Over the course of 10 episodes, Em has been on a journey to figure out who murdered her. In fact, she needed to figure out if she was murdered or had killed herself at first. Once she realized she was definitely murdered, we had to wait until the Revival season 1 finale to find out who did it.
There were plenty of twists and turns along the way. Naturally, we had red herrings thrown at us, but we were actually told who the real murderer was early on in the season. We just probably didn’t want to believe it.
Plus, the big reveal came with its own story that led to a lot of questions, and it slightly threw us off on who the real murderer was. Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce broke it down for us, confirming the murderer in Revival season 1.
Em’s real murderer in Revival season 1
In the Revival season 1 finale, Lester took Em away from the church under the pretence of helping her. However, it turned out that he was behind Revival Day this whole time. In fact, it looked like he was the one to murder Em, which was the story in the comic.
However, Lester shared that Aaron was the one who really did it, and the showrunners have confirmed. Aaron lured Em to the bridge and took her from there. He then put her in the water and started drowning her. He was taking her life force from the ritual for himself, and that’s when Lester stepped in.
Maybe Lester finished the job. We know that Em initially saw Aaron and then the man with the mask, who turned out to be Lester, when she went into the water. It’s possible that she was still partially alive enough to see Lester finally kill her, but this could have also been due to her soul leaving her body.
The showrunners make it clear that Aaron did it. And he was doing it for love.
Aaron wanted to save his wife
While Lester wanted eternal life, Aaron wanted to save his wife, Nithiya, from cancer. She was trying to fight the cancer diagnosis, but she couldn’t, and so, Aaron turned to the water to see if that would help to save her. He needed to kill to get the life essence, presumably to give it to Nithiya.
Aaron and Lester had already tried this two years earlier with Rose. However, that failed, and it’s not clear yet why Em was the special one. Something definitely stands out as Em has a purple soul compared to everyone else’s yellow soul, but we need Revival season 2 to figure out what that is.
Revival is now available to stream on Peacock.