Fortunately Stowe, who plays conniving matriarch Victoria Grayson, and VanCamp, who plays vengeful Emily Thorne, are beautiful and talented but also stand as guardians of their characters' integrity, and they're not afraid to argue with the showrunner, Sunil Nayar, when they think the writers are being ridiculous.

"As much as I and all the writers understand the characters, they have inhabited these women for going on four years now, so they talk to us about story arcs that they are interested in," Nayar says.

"When we do the big dramatic moves, from an acting point of view, they are scary. You don't want your character ever to get to a point where you've lost a sense of who they are. Madeleine knows who Victoria is and Emily knows who Emily Thorne is, so they have ways of suggesting pieces of their history and their motivation that really flesh out what their stories are, to make them much more grounded and complex."

VanCamp told Associated Press she'd been worried when she heard what Nayar's team were planning for last year's season cliffhanger. "I was skeptical at first but now that I see how, where they are going with this, it is very, very interesting."

The twist she's talking about involved a character suddenly appearing when everyone thought he was dead. "You are not quite sure what he is, who he is, what his agenda is, where he has been," said VanCamp. "It's kind of like Brody in Homeland. Something is clearly broken inside of him and you don't know what or where it is coming from. And Victoria kind of gets in there and starts doing all her manipulations."

I've managed to get this far without revealing what the most recent plot twists have been, because it's possible you are among the 1.5 million Australians who stopped watching Revenge during its second and third seasons (after its first season pulled a record 2 million viewers). That kind of audience drop-off also happened in America, as viewers started recording Revenge and bingeing on three or four episodes at a time. The big plot twists were part of an effort to bring those viewers back to watching on first broadcast.

Stop reading and go to the next item now if you still plan to catch up with the episodes accumulated on your recording device. OK, here is Nayar explaining the premise of the show: "The original spine was the journey of the character that we came to know as Emily Thorne, who was back in the Hamptons to avenge a father she felt was wronged by all these people. The spine was about watching her elegantly and intelligently going about exacting her revenge. But she got sucked in and proved herself to be only human in what is almost a sociopathic endeavor."

Over the past two seasons, the writers have expanded Stowe's role. "Victoria needs to be as complicated and as intelligent as Emily, because your great hero needs the worthy adversary," Nayar says.

Now here's VanCamp explaining what just changed: "The biggest surprise of last season was that my father is still alive. So the show just turns on its head, because what was all of this for? You can certainly see the torment once she realises her father is actually alive."

Stowe (whose character is in a mental hospital after killing Emily's sweetheart) hints at what is coming next: "I will say that it appears that David [Emily's father] and Victoria have some sort of sadomasochist relationship. She had a very demented early background, very tortured and had been used over and over and over again, and I think Emily and Victoria are very similar creatures. There are going to be deaths. I wouldn't be surprised if Victoria's one of them." (I suspect the last sentence is a joke.)

To the charge that all this makes Revenge look like an afternoon soap, Nayar responds: "On paper it can easily look like they're just tropes we are using to lean into, but in the exploration of the stories and the way that our actors have the ability to really ground these human beings, we are different. With soap operas, the onus is on them to churn out five original episodes a week, so they don't get the luxury of crafting a story where they can really dig into the psychology of what makes the human being do that."

"What we have the luxury of doing is to take a trope like David Clarke coming back from the dead and actually explore it in ways that are deeply psychological and very surprising, so that they don't just feel like we ran out of things to do."

When I spoke to him, Nayar was in the process of plotting out the final three episodes of the new season. His team must develop two scenarios – one in case the show is renewed and one in case it is axed.

"The audience that has been such loyal fans, such passionate fans, deserve the show to end as opposed to just stop," Nayar says. "All of us who've worked on the show, we deserve a chance to finish it properly. We're not 100 per cent sure what we're aiming for, so we are building ends so that if they say it's the last season, we go in this direction, or if they tell us there's a season five, we'll go in this direction. The exciting thing is both directions are great."

Revenge returns to Seven on Monday, February 23, at 9pm.

Bean there, seen that
It's a scary thought that we have reached the 25th anniversary of the arrival on this planet of a creature known only as Mr Bean. Since his first appearance on British television early in 1990, Mr Bean's 14 half-hour programs have been seen in 190 countries, sold 35 million videos and DVDs, been viewed 1.3 billion times on YouTube and been turned into an animated series for children.

Rowan Atkinson created the character while studying for his master's degree in electrical engineering at Oxford University. His co-creator was student friend Richard Curtis, later known as the writer of Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral. After Mr Bean performed Chariots of Fire with the London Symphony Orchestra at the opening of the 2012 Olympics, Atkinson told the London Daily Telegraph: "The stuff that has been most commercially successful for me – basically quite physical, quite childish – I increasingly feel I'm going to do a lot less of. Apart from the fact that your physical ability starts to decline, I also think someone in their 50s being childlike becomes a little sad."

But now we learn that he's agreed to bring the character back just one more time, in an appearance for the charity Comic Relief on the BBC on March 15. We'll keep you posted on when it might reach Australia.

Poppy flowers again
The Sydney-born actress Poppy Montgomery has come back from the dead so many times she deserves a role in Resurrection. She starred with another Australian, Anthony LaPaglia, in 160 episodes of Without a Trace before it was cancelled in 2009, but returned in 2011 as another cop (with a photographic memory and red hair) in Unforgettable.

The US network CBS cancelled that after one season, but changed its mind and brought it back in 2013 as a summer filler. At the end of the third season last October, CBS cancelled Unforgettable again. Last week the US cable network A&E announced it would produce a fourth season of 13 episodes, starting in the second half of this year. As Variety magazine noted: "The producers might want to change the series name to Unkillable."

Montgomery joins three other Australian actresses in the axed-recovery program: Melissa George (who starred in the cancelled series Hunted but now features in the US version of The Slap); Rachael Taylor (in cancelled series Charlie's Angels, 666 Park Avenue and Crisis, but just cast as a Marvel hero in AKA Jessica Jones); and Miranda Otto (in cancelled series Cashmere Mafia and the US version of Rake, now joining Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris in Westworld, written by Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan).

For more, go to smh.com.au/entertainment/blog/the-tribal-mind.