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tori_reviews2023-08-30 10:53 pm
jedi_of_urth) wrote in tori_reviews2023-08-30 10:53 pm
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The Vampire Diaries 2x01: The Return
This might be a reminder why I ran out of energy to keep doing long reviews of this season's episodes.
The Vampire Diaries 2x01: The Return
This is actually an astonishingly good episode. It seems like all my problems with s1 are just gone as soon as we’ve turned the page. Admittedly, I can already see the seeds being sown of whole new problems, but they haven’t grown big enough yet to be problems.
I will say the plot here is kind of messy, since some of these story threads really deserved more space to breathe rather than all happening in the same day, even though some of the plots only work because they’re so stacked on top of each other before anyone has a chance to compare notes on what’s happening (this show could probably pull off a 24 style season if they’d ever wanted to).
Though, if I need to critique, Dobrev doesn’t seem to have quite worked out her portrayal of Katherine yet; it’s close, and is probably somewhat down to the writing keeping so much of Katherine’s motives muddled. Her work anywhere on this show may not have been as big a task as Orphan Black’s clones, but over time I recall her being really good at inhabiting the characters differently; even when they were portraying each other. Here, it’s more like she’s having fun playing the more overt and outrageous character with Katherine – and I can’t blame her for that – but hasn’t embodied Katherine as a fully-fledged person yet.
Then again, what I’m attributing to meta-textual lack, could arguably be in character behavior. Maybe Katherine herself is playing up her Katherine-ness to seem like even more of an agent of chaos than she actually is. I’m not often willing to give these writers a lot of benefit of the doubt, but I’m almost willing to at this point. It could be that she’s trying to play each of the brothers differently, plus her openly antagonistic treatment of Bonnie, that she might be feeling out what’s going to work. Though I’m only willing to give so much wiggle room; even if I think they have the broad strokes of what this season will deal with in mind (which I’m not convinced they did), I know that they’re going to be retconned repeatedly after that and Katherine’s motivation is quite plot/lore dependent.
Even beyond that, I’m not sure I love chaos-Katherine as an in character explanation; because the Salvatores don’t really know what Katherine’s Katherine-ness is yet. Damon kind of knew the real her back in 1864, but he also quite clearly never considered that she was so…’Katherine’ as to do what she did. Stefan arguably has a better idea of who she really is by virtue of what she did to him in the course of their relationship, but she still never really showed how…Katherine she could be. And it’s not like she wasn’t actually this ‘Katherine’ back then, considering the long game it’s been revealed she was playing, she just didn’t let people know that she was.
It is kind of crazy how much more chemistry Dobrev has with both the male leads when she’s playing full on Katherine. Again, she’s able to crank everything up in a way that wouldn’t make sense for normal teenager Elena to be portrayed with. And in the flashbacks we saw during s1 we still weren’t really seeing the all in Katherine portrayal since we were seeing how the guys remembered her; plus they were playing versions of their characters that were mostly more restrained too, so the comparison didn’t stand out so much.
(But it’s also funny to me, because I always thought Dobrev had more chemistry with Gillies as Elena than as Katherine. Their restrained performances fit together in way that still sparked, that I didn’t think matched when it was Elijah and Katherine.)
I was going to say I have a lot of thoughts on all four legs of the new love square, but it turns out there is leg I don’t have much to say on. That being Stefan and Elena; so this will be where I put how much of an ass Stefan is being about the kiss (even if that is also about his relationship to Damon and to Katherine). Katherine was sending Damon different signals than Elena would have been, as this episode plainly shows (also because Katherine wasn’t sure what signals Elena would have been giving Damon in that moment, so she was pitching her performance responding to him just as much, which was more than Elena would have). Damon was responding to the signals he thought ‘Elena’ was giving him, and moved in, cautiously, to see if she wanted to kiss him too. Is it still a dick move to move in on his brother’s girlfriend without getting signals of more explicit desire, yeah; but Stefan should be a lot more bothered by Damon’s behavior after the fact and throughout this episode, especially once they know it was Katherine, than by the fact that the kiss happened.
