The Vampire Diaries 1x15: A Few Good Men

[jedi_of_urth]

The Vampire Diaries 1x15: A Few Good Men

Well, I’m not sure what to say about this, so I guess I start with a quibble and see where it goes.

This bachelor auction makes very little sense. Whether it was a call and response auction or a silent auction, that involves bidding on the bachelors in question. This might be a raffle, if there were different bowls for people to put their tokens in; if there was only one bowl it’s more like a lottery; though either way I have questions. If it’s a raffle, why did mama Donovan (Kelly, I can remember that for a little while at least) even put any tokens in the plumber’s bowl when she said she didn’t want to end up with him? But if it was a lottery, how did Jenna so easily end up with Alaric? Either way, Carol would have had to enter herself into the raffle/lottery, at least officially; so if it’s a lottery it’s even more coincidental that she ‘just happened’ to draw her own number, and if it’s a raffle then it would be clear that she made a point of ‘entering’ for a chance with Damon. Basically, there should be shenanigans called.

Although…maybe the simplest explanation is that Kelly just put tickets in the plumber’s bowl, either by mistake or because she was exaggerating how much she didn’t want to end up with him. I guess Occam’s Razor would be satisfied with that version. Doesn’t really do anything for my shenanigans calling overall.

Also, what does Jenna (and anyone else) think during Damon’s hassling of Alaric? At the very least people would think Damon just confessed to shagging Alaric’s dead wife and at minimum that’s bad form.

And on that topic, if Isobel’s been gone for about two years and there’s not a body, how did she get declared dead so quickly? My knowledge may be acquired from television, but I feel like it would take longer than that unless there was additional evidence that she was probably dead, which we know they didn’t have. Plus, in those circumstances, there has to at least be some suspicion that she’s just run off, and other suspicion would have fallen of Ric (either for killing her or making her feel she had to run away and hide). I guess I’m just not sure Ric’s record would be squeaky clean.

To turn that token though, had Ric been found dead (or even gone missing) a day or two after Damon told the Sheriff he was suspicious of the other man, and even egged him on over his dead wife, I think Damon might be under some suspicion for Ric’s death. Not that I’m very confident in any of the policing around this show; since Elena should really be questioned over being in the vicinity of two suspicious deaths in one day (also I feel sorry for the truck driver who, even if he doesn’t get hit for vehicular manslaughter, is still going to live with the idea that he killed a guy, and won’t know that said guy was compelled to get killed).

I will firstly say the Jenna must be bad at googling (sorry, bing-ing) things. Since Isobel never changed her name, and there would likely be news about her ‘death’ (however it was reported), it shouldn’t have been hard to find. However I might allow some leeway as Jenna had jumped to the conclusion about Alaric’s Isobel (though I would call out that leap) and she wanted to run things past him before giving Elena google (bing) results that might even mention him and what it means about Elena’s birth mother.

And I will say that I don’t understand Isobel’s play here. It’s not like she put Elena off her trail, or she would have had Trudy give some false information instead of an accurate enough life story that Elena could have continued to search from. Or, even easier, Isobel could have just killed Trudy before Elena ever showed up, if Isobel is so indifferent to killing off her old friend anyway. And then having the messenger kill himself in front of Elena isn’t really going to have the effect Isobel claims to want, that’s just more for Elena to want to look into.

As for the usual check on the timeline, this episode is a bit of a problem child. I’m fairly sure that as time goes on the writers did learn to lay off dates wherever possible (which caused its own kind of confusion), but here the guy actually says it’s 2010. By my calculations, this is basically impossible. Even if we pretend that setting Halloween in 1x07 makes sense, the episodes since then have only had a few days’ worth of wiggle room, meaning not enough to get to 2010. Were it not for the dates given of the Gilbert parents’ deaths, it would almost be easier to say this series so far was in fall 2010, than to work out how it could have been 2009 before and is now 2010.

For once we do get some breathing room at least. Not enough for the date given, but room to add in a couple weeks I guess. Although it means Harper’s just been wandering around like a lost puppy for that time without finding any of the other tomb vamps until now. And no one’s gotten sick of Damon’s bullshit in this more extended period of time. I can certainly believe Damon is still being a reckless moron after however long it’s been (it could have been years), but I’m not sure he could have avoided being caught for all that long.

This episode is pretty catastrophic for Damon’s character; and any sympathy last episode might have bought him is gone just as fast. And it’s not as if it’s introducing some nasty element, it’s just reminding the audience how awful Damon is. That said, as much as I want to think that was the point of showing all his actions here, I’ve seen this show, and I don’t think that’s what it’s going for. Especially since I don’t think we’re supposed to be cheering on Alaric at the end, even though I am. (It’s not a great episode for Stefan either, but in subtler ways that I can more easily see how the writers overlooked the awfulness.)

Damon is terrible and should die. In fact, in my head this season would end with Damon’s death and it being some kind of mystery leading into next season. With such a long list of suspects that it obscures some reveal coming in from the outside who just wanted him dead for a new reason (like Katherine just being tired of his shit) beside all the reasons we know he needs to be killed.

