'Revival' Episode 1 Recap & Ending Explained: Is Martha Dead?

What if one day the dead come back to life? Revival, as the name suggests, is a zombie show with a twist. Yes, a shocking number of people exhumed themselves, but they weren’t bloodthirsty. Their behavior was surprisingly normal, or at least that is the idea you get in the very first episode of Revival, starring Melanie Scrofano as the lead character, Dana Cypress. It had always been Dana’s dream to move out of rural Wisconsin, and she had pretty much made up her mind about shifting to Chicago. But that was before the dead in her hometown started to rise. As a police officer, she was expected to dedicate all her hours to solving the mystery behind this strange occurrence, and she was too intrigued to pass up the opportunity.

Spoiler Alert

After 35 days of quarantine, Mayor Dillisch announced that it was time people were allowed to go back to their regular lives. Post ‘Revival Event,’ 47 cases of revivals had been reported, and surprisingly, all were tied to a specific two-week period prior to the revival day (on December 18th). The cause was unknown, and so was the effect of such a strange event. After a month-long quarantine, Dana headed to a local bar and was hooking up with a stranger when suddenly she received a call from her father. He told her about a dead horse that a man named Lester had come across, and he wanted Dana to investigate the matter. Dana’s father, Wayne, was also her boss, so even though she didn’t wish to spend the night searching for the owner of the horse, she didn’t have a choice. 

Dana arrived at the woods where the dead horse was found. Lester guessed it must have been the coyotes that killed it, but Dana was not yet ready to arrive at a conclusion. She grew a little suspicious when she noticed tire marks, and very close to the dead horse, she came across a coyote that had been trapped in a makeshift trap. Dana was taken aback when she discovered loose teeth resting on the snow next to the deceased coyote. The next day at work, Dana was introduced to Dr. Ibrahim Ramin, the new CDC liaison, who turned out to be the stranger she met at the bar. Wayne could already sense from their awkwardness that they’d met before. But he chose to stay out of it because he already had too much on his plate. He was not happy with the mayor’s move, because lifting the quarantine had resulted in complete chaos. Moreover, he was not entirely sure if the Revivers should even mingle with normal people. The mayor thought Wayne was overreacting, but all he cared about was protecting the people in his town, and he couldn’t brush aside the terror that comes with the idea of the dead coming back to life. Dana managed to sneak out the revival record from her father’s office to find out the names of the people who had died between Dec 4 and 18, but they weren’t tracked down. One of the missing people was Myles Miller, a criminal serving life imprisonment. 

Even though Dana didn’t wish to cross paths with Ibrahim again, that was not really an option. He and his team were working on finding out if the Revivers could ever pose a danger, and she needed his expertise to understand what she was dealing with, especially after his team took the dead horse to the lab to study it. When they met again, Dana clearly stated that she wanted them to deal with the whole situation professionally, and Ibrahim agreed. She noticed a bunch of teeth Ibrahim was studying that he had retrieved from the horse’s body, so she showed him the loose teeth she’d found beside the coyote the previous night. Ibrahim was shocked to find out that they were identical, derived from the same subject. He decided to share a secret with Dana—the tissue of the Revivers could heal on its own; anything newly introduced to their cellular structure could regenerate. This meant that if their teeth fell off, they could grow back on their own, and the identical teeth they discovered from the scene of crime indicated that it belonged to the same subject. 

Dana came to the conclusion that the tire marks were not from Lester’s truck (she figured that out from the model of his truck), she assumed it was quite impossible that the coyote found at the scene chased a living horse and dragged the body to the spot. According to her theory, someone left the horse in the woods knowing that animals would get to it and that would help this person cover what actually had happened to the horse. According to Dana, it was a Reviver who did this, and someone was helping the Reviver cover their tracks. And she thought her best bet was Myles Miller.