And really, Stefan’s attitude in the end of the episode does not make him look good, considering how he acted about the kiss. He’s so very upset that Damon would kiss what he thought was an Elena that wanted to kiss him back; but is apparently defending the outright sexual assault and killing of Jeremy on the grounds of Katherine messing Damon up and the result where Jeremy doesn’t stay dead. Even if Elena hadn’t told him yet about Damon trying to force himself on her, what Stefan chooses to try and justify in Damon’s behavior and what he thinks needs to be addressed seems to have some misplaced priorities.
…for once I feel the need to say something about this show’s terrible handling of consent. I usually try and avoid the topic since everyone except the writers of the show probably know it’s there. But this episode makes some weird choices if it is aware of its portrayal of consent; and terrible choices if it isn’t. And oddly…consistent whichever it is. Because there’s a fairly clear parallel drawn between Katherine’s presumption of Stefan’s feelings, and Damon’s treatment of Elena’s potential feelings for him. It's all very abuser/rapist ‘you totally love me you just need to admit it’ behavior. But the show is always warry of outright calling Katherine sexually abusive rather than the kinder sexually assertive (girl boss Katherine is a much more fun way to view her, I agree); and has the world’s most muddled treatment of Damon’s behavior. Because it seems deliberate to put this in the season premier that Damon was still the guy who they spent so much time showing as abusive last season; he mellowed for a while, but it didn’t take long to set him back completely.
Like I said, if the writers recognize that Damon and Katherine are both bad people for what they do here, then it’s consistent. If the writers think that Damon and Katherine are both earnestly in love with the objects of their abuse (including overlooking that it is abuse), then it’s consistent. The first makes far more sense this episode; long term I can only conclude it’s the latter.
I’m going to leave off some of my discussion of Katherine’s feelings at this point. My memory is hazy enough that I don’t remember what is and isn’t part of her plan. That said, I have some vibe that she just switches tactics for dealing with Damon mid scene. It’s all manipulation, but to what end I’m not sure at the moment.
Look, I hate Damon most of the time, and even I feel a little sorry for him with Katherine’s rejection. It’s clear that part of him had been hoping that if they ever saw each other again, she would say that leaving him behind had been a mistake and now they had a second chance. It’s delusional, but after 145 years I can hardly blame him for not having given up his delusions completely (taking his frustration with Katherine out on Elena is a problem though).
I also kind of want to commend the staging of the D/K near-sex scene. Because it comes across quite clearly that Damon is torn between his desire to show that he is in control here, and his desire for Katherine to dominate the hell out of him (like, one assumes, she always did before).
Another bit that stood out to me is Damon’s idea for ignoring Katherine until she can’t stand being ignored. And…I’m not sure if that’s Katherine. It’s certainly Damon logic because he very much gets tired of being ignored and starts acting especially rashly, but Katherine… She was fine with the world thinking she was dead for a century and a half; presumably she wanted it to be indefinitely as the vamps being trapped rather than killed was Emily/Damon/Anna’s add on to Katherine’s plan to kill all the vampires as a means of faking her own death. So it’s almost more evidence that Damon still doesn’t get Katherine; that he thinks they’re the same sort of person, when they’re not (at least not in the ways Damon thinks).
The ’kiss me or kill me, you’re only capable of one or the other’ line though… For one, that makes a lot of sense of Damon’s attitude toward Elena; if he doesn’t want to kill her it must be because he wants to kiss her, he has almost no other way of relating to people (arguably even Stefan). But taken broadly, for these characters, it also is very much about control. They can either manipulate a person’s feelings or control them through violence, that’s more or less their only ways to interact with the world. It’s true of Damon, of Katherine, and fits my long standing opinion that Katherine and Klaus are cut from the same cloth.
Now, part of me wants to complain about Elena being a little lost in the love square going on, but in this instance I don’t think I’m upset by it. At least…not exactly. I guess I don’t hold against this episode what I can see (especially in retrospect) it’s signaling about the show at large; though I do have mixed feelings about it. Thing is, this isn’t Elena’s story. Katherine isn’t Elena’s villain (yet). As far as Elena’s concerned there isn’t even a love triangle going on. Unfortunately, she isn’t given a story outside the love triangle she doesn’t want to be in. All of her other friends are in crisis mode, but Elena isn’t part of any of those stories, because the show only cares about her in relation to the brothers, and she isn’t really part of that plot right now either, because Katherine’s the center of that story.
