing this foreign concept called “music”. Aaron brings her/them an old Walkman and an audiocassette, which she/they activate with their powers so they can listen to Starship’s “We Built This City” Lord-knows-how-many times. Rewind and play. Rewind and play. Rewind and play. Fellow ’80s kids remember this repetitive but rewarding sensation. Still getting the hang of rock criticism, she/they declare it “the finest song ever written!” (“The individual harmonics are elegant!”) Aaron disrespectfully disagrees.

Aaron tries to cajole the nanobots into locating the missing Miles, and/or into vacating his wife. They think he’s funny. They’re well aware their powers give them the upper hand and renew their death threats if he doesn’t keep playing along with their experiments…of which he’s not been the only subject. They reveal they’ve conducted exactly 3,289 such human-experience experiments to date, including Miles’ disorienting shack incident, in which they peered into the darkest corners of his mind, judged him undeserving of rescue, and tried to persuade him to go away forever. And now you know the rest of the story.

And for their next experiment, they want to try pizza. In Texas and without a true pizza chef on hand, it’s a good thing they have no standards to let down.

Rachel vs. Bass in the Worst-Friend-Ever contest: They loathe each other, but they’re forced to search for Miles together. Eventually their tensions boil over and they’re forced to make with the yelling. They take turns recounting each other’s sins and hypocrisies, of which we’ve seen plenty of both throughout the series. Bass brings up the one time they “hooked up” in season one while he was a tyrant and she was his prisoner; they argue over whether or not that counted as “consensual”; and he plants an unwanted kiss on her lips as if that somehow settles everything, even while she’s withdrawing with a sufficiently disgusted look.

But later all is forgiven when they find Miles’ bloodied jacket. She despairs, but he reminds her Miles has survived far worse battle damage. Thus do they set aside their varying levels of awfulness and bond over the one thing they have in common besides occasional disregard for the lives of innocents: they agree on Miles’ pure awesomeness.

Charlie Matheson, the woman who killed Jason Neville: During the search for Miles, who should just-so-happen to show up but Tom Neville, evil father of the brainwashed guy she killed in self-defense last time, for which she’s still suffering slight PTSD flashbacks. At first Tom doesn’t even know Jason’s dead and expects Charlie to take him right to his son, assuming they’re still smitten and hanging out together and acting all lovey-dovey. Tom is several episodes behind on a lot of things.

A diversion to an unrelated house fails to give Charlie the edge she needs to overpower him. He realizes something’s off and intensifies his questions about Jason’s whereabouts. After some high-volume badgering, Charlie’s stone-cold facade begins to crack and tears begin streaming.

She tells him Jason’s dead. He assumes it was Miles. She confesses she killed him, in self-defense as a probable result of Patriot brainwashing activation. Quoth Charlie: “I cared about him and that’s what I did to him and I hate myself for it.”

Tom’s stone-cold facade begins to crack and tears begin streaming. He screams and opens fire.

All the bullets embed the wall around her. Not a single wound. He closes in to point-blank range, jams his pistol against her head hard enough to leave a bruise, and pulls the trigger.

Empty.

She runs away while he has a complete breakdown. Later she recounts the moment when she realized that, for the first time this season, she’s not ready to give up and die after all.

The question remains: what to do with her second chance at life, after her Pulp Fiction near-death experience? All she knows for now is, “I need to figure out what kind of tomorrow I wanna see.”

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, in all their uneven glory. MCC recaps for the current season of Revolution are listed below as handy reference for whatever reason. 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”
10/23/2013: “One Riot, One Ranger”
10/30/2013: “Dead Man Walking”
11/6/2013: “The Patriot Act”
11/13/2013: “Come Blow Your Horn”
11/20/2013: “Everyone Says I Love You”
1/8/2014: “The Three Amigos”
1/15/2014: “Mis Dos Padres”
1/22/2014: “Captain Trips”
1/29/2014: “Happy Endings”
2/26/2014: “Fear and Loathing”
3/5/2014: “Dreamcatcher”
3/12/2014: “Exposition Boulevard”
3/19/2014: “Why We Fight”
4/2/2014: “Austin City Limits“