‘Royal Pains’ season 6, episode 3 review: What surprise is Emma hiding now?

Tuesday night’s “Royal Pains” started to get into the meat of this season, and that included more and more questions about this ever-so-mysterious Emma.

For most of the past couple of weeks, the impression we had was that she was the somewhat-innocent (but also very angry) daughter of Eddie R. Lawson, who was in the Hamptons just to confront her father, and figure out more of her heritage. She learned through here that her father never knew she existed, and therefore, it would be pretty horrible for her to be bitter at a man who never wanted to deliberately hurt her.

With all this being said, there was still another twist to the story that we didn’t see coming. Emma had run away from home, and she was slightly younger than she was telling Hank and company at the age of 17. She also has a history counting cards and doing other devious behavior. Basically, she is so much more Eddie’s daughter than we ever thought beforehand. We actually thought that something worse was coming when we heard about Hank’s background check on her, but this really was not so bad as we predicted.

As for Divya and Dr. Sacani, what is the show doing with these two? It’s like they have been just cast away on an island while the Lawsons deal with family drama. Divya was poached of a nanny after bragging about her endlessly, and Jeremiah grew closer to a bartender that has become his surprising new companion, and possible new love interest down the line. The Divya story did come back around at the tail end, but did it really need this much of a setup?

These two stories, plus a random Padma Lakshmi cameo that had no real purpose other than reminding you that this show and “Top Chef” have the same parent company, made this episode ultimately uneven. We still enjoyed enough of it to smile for most of the hour, but it fell just short of “Royal Pains” perfection. Grade: B-.