Elena doesn’t get to resolve anything with John; Stefan gets the last word in the attempt to get answers (that was a fairly bizarre threat if we get down to it; leave town before my blood leaves your system or I’ll use the fact that my blood is in your system to turn you into a vampire?), and John only tries to have a meaningful conversation with Jeremy. Hell, the show even revised the kitchen scene from 1x22 to downplay a personal element between Elena and John, because this time we don’t get him telling ‘Elena’ his feelings about Isobel and how it’s gotten tied up with his thoughts on vampires.
We never get any bits of Elena dealing with Caroline being hurt. And yes that’s a small plot this episode that will explode next time, but the writers didn’t care to show the audience the connection between Elena to Caroline before Caroline got pulled into the Katherine plot.
I think there is another long term problem with the show that’s kicked up a gear here. That there is a disconnect between what Elena tends to say she wants, and what the show seems to want you to think Elena wants. And I don’t mean in a want vs. need way that can be applied to many of Buffy’s statements about wanting a normal life; or even Elena’s statements of the same kind a few episodes ago. It’s hard not to feel that something in the writing really wants to Triangle to seem that it’s balanced; like Damon’s hurt feelings come from being rejected by Elena rather than being about Katherine. Even if another part of the writing and presentation is very clear that Elena is not interested in Damon; her answer to Damon is completely in character, she wouldn’t have kissed him back at this point. Whether or not she has ~feelings~ (of a specifically romantic sense; she does have expressed feelings like affection and concern for him regardless of her ~feelings~) for him, she is very clearly committed to her relationship with Stefan; whatever might happen if something were to change that then whatever she may or may not ~feel~ for Damon could come into play, but it’s not right now and he should know that.
It's like I’ve said from the start; the natural love triangle on this show is between Stefan (or Damon, if they hadn’t started him off so far into the negative zone) and Matt. That is, if this show was Elena’s coming of age story (that is should have been); to show her deciding what kind of life she would choose to live. But the show is already heavily drifting towards caring more about the Manpires than Elena’s growth and what she wants in her relationship/future/life. To be ever so slightly fair, while condemning the choice overall, that drift would be somewhat inevitable within the show’s structure; given that vampires are kind of central to the show’s hook it could never have Elena choose to get out of this mess entirely, so that’s already penning in her choices by a lot.
(Dang, I hope I can have another brief Triangle discussion next time. This one kind of exploded. Although it did cover at least most of the characters that I have much to say about for this ep, I just have other notes.)
Let’s talk about Bonnie for a bit. Like some of the other things I already discussed, I’m not sure how to look at this. I don’t remember if it comes out that Bonnie deliberately didn’t de-spell the Gilbert device (it’s quite possible it does next episode), because this episode kind of seems to remember that and kind of doesn’t. Bonnie’s actions can be read as guilt for a mistake as easily as fallout from a deliberate choice on her part. I recall that it was a choice she made, so I’m inclined to read her actions through that lens, but she also seems a little…detached from the fact that she played an active role in some of the consequences of what happened.
That and a few other things make me wonder if there’s some subtle rewriting of events from the end of s1. Even in the previously segment, the replay has Liz telling Tyler about Lockwood Sr.’s death, which didn’t happen in the last episode; that’s a minor change since it certainly could have happened after the original scene cut. Then the fact that the John and Katherine-as-Elena interaction is a different conversation; for a bit I thought it could be interesting to see the scene simply recut now that the audience is aware of the approaching swerve in circumstance, but the conversation actually is different. And some of the way Carol is acting, especially to Liz, seem to mishandle some facts from the way events went last season; Carol knows that Liz was knocked out and chained up in her office during the vamp catching minutes.
