Scream: Revelations Recap

Synopsis: After 4 deaths and multiple threats Emma will come face to face with the killer.

Rating: ★★★★☆

We did it! We survived the season and the real killer has been caught.

After suspicious footage of Kieran and Nina surfaced, and Kieran disappeared from the dance right before the sheriff turned up on camera chained to a tree – Emma was understandably unsure of who she could trust.

At the same time, Branson kills a guard and escapes from prison, where he’s being held on suspicion of the murders. When Maggie arrives she recognizes the scene as staged, and finds an old necklace in the guard’s mouth, signifying the tree where Brandon used to leave her gifts.

They correctly guess it’s the same tree the sheriff was tied to in the video and go to rescue him, except when Maggie releases the chains, literally all of his guts spill right out onto the ground. It was sad. But kind of awesome.

Emma then gets a call from the killer, warning her that bad things are about to happen at Brooke’s house party. She rushes there with Noah, and finds Kieran on the way. But by the time they get there, everyone is gone, and a student’s dead body and Piper’s bloody car and broken glasses are the only clues.

Until that is, they found poor Brooke in the standing freezer, after a nightmare-inducing sequence in which she hides in it, the killer locks her in, stabs her through it from multiple angles, and then plugs it back in and leaves her to die- freezing, bleeding, suffocating and terrified in a dark, tiny space.

Together with Audrey, they search the house, no one trusting the other, until the killer calls again to meet Emma alone at the docks, or her mother dies.

She sneaks off, and finds her mother tied to a chair with the killer waiting. The mask is finally removed and… It’s Piper.

The sweet, quirky internet journalist who’d been becoming fast friends with Emma, and had a suspiciously dead father.

As it turns out, she’s the lost daughter of Maggie and Brandon James, back in Lakewood for revenge on her mother, and the half-sister who got the life she never did.

The whole thing played out well, and with tremendous suspense. Piper got hers after being shot multiple times and tossed into the lake where it all began. (Sidenote: are we meant to believe that whatever grabbed Noah’s leg in the lake during the pilot was Piper just hanging out under the water?)

I have a bone to pick with the idea that, in a ten-episode murder mystery, you are allowed to just keep on introducing characters as you go. It ruins the fun if I have my money on certain characters as the killer, only to have new ones the next week.

It makes it a much harder game, but it’s also cheating.

But here’s where it gets interesting:

We still don’t know who killed Rachel.

We also don’t know who attacked Will and Piper herself in the factory after they met with the mayor.

Why does Cassie James believe her grandson came to visit her if there is no grandson?

The divers at the end had not found Piper’s body. In a small, still, inland lake where she fell right next to the only dock.

Knowing that Scream killers so often have accomplices, the season finale treated us to a final tag scene in which Audrey pulls a stack of letters from Piper out of a super-secret hiding place, and burns them. Under a narrated monologue by Noah explaining how these things are almost never over the first time you think they are.

All-in-all, it was solid, entertaining season that got better with every episode, but MTV will need to add some breadth and depth to keep this ball in the air. Starting, preferably, with nuanced dialogue for more characters than just Noah. These kids are good actors, give them good material to work with.

Final Body Count: 9