Elena
and Stefan have been kidnapped by Travellers because they were too busy love
triangle arguing than actually handling shit and now Damon is dealing with
this the way he deals with everything – torturing people. Caroline also drops
in so they can exposition everything.
Stefan and Elena are both being drained by the Travellers
but some helpful person frees Stefan and despite both of them being hardly able
to walk, they manage to escape. Travellers, I’m not impressed. They top up
their blood with “squirrel slaughter” (Elena’s not a fan) and call Damon, not
for rescue but so he can hunt down and kill Markos since he has a huge bucket
of doppleganger blood and can do all kinds of mischief with it. Stefan and
Elena begin the long walk home, frustrated by the fact they’re so low on blood
their vampire mojo is failing (to prove this, Stefan tries and fails to blur
for Elena’s amusement – also lots of angst. Lots and lots of angst).
And Damon gets stabbed. That’s Enzo’s way of getting Damon’s attention and reminding us, through Bonnie, that Damon promised to find a way to bring him back. And he’s driving Bonnie up the wall until he gets his way – and wasting perfectly good booze (well, insofar as American booze can be perfectly good). Hey, Enzo, this is Mystic Falls, people drink booze instead of water – you can’t be wasting it. Damon’s plan is for Enzo to latch on to whatever spell Liv is planning to cast to save Bonnie from the Other Side collapse – Bonnie disagrees but no-one listens to her.
Live and Luke have a meet and greet where the coven they
belong to is really pissed (this is the coven that thinks stopping the
Travellers getting the dopplegangers is major important but has only sent 2 young
witches to deal with it) and is blaming Luke for Elena and Stefan’s blithering
foolishness – and sending unpleasant migraines to make their point. Last option
is to kill Elena and Stefan.
See, I’d have made it the first option.
Random cameo from Pam, who is possessed by the Traveller,
Karl who gets a vial of doppleganger blood from the postman (you can get
ANYTHING off amazon or ebay) then stabs Pam’s husband in the neck for
completely failing to realise his wife has been colonised by a total stranger.
Also he’s Black and lacks any useful woo-woo so he was never going to live long
on this show.
Stefan and Elena are still annoying and are now saying how wonderful Caroline is, they get a ride. Not because of Elena’s breasts (which she deploys to aid hitchhiking) but because it’s Maria, the Traveller wife of Traveller Julian and she’s the one who freed them. Because she thinks I haven’t suffered enough, it seems.
She wants Julian – in Tyler’s body (she says Tyler is gone). She wants to leave with him to spend his last moments with her. Yes, last moments, because the spell will strip Tyler of his vampireness and then kill him.
Damon has the stooges (Tyler and Jeremy) drag in the “husks”
of all the Travellers from the cave (my idea – admittedly mind involved axe
murder). Caroline and Damon snark back and forth for a while, ending with
Caroline telling Damon to not torture Julian/Tyler because “she doesn’t abandon
the people she cares about”. A direct hit that woman! Though it has to be said
until very very recently she was quite happy for Damon and Elena to break up.
Caroline checks with Julian who confirms that Markos wants to remove all witch
magic – including daylight rings and vampirism.
Caroline goes to Bonnie with a plan – kill Julian/Tyler
and then latch TYLER onto the Other Side spell as well. Damn they’re going to
have a full bus at this rate. But Bonnie finally cracks, there is no spell;
there is no way to save the Other Side, everyone in it and Bonnie. Problem?
Enzo overheard this.
Markos drops in on Damon, looking for his missing people.
Damon wants to do the hostage thing, sadly Markos and all his people are
not-very-sensible fanatics so he’s quite happy for all the Travellers to die to
break the curse. He stabs one to prove his point. He reminds them AGAIN that
this is NOT ABOUT TAKING OVER MYSTIC FALLS (ye gods like this town is so
important), it’s about destroying all witch magic. Everywhere. All of it.
Seriously this is like 3 times we’ve been told this
Markos has also transfused his blood with Doppleganger blood so is super strong and fast and can’t just be vampired. Because Traveller magic now = super strength. Apparently. It’s an upgrade from the usual “we need blood and a whole chorus line”.
All around town, Travellers break vials of doppleganger
blood and begin chanting the curse breaker.
Maria, Stefan and Elena return to town – and run into
Luke and Liv who have decided to kill the dopplegangers. Given the givens, this
is a great idea. Apparently Luke is actually a witch and finally uses magic (or
it could be all Liv, I guess). They wreck the car (knocking Maria out) and each
take a doppleganger.
Enzo has a little tantrum at Bonnie about how he’s not
accepting his inevitable demise (wish Bonnie would get some of that) and Maria
appears, dead from the car crash and asks her to tell Julian she tried.
Julian apparently senses that and uses vampire senses to communicate with Damon, he’s all willing to bring Markos down now. Showing Markos the wine cellar (no, really, they do a house tour), he slips Julian the key to his chains.
Liv and Luke’s plan fails because they spend far too much
time being apologetic and dramatic than actually killing, the Traveller curse
kicks in and their magic fails. They would be vampired to death, but the
daylight rings also fail so Elena and Stefan have to head for shade. The
Travellers also appear to be dying, judging by the blood oozing from their ears
and noses.
Mat leads Elena and Stefan through the tunnels under the
bar – but Elena starts coughing up water. She became a vampire when she drown with
Damon’s blood in her system, her vampirism is failing. Stefan staggers from the
bullet wound that killed him.
And Markos gets bitten by a hybrid. Personally I’d have gone with a neck snap. It would have been great – until Julian loses his fangs because of the magic down. Damon’s daylight ring fails. Travellers, or the vessels, begin dying en mass from the chant; their bodies begin waking up in the Salvatore home, as Damon also falls from the bullet wound that changed him and Julian begins choking from Tyler’s death injury. Damon and Julian run to try and buy some time.
Bonnie has an inspiration on how to save the Other side –
but it needs Enzo. The Salvatore brothers, Matt, Jeremy and Elena meet up and
go on the run, trying to flee ahead of the spell.
On the Other Side, Enzo talks to Maria to ask if she
knows the spell they used to resurrect Markos. She does – but it takes 24
Travellers dying to cast. Enzo is sure they can fill in the details. Unfortunately
she’s pulled into the sky void – well that’s inconvenient. A snag as he puts it
– but Julian/Tyler drops in on Elena, Stefan, Caroline and Damon looking for
Maria. He loses his temper – and rips out Stefan’s heart declaring that a dead
doppleganger stops the spell
YES! REASONABLE SOLUTION!
Stefan then appears before Bonnie – and she tells him she
has no solution
The Travellers want to purge the world of allll magic.
Why? Because if they were just breaking the curse then we’d actually be on their
side. I think it’s a sloppy writing technique for many shows (Alphas, for example) where the “bad guys”
are made almost comically-melodramatically evil because if they weren’t we’d be
hard pressed to decide whether they are actually the villains – and such
greyish morality is not all that popular.
Ok so I am going to use my super psychic powers and predict a saving of the other side, a returning of the dead to life – which includes Stefan.
Snark aside, that was some decent drama with only a few holes. Nicely done, Vampire Diaries - and I take it back about Enzo's irrelevance. Ok he was still kind of irrelevance, but nice to bring him back into the main plot again.
In fact it would have been an awesome episode, with potential for an awesome season, if we still didn't have the endless Elena/Damon/Stefan angst all the time. It's a distraction, it's tiresome, it's not needed