Then you get to the things that seem to happen too quickly considering this is all the next day after Founders’ Day. For one, Founders’ Day/week/month events should probably still be going on, though potentially suspended where they could be. For two, the gathering at the Lockwoods’ seems too formal to be impromptu for the recently deceased Mayor. (I suppose the two problems could cancel each other out to some degree, since they had the stuff for Founders’ events around they just used them for the wake.) There’s a part of me that ends up being suspicious that Mason shows up so soon after his brother’s death but I’m not sure if that’s a legitimate thing to be suspicious of; Carol could have called him the night before which could have been enough time for him to come from wherever he was when things went down in Mystic Falls. It just feels like a TVD time thing, where the writers don’t account for the fact that this is still less than 24 hours (if a hectic less than 24 hours) after everything happened.
I have sort of a half developed theory that whatever magic activates werewolves if they kill someone, isn’t sure what to do with Tyler concerning Caroline. When the EMTs looked at his eyes after the wreck, he had wolf eyes just as Caroline collapsed; had she died, clearly Tyler’s wolf gene would have been activated. And so long as she was in limbo, he’s extra agro because his body isn’t sure if he’s going to turn or now. I’m not sure this logic makes sense, but I’m not sure it can be disproven based on the fact that Katherine is the one to actually kill Caroline.
There is another line this episode that I’m not sure what to do with; which is Damon’s assertion that if Katherine wanted someone dead they would be. How does he say that with John presently surviving what looks like Katherine wanting him dead? Is it more evidence that Damon doesn’t get Katherine? Should I take it to mean that Katherine actually didn’t mean for John to die (in spite of going to efforts so he definitely could have died)? It definitely says that they should all be asking themselves what Katherine’s actual plans might be, and none of them have the faintest clue.
And speaking of John, this was a really rushed and clunky effort to write him back off the show. It doesn’t deal with any of the fallout for him deliberately killing Anna (something I think only Damon knows at this point) and even kind of sidestepping that he’s responsible for Anna’s death even if you don’t know that he killed her specifically. The revelation of him being Elena’s bio-dad has no impact on the plot (something I also don’t think Jeremy knows yet) or the characters’ interactions. It doesn’t concern itself with pesky previously and currently established facts about the show; that John was probably just as wounded as Caroline; that Stefan’s blood isn’t as potent as Damon’s, and Caroline is being kept in the hospital longer than John. Yes, John is an adult and can check himself out against medical advice, but he’s getting around pretty well for someone who was stabbed in the gut repeatedly 24 hours earlier.
The episode also never tells us why Katherine tried to kill him or what he supposedly knows that we’re assuming she wanted to silence. If it’s, say, something about the Originals and the doppelgangers, he probably should have told the Mystic Falls gang, leaving without saying anything hurts the people his is trying to protect far more than the ones he wants dead. And the fact that people (both the main character gang and the supporting characters who might have questions) stop caring to interrogate what happened so quickly seems…like exactly the choice this show would make because it needs to get rid of the one character who would actually point out that vampires are dangerous; also coincidentally an adult, which the show so rarely cares for.
It's especially annoying, because the scene between John and Jeremy (and, I repeat, Elena should have had a comparable scene with him) brings in elements of specifically the Gilbert family legacy that the show will basically sidestep for a while (I sort of remember it coming up in s5, long after there’s anyone to actually speak for the former generation). The exploration of which maybe would have been a better next level threat to step up than going straight to the most powerful vampires in the world. But there’s also kind of an implication that the Gilberts are a bit obsessed with vampires; they will hate them or they will love them (that theme again), which could certainly have been worked into a large story. Although, to go back to last episode, that might require the writers to both take a side on the vampire question and be able to defend it, and this show is bad at that.
Well…that was a lot to say. (…and not really said all that well I say later.)
What am I shipping?
All of a sudden while I’m not sure I’m shipping anything specific, there is a sense that I could be shipping a lot of things. But ultimately Damon/Katherine is probably the one that means much of anything to me.
Who do I hate the most?
Damon. It’s rare that I will ever hate Katherine to the degree she might deserve, and when I do it’s often because she’s siding with the Salvatores instead of messing with them. If it wasn’t Kat, and maybe if I didn’t know it turns out alright, I might still give it to her for killing Caroline; but Damon would still be hard to beat for the top spot with all the crap he pulls this time.
