It’s another flash to the future – 3 years from now when
Rick is not dead but is instead making electronics for a doll with ominous
music. He also seems to have 2 daughters and a shotgun in case of house guests –
in this case Damon who is there to be ominous and threatening.
And to the present and Alaric all angsty over his Evil
Rock and hanging around the morgue with the morgue tech telling him he can’t keep
Jo’s body around because ewwie.
Just to prove how pointless evacuating Mystic Falls was
there are now coach tours to the deserted town. Matt has to show them away and
threaten Enzo randomly – Enzo wants access to the town CCTV (why why do they
even have CCTV in the town? I mean who is paying for it?).
Damon and Lily are all prepared for their hostage swap
with Lily all accusing Damon of being selfish for taking a hostage like she
did. And Damon in trouble because Valerie killed Oscar last episode. Oops
Sefan and Damon argue about this – with Stefan blaming
Damon for endless bad decisions. Actually, as far as Vampire Diaries goes, kidnapping Oscar wasn’t an entirely terrible
decision
Nora and Mary Louise go to see Stefan and Damon looking
for Oscar. Good line:
“You reak of blood”
Damon “I’ve been binging”
Stefan “I’ve been judging”
That pretty much sums up a lot of the last seven seasons –
except when they swapped roles. Damon tries some desperate lies about Oscar
having escaped while they hide his body out the window. That actually works.
They also send an unpleasant message with a disposable Woman of Colour – for
every hour that Oscar is missing, a student will die
Wait, I lost track – do Damon and Stefan care about
civilian casualties at the moment? It’s not like Vampire Diaries is consistent here.
Caroline and Bonnie are all room-matey again (and remind
us that Caroline’s skin is vervain which they’re all angsty about but is
actually a kind of awesome super power). Bonnie tells Caroline of her trying to
let Alaric down about his whole creepy resurrection thing.
Which means Caroline and Stefan’s relationship is still
all tense with burny-ness an unresolved Valerie issues. Stefan has a solution
to murderous witchpires – a school dance
I was thinking it has been a long time since Vampire Diaries had one of their endless
parties/dances/celebrations.
Caroline uses her expert manipulative wiles to convince
Nora and Mary-Louise to go to the party with some crafty psychology. She also
asks Mary Louise to remove the vervain spell because not being able to show
physical affection for her significant other is a pain – as points out Mary
Louise, a lesbian from 1900. Bullseye Mary Louise. She won’t remove the spell
because she has no wish to invoke Valerie’s vicious revenge.
Nora explains the same thing to Stefan – Valerie is far
too vengeful to annoy. Mary Louise has her costume – but Nora declares it not
sexy enough and lowers the neckline which throws Mary Louise into a tantrum and
more human bodies fall.
The party begins with more Stefan and Elena flirting, and
trying to stop the Witchpires killing people and Nora embracing the modern
world and Mary Lou clearly out of her depth. Caroline helpfully vocalises their
issues to Stefan before they discuss their issues with Valerie.
Mary Louise and Nora’s issues boil over (with another
dead WOC) into a full on argument about jealousy and attention seeking and clingy-ness
and Mary Lou’s inability to adapt.
Enzo has used that CCTV access to see Valerie going out
of the town to get Oscar. He confronts her about it – and Valerie admits it and
why. Of course Enzo, who loves Lily, is going to be super duper not happy about
Julian coming back.
Enzo goes to ask Lily about Julian who describes him as a
saint and the love of her life.
While they’re doing that, Damon drags Oscar’s body to
Bonnie and Alaric for some unwise resurrection. I mean the Phoenix Stone causes
evil scary visions, surely the best way to deal with this is to combine it with
a witchpire, right? Time for unwise experimenting.
They do eventually resurrect Oscar. He also has ravenous
hunger – which they’re all quite happy to overlook. Of course Bonnie is now
going to resurrect Jo.
Mary Lou, charged up issues, starts to go on a rampage
but Stefan stops her with proof that Oscar has been found. Now Stefan gets to
play sounding board for Mary Lou’s issues of Nora growing apart while Stefan
mopes about Caroline’s issues with Valerie. He then decides to drug Mary Lou in
the hope this will help him de-vervain Caroline (technically since Witchpires
can syphon, any of them can break the spell).
He then threatens her with death if Nora doesn’t de-spell
Caroline. Like everyone else he has, for some reason, forgotten that witchpires
are WITCHES so she just steals the stake. Caroline has a better idea, she grabs
Nora and makes her suffer Vervain burn until she syphons the spell off. They then
break the necks and incapacitate the two witchpires
Do I point out now that they could have left Lily with
just two Witchpires at this point?
When they wake up Nora and Mary Lou are all happy and
romantic and can now reconcile some of their issues.
Caroline and Stefan can now get it one which they start
to do but Caroline actually wants to explain and work through her emotional
reactions to Valerie while Stefan is not only clearly not listening but
continually ignoring her wish to wait. Speed talking their way through the
issues, they then have sex.
At Witchpire House, Valerie is making breakfast and fully
planning for Oscar’s return to keep up the charade of not killing him. Lily
also wants to talk all about Valerie’s crush on Stefan – Lily wants Valerie to
spill any secrets she has – Valerie decides not to.
Oscar’s resurrection isn’t going well – he can’t remember
where he was and he is out of control with hunger and he goes on the run. Matt
comes and finds Damon explaining that Oscar is going on a rampage – and Damon
actually cares whether Matt dies or not. Which is more than I do.
Oscar catches up with the coach full of tourists and eats
all of them. Lily finds him and scolds him (it sounds like Oscar is a ripper
when he feeds though he wasn’t last episode) and only Damon intervening and
breaking Oscar’s neck saves Lily (why save her? Whyyyyy?) so Damon can snark
about Lily loving Ripper kids.
Damon can now get Elena and lays down the law to Lily
that he’s moving back to Mystic Falls because he now has a conscience about the
bodies the witchpires are piling up. Lily also tells him to let Elena go for a
little time – and he gets to diary writing. He now decides to find out who he
is without Elena
I mean it’s not like he lived for centuries without her?
Anyway they get Elena’s corpse well away from the town
and the firing ine.
Matt finds Valerie and points a shotgun at her – and gives
her a convenient countdown rather than shooting her – Enzo stops Matt shooting
her. Enzo wants to collaborate with Valerie to keep Julian out of the picture
Bonnie resurrects Jo. Honestly of every single character
this show has ever had, I can’t think of one I’m less interested in
Hey, the witchpires are down 2 members for no loss on the
other side. Chalk this up for a win and look for another one to take out. If I
were Bo (POC, silent so the writers have decided to characterise him – because people
who can’t talk can’t be fully developed for them it seems) I’d be watching my
back, he has disposable written all