For neither the first or last time, Damon’s actions are so bad, they make the people around him look pretty bad to for not just putting him out of the world’s misery. Stefan knows what Damon is doing with those sorority girls is wrong, and how likely it is that they’re going to end up dead rather than waking up in their dorms thinking they were just roofied for the past week. There is a small part of me that could even…not forgive but accept Stefan treating Damon’s action with kit gloves, because pissing Damon off will likely result in an even worse end, if Stefan played the same reactions with more concern instead of judgmental smug superiority.

I’m almost more upset with Elena, but also kind of not. Elena really doesn’t get what Damon is capable of and how inhuman he is. She sees him as a troubled guy, but is still getting her head around the idea of him as a remorseless killer. She’s being drip fed Damon’s horrific behavior in a way that her mind has been molding to justify it in terms she can understand and even accept for the sake of Stefan and her own sanity. But, Elena, that anger and disgust you feel that Damon killed your birth mother? Alaric would be feeling that anger whether she was your mother or not. And every other one of Damon’s kills (like, say, Vicki) is someone’s person, someone who would have as much (and likely more) right to be pissed about their person being dead as you feel about Isobel’s death.

Which would be fine if Elena was ever given the chance to process though all of that and face the hard truths that come with a life like she’s gotten herself into; but I know she won’t. Because that would make the triangle actually about Elena, and the version of herself that she is willing to be, rather than which of the brothers can figure out the right cheat code to end up with her.

I say that this episode is bad for Stefan, but I can say that there could be a charitable read of a lot of actions I disapprove of. In that he is trying to walk a narrow road to keep the complicated situation from getting out of control. And he’s not great at that sort of thing. But what grates on me is that while he isn’t trying to control Damon, he is trying to control Elena and Alaric’s behaviors and knowledge, and so he comes off as a dick. It even bothers me that he tells Elena to let him go with her to talk to Trudy, because it doesn’t come off as supportive to me, so much as him expecting that he has a say in whether she goes or not.

Besides, because for me putting a stake through Damon’s heart is always an acceptable option, or at least giving desiccating him another try; plus I don’t see a moral difference between ‘Damon probably killed Alaric’s wife’ and ‘Damon probably killed Alaric’s wife who might also be Elena’s birth mother.’ So being cagey to try and keep Elena from talking to Alaric (and thus learning Damon’s involvement in Isobel’s death) just seems like Stefan trying to control the flow of information, because he assumes he should control what Elena knows and what she doesn’t.

Of course, even when Stefan is trying to be a dick controlling things around Elena, he’s bad at it. He never actually has control, which makes him look even worse to me; like he’s determined to hold onto the fraction of superiority he has, and lording it over the people he wants to control.

I don’t remember if back in the day I had a lot of thoughts about Alaric and Isobel, but I have at least a couple now. For one, these episode does a fair amount of paralleling Isobel and Katherine. In the flashback, Isobel talks about how she’s selfish and crazy and a terrible wife, though it was the selfish part that stood out to me. And that’s what makes Katherine a terrible potential partner for anyone, that she’s selfish; and even when she ‘loves’ someone it is in a selfish way that puts herself first. Which completes the parallel with how Isobel up and left Ric with how Katherine just walked away from Damon (also Stefan, but his feelings on the matter aren’t being paralleled).

But where I usually understand Katherine’s selfishness, Isobel’s confuses me. Even without what we will learn next season about her being on the run from the Originals for centuries, Katherine’s selfishness already seems to be about survival; and if she has to leave dozens to die so she survives she doesn’t really care. And she does not allow herself to care about anyone enough that they could be more important than her survival. But what was Isobel’s motivation? In a way, we’re not supposed to know at this point because we really only have Alaric’s view of her and he doesn’t know, but the clues we have don’t mean a lot to me.

On one hand, it seems Isobel wasn’t fully into her and Ric’s marriage, a combination of him getting a bit pushy on some things and boredom after a few years of the marriage; on the other she did care enough to give him the ring so that she couldn’t come back and hurt him. While there are signs that she was getting perhaps overly dedicated to her research, I don’t see it as becoming important to the exclusion of all else to the point where she was ready to die just to know she was right. The dialog draws a comparison between her and Mulder, but Mulder’s willingness to die for answers largely comes back to questions that have haunted him since childhood, but there are no signs that Isobel had something like that where she just desperately needed to know what happened.

Maybe it will make a bit more sense as we get more to go on, but I think if we got enough I’d have a bit better memory of it.

I was considering going on a tangent about how all the things at work here are fairly well done to avoid coincidence. Damon’s too quick to assume this one is because of Katherine, when it has more to do with the Gilberts, although that does in turn loop back to Katherine back in 1864 making Mystic Falls so aware of vampires (how do so many of the clan that got left in the tomb have daylight jewelry?). Then I considered that the biggest coincidence of the whole drama is that the doppelganger would be born into a family and town that knew so much about the supernatural. I don’t know if they justify it down the road, but we know it can’t be that the doppelganger is always born in this area (going back to Tatia), because Katherine wasn’t; and that’s before adding in the longer line of doppelgangers I don’t remember as much about.


What am I shipping?
Basically nothing, I can’t even think of anything this episode made me entertain ideas about.

Who do I hate the most?
Hard not to say Damon, although Isobel’s kind of a bitch too. But mainly, Damon.