The Vampire Diaries 2x01: The Return
This is actually an astonishingly good episode. It seems like all my problems with s1 are just gone as soon as we’ve turned the page. Admittedly, I can already see the seeds being sown of whole new problems, but they haven’t grown big enough yet to be problems.
I will say the plot here is kind of messy, since some of these story threads really deserved more space to breathe rather than all happening in the same day, even though some of the plots only work because they’re so stacked on top of each other before anyone has a chance to compare notes on what’s happening (this show could probably pull off a 24 style season if they’d ever wanted to).
Though, if I need to critique, Dobrev doesn’t seem to have quite worked out her portrayal of Katherine yet; it’s close, and is probably somewhat down to the writing keeping so much of Katherine’s motives muddled. Her work anywhere on this show may not have been as big a task as Orphan Black’s clones, but over time I recall her being really good at inhabiting the characters differently; even when they were portraying each other. Here, it’s more like she’s having fun playing the more overt and outrageous character with Katherine – and I can’t blame her for that – but hasn’t embodied Katherine as a fully-fledged person yet.
Then again, what I’m attributing to meta-textual lack, could arguably be in character behavior. Maybe Katherine herself is playing up her Katherine-ness to seem like even more of an agent of chaos than she actually is. I’m not often willing to give these writers a lot of benefit of the doubt, but I’m almost willing to at this point. It could be that she’s trying to play each of the brothers differently, plus her openly antagonistic treatment of Bonnie, that she might be feeling out what’s going to work. Though I’m only willing to give so much wiggle room; even if I think they have the broad strokes of what this season will deal with in mind (which I’m not convinced they did), I know that they’re going to be retconned repeatedly after that and Katherine’s motivation is quite plot/lore dependent.
Even beyond that, I’m not sure I love chaos-Katherine as an in character explanation; because the Salvatores don’t really know what Katherine’s Katherine-ness is yet. Damon kind of knew the real her back in 1864, but he also quite clearly never considered that she was so…’Katherine’ as to do what she did. Stefan arguably has a better idea of who she really is by virtue of what she did to him in the course of their relationship, but she still never really showed how…Katherine she could be. And it’s not like she wasn’t actually this ‘Katherine’ back then, considering the long game it’s been revealed she was playing, she just didn’t let people know that she was.
It is kind of crazy how much more chemistry Dobrev has with both the male leads when she’s playing full on Katherine. Again, she’s able to crank everything up in a way that wouldn’t make sense for normal teenager Elena to be portrayed with. And in the flashbacks we saw during s1 we still weren’t really seeing the all in Katherine portrayal since we were seeing how the guys remembered her; plus they were playing versions of their characters that were mostly more restrained too, so the comparison didn’t stand out so much.
(But it’s also funny to me, because I always thought Dobrev had more chemistry with Gillies as Elena than as Katherine. Their restrained performances fit together in way that still sparked, that I didn’t think matched when it was Elijah and Katherine.)
I was going to say I have a lot of thoughts on all four legs of the new love square, but it turns out there is leg I don’t have much to say on. That being Stefan and Elena; so this will be where I put how much of an ass Stefan is being about the kiss (even if that is also about his relationship to Damon and to Katherine). Katherine was sending Damon different signals than Elena would have been, as this episode plainly shows (also because Katherine wasn’t sure what signals Elena would have been giving Damon in that moment, so she was pitching her performance responding to him just as much, which was more than Elena would have). Damon was responding to the signals he thought ‘Elena’ was giving him, and moved in, cautiously, to see if she wanted to kiss him too. Is it still a dick move to move in on his brother’s girlfriend without getting signals of more explicit desire, yeah; but Stefan should be a lot more bothered by Damon’s behavior after the fact and throughout this episode, especially once they know it was Katherine, than by the fact that the kiss happened.
And really, Stefan’s attitude in the end of the episode does not make him look good, considering how he acted about the kiss. He’s so very upset that Damon would kiss what he thought was an Elena that wanted to kiss him back; but is apparently defending the outright sexual assault and killing of Jeremy on the grounds of Katherine messing Damon up and the result where Jeremy doesn’t stay dead. Even if Elena hadn’t told him yet about Damon trying to force himself on her, what Stefan chooses to try and justify in Damon’s behavior and what he thinks needs to be addressed seems to have some misplaced priorities.
…for once I feel the need to say something about this show’s terrible handling of consent. I usually try and avoid the topic since everyone except the writers of the show probably know it’s there. But this episode makes some weird choices if it is aware of its portrayal of consent; and terrible choices if it isn’t. And oddly…consistent whichever it is. Because there’s a fairly clear parallel drawn between Katherine’s presumption of Stefan’s feelings, and Damon’s treatment of Elena’s potential feelings for him. It's all very abuser/rapist ‘you totally love me you just need to admit it’ behavior. But the show is always warry of outright calling Katherine sexually abusive rather than the kinder sexually assertive (girl boss Katherine is a much more fun way to view her, I agree); and has the world’s most muddled treatment of Damon’s behavior. Because it seems deliberate to put this in the season premier that Damon was still the guy who they spent so much time showing as abusive last season; he mellowed for a while, but it didn’t take long to set him back completely.
Like I said, if the writers recognize that Damon and Katherine are both bad people for what they do here, then it’s consistent. If the writers think that Damon and Katherine are both earnestly in love with the objects of their abuse (including overlooking that it is abuse), then it’s consistent. The first makes far more sense this episode; long term I can only conclude it’s the latter.
I’m going to leave off some of my discussion of Katherine’s feelings at this point. My memory is hazy enough that I don’t remember what is and isn’t part of her plan. That said, I have some vibe that she just switches tactics for dealing with Damon mid scene. It’s all manipulation, but to what end I’m not sure at the moment.
Look, I hate Damon most of the time, and even I feel a little sorry for him with Katherine’s rejection. It’s clear that part of him had been hoping that if they ever saw each other again, she would say that leaving him behind had been a mistake and now they had a second chance. It’s delusional, but after 145 years I can hardly blame him for not having given up his delusions completely (taking his frustration with Katherine out on Elena is a problem though).
I also kind of want to commend the staging of the D/K near-sex scene. Because it comes across quite clearly that Damon is torn between his desire to show that he is in control here, and his desire for Katherine to dominate the hell out of him (like, one assumes, she always did before).
Another bit that stood out to me is Damon’s idea for ignoring Katherine until she can’t stand being ignored. And…I’m not sure if that’s Katherine. It’s certainly Damon logic because he very much gets tired of being ignored and starts acting especially rashly, but Katherine… She was fine with the world thinking she was dead for a century and a half; presumably she wanted it to be indefinitely as the vamps being trapped rather than killed was Emily/Damon/Anna’s add on to Katherine’s plan to kill all the vampires as a means of faking her own death. So it’s almost more evidence that Damon still doesn’t get Katherine; that he thinks they’re the same sort of person, when they’re not (at least not in the ways Damon thinks).
The ’kiss me or kill me, you’re only capable of one or the other’ line though… For one, that makes a lot of sense of Damon’s attitude toward Elena; if he doesn’t want to kill her it must be because he wants to kiss her, he has almost no other way of relating to people (arguably even Stefan). But taken broadly, for these characters, it also is very much about control. They can either manipulate a person’s feelings or control them through violence, that’s more or less their only ways to interact with the world. It’s true of Damon, of Katherine, and fits my long standing opinion that Katherine and Klaus are cut from the same cloth.
Now, part of me wants to complain about Elena being a little lost in the love square going on, but in this instance I don’t think I’m upset by it. At least…not exactly. I guess I don’t hold against this episode what I can see (especially in retrospect) it’s signaling about the show at large; though I do have mixed feelings about it. Thing is, this isn’t Elena’s story. Katherine isn’t Elena’s villain (yet). As far as Elena’s concerned there isn’t even a love triangle going on. Unfortunately, she isn’t given a story outside the love triangle she doesn’t want to be in. All of her other friends are in crisis mode, but Elena isn’t part of any of those stories, because the show only cares about her in relation to the brothers, and she isn’t really part of that plot right now either, because Katherine’s the center of that story.
Elena doesn’t get to resolve anything with John; Stefan gets the last word in the attempt to get answers (that was a fairly bizarre threat if we get down to it; leave town before my blood leaves your system or I’ll use the fact that my blood is in your system to turn you into a vampire?), and John only tries to have a meaningful conversation with Jeremy. Hell, the show even revised the kitchen scene from 1x22 to downplay a personal element between Elena and John, because this time we don’t get him telling ‘Elena’ his feelings about Isobel and how it’s gotten tied up with his thoughts on vampires.
We never get any bits of Elena dealing with Caroline being hurt. And yes that’s a small plot this episode that will explode next time, but the writers didn’t care to show the audience the connection between Elena to Caroline before Caroline got pulled into the Katherine plot.
I think there is another long term problem with the show that’s kicked up a gear here. That there is a disconnect between what Elena tends to say she wants, and what the show seems to want you to think Elena wants. And I don’t mean in a want vs. need way that can be applied to many of Buffy’s statements about wanting a normal life; or even Elena’s statements of the same kind a few episodes ago. It’s hard not to feel that something in the writing really wants to Triangle to seem that it’s balanced; like Damon’s hurt feelings come from being rejected by Elena rather than being about Katherine. Even if another part of the writing and presentation is very clear that Elena is not interested in Damon; her answer to Damon is completely in character, she wouldn’t have kissed him back at this point. Whether or not she has ~feelings~ (of a specifically romantic sense; she does have expressed feelings like affection and concern for him regardless of her ~feelings~) for him, she is very clearly committed to her relationship with Stefan; whatever might happen if something were to change that then whatever she may or may not ~feel~ for Damon could come into play, but it’s not right now and he should know that.
It's like I’ve said from the start; the natural love triangle on this show is between Stefan (or Damon, if they hadn’t started him off so far into the negative zone) and Matt. That is, if this show was Elena’s coming of age story (that is should have been); to show her deciding what kind of life she would choose to live. But the show is already heavily drifting towards caring more about the Manpires than Elena’s growth and what she wants in her relationship/future/life. To be ever so slightly fair, while condemning the choice overall, that drift would be somewhat inevitable within the show’s structure; given that vampires are kind of central to the show’s hook it could never have Elena choose to get out of this mess entirely, so that’s already penning in her choices by a lot.
(Dang, I hope I can have another brief Triangle discussion next time. This one kind of exploded. Although it did cover at least most of the characters that I have much to say about for this ep, I just have other notes.)
Let’s talk about Bonnie for a bit. Like some of the other things I already discussed, I’m not sure how to look at this. I don’t remember if it comes out that Bonnie deliberately didn’t de-spell the Gilbert device (it’s quite possible it does next episode), because this episode kind of seems to remember that and kind of doesn’t. Bonnie’s actions can be read as guilt for a mistake as easily as fallout from a deliberate choice on her part. I recall that it was a choice she made, so I’m inclined to read her actions through that lens, but she also seems a little…detached from the fact that she played an active role in some of the consequences of what happened.
That and a few other things make me wonder if there’s some subtle rewriting of events from the end of s1. Even in the previously segment, the replay has Liz telling Tyler about Lockwood Sr.’s death, which didn’t happen in the last episode; that’s a minor change since it certainly could have happened after the original scene cut. Then the fact that the John and Katherine-as-Elena interaction is a different conversation; for a bit I thought it could be interesting to see the scene simply recut now that the audience is aware of the approaching swerve in circumstance, but the conversation actually is different. And some of the way Carol is acting, especially to Liz, seem to mishandle some facts from the way events went last season; Carol knows that Liz was knocked out and chained up in her office during the vamp catching minutes.
Then you get to the things that seem to happen too quickly considering this is all the next day after Founders’ Day. For one, Founders’ Day/week/month events should probably still be going on, though potentially suspended where they could be. For two, the gathering at the Lockwoods’ seems too formal to be impromptu for the recently deceased Mayor. (I suppose the two problems could cancel each other out to some degree, since they had the stuff for Founders’ events around they just used them for the wake.) There’s a part of me that ends up being suspicious that Mason shows up so soon after his brother’s death but I’m not sure if that’s a legitimate thing to be suspicious of; Carol could have called him the night before which could have been enough time for him to come from wherever he was when things went down in Mystic Falls. It just feels like a TVD time thing, where the writers don’t account for the fact that this is still less than 24 hours (if a hectic less than 24 hours) after everything happened.
I have sort of a half developed theory that whatever magic activates werewolves if they kill someone, isn’t sure what to do with Tyler concerning Caroline. When the EMTs looked at his eyes after the wreck, he had wolf eyes just as Caroline collapsed; had she died, clearly Tyler’s wolf gene would have been activated. And so long as she was in limbo, he’s extra agro because his body isn’t sure if he’s going to turn or now. I’m not sure this logic makes sense, but I’m not sure it can be disproven based on the fact that Katherine is the one to actually kill Caroline.
There is another line this episode that I’m not sure what to do with; which is Damon’s assertion that if Katherine wanted someone dead they would be. How does he say that with John presently surviving what looks like Katherine wanting him dead? Is it more evidence that Damon doesn’t get Katherine? Should I take it to mean that Katherine actually didn’t mean for John to die (in spite of going to efforts so he definitely could have died)? It definitely says that they should all be asking themselves what Katherine’s actual plans might be, and none of them have the faintest clue.
And speaking of John, this was a really rushed and clunky effort to write him back off the show. It doesn’t deal with any of the fallout for him deliberately killing Anna (something I think only Damon knows at this point) and even kind of sidestepping that he’s responsible for Anna’s death even if you don’t know that he killed her specifically. The revelation of him being Elena’s bio-dad has no impact on the plot (something I also don’t think Jeremy knows yet) or the characters’ interactions. It doesn’t concern itself with pesky previously and currently established facts about the show; that John was probably just as wounded as Caroline; that Stefan’s blood isn’t as potent as Damon’s, and Caroline is being kept in the hospital longer than John. Yes, John is an adult and can check himself out against medical advice, but he’s getting around pretty well for someone who was stabbed in the gut repeatedly 24 hours earlier.
The episode also never tells us why Katherine tried to kill him or what he supposedly knows that we’re assuming she wanted to silence. If it’s, say, something about the Originals and the doppelgangers, he probably should have told the Mystic Falls gang, leaving without saying anything hurts the people his is trying to protect far more than the ones he wants dead. And the fact that people (both the main character gang and the supporting characters who might have questions) stop caring to interrogate what happened so quickly seems…like exactly the choice this show would make because it needs to get rid of the one character who would actually point out that vampires are dangerous; also coincidentally an adult, which the show so rarely cares for.
It's especially annoying, because the scene between John and Jeremy (and, I repeat, Elena should have had a comparable scene with him) brings in elements of specifically the Gilbert family legacy that the show will basically sidestep for a while (I sort of remember it coming up in s5, long after there’s anyone to actually speak for the former generation). The exploration of which maybe would have been a better next level threat to step up than going straight to the most powerful vampires in the world. But there’s also kind of an implication that the Gilberts are a bit obsessed with vampires; they will hate them or they will love them (that theme again), which could certainly have been worked into a large story. Although, to go back to last episode, that might require the writers to both take a side on the vampire question and be able to defend it, and this show is bad at that.
Well…that was a lot to say. (…and not really said all that well I say later.)
What am I shipping?
All of a sudden while I’m not sure I’m shipping anything specific, there is a sense that I could be shipping a lot of things. But ultimately Damon/Katherine is probably the one that means much of anything to me.
Who do I hate the most?
Damon. It’s rare that I will ever hate Katherine to the degree she might deserve, and when I do it’s often because she’s siding with the Salvatores instead of messing with them. If it wasn’t Kat, and maybe if I didn’t know it turns out alright, I might still give it to her for killing Caroline; but Damon would still be hard to beat for the top spot with all the crap he pulls this time.