Myles Miller had a violent past, and naturally Dana was suspicious of him. His house looked haunted from the outside, with traps set up everywhere. Since there was no one at home, Dana tried to inspect the place a little, when all of a sudden a man attacked her from behind with an axe. Dana managed to get hold of him, and as luck would have it, his arm got stuck in a trap. Dana witnessed Myles’ arm heal as soon as she removed the trap. While Myles claimed that he had nothing to do with any horses dying, Dana refused to believe him. She checked his teeth, and while they didn’t match the ones she’d found, she decided to take him to the station anyway. Before she took him to the station, Myles mentioned that he’d seen a red truck with a tarp on it, and he believed that was the vehicle that was used to transfer the horse. 

Dana strongly believed that amongst the 45,000 people who were quarantined, it was impossible that there were only 47 Revivers. She believed there were some who had died in their sleep and woke up the next day not realizing what might have occurred. And clearly there were a few violent ones. That morning, while driving around town, she noticed a red truck with a tarp, and she felt the strong urge to check if it was the one Myles had described the previous night. The folks who owned the truck behaved suspiciously, and when Dana heard strange noises coming from the barn, she knew she had to find out what was going on. Inside the barn, she discovered an old woman who was extremely agile and strong. She also noticed loose teeth lying on the floor. The old woman complained about the teeth growing even after she pulled them off (this was possibly why Dana had found loose teeth at the crime scene). With swift moves, she killed the couple who were trying to protect her. It was obvious that she was not the same person she once used to be, but the couple was hopeful, so they’d chosen not to report her to the cops. 

While Dana was dealing with something the likes of which she’d only imagined, her father had started to notice how the Revival Event had taken a toll on people’s mental health. Mrs. Shaw’s husband passed away on December 3rd, and she waited for him to come back to life even though she was told that was not going to happen. So, she ended up digging up his grave and bringing his corpse to her house, waiting for him to respond. While Wayne was busy dealing with Mrs. Shaw, by the time he stepped out of her house, he realized that his grandson was missing. He had brought him along, thinking it was going to be a short trip. Cooper had last heard a loud noise and possibly seen something shocking before he disappeared. This is definitely going to be a crucial plot point in the upcoming episodes of Revival. 

While she was going around town, Dana came across her younger sister, Martha ‘Em.’ She was a college student grappling with mental health issues. Possibly her mother’s death left her scarred, but the show does not delve into the details in the first episode. Martha was in love with her professor, but he avoided her. When she confronted him, he promised to meet her after classes, but that never happened. He left her high and dry, and she had trouble coping with the whole situation. She called her father, who had been quite worried since he hadn’t heard from her for the past three weeks. Martha told him that she was doing alright, though her eyes told a different story. She was in pain, and she didn’t know what to do. A man was seen creepily checking out Martha; he had a hat on, though the identity of the man and his intention remained a mystery in the first episode.

Martha ended up in her hometown, perhaps looking for comfort. Dana was surprised to see her, and she offered her a lift to her dorm. She thought it was irresponsible of Martha to simply disappear for days. Martha refused to explain why she’d gone missing; she changed the topic and expressed her interest in accompanying Dana to work. The sisters, who had not seen each other for quite some time, revisited their past memories together. Dana regretted not going to Myrtle Beach with Martha; that was something that they had wanted to do together as sisters. Dana got pregnant at the time, and it just didn’t work out, but she promised that as soon as she was done dealing with the case she was working on, they would go to the beach together. Martha was visibly happy. 

When Dana stepped into the barn, Martha followed her. During the ending of Revival episode 1, the rogue Reviver had attacked Martha when she stepped in to save Dana. The Reviver used a scythe to tear open Martha’s body, and she collapsed on the floor. Dana didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger on the Reviver, but the bullet wounds healed immediately. All of a sudden, at the very end of episode 1, a sharp object split open the Reviver’s head, and it collapsed on the floor. As it turned out, Martha had used the scythe in her hand to attack the reviver’s head, but how was she still alive? The ending revealed that Martha was a Reviver as well. The three weeks she’d been missing? Well, it turns out she was dead the whole time! Did she kill herself after her professor started to distance himself from her, or was she murdered? And if so, who killed her? Also, how many rogue Revivers were there in town? And what resulted in their condition? Well, we have to wait for the next episode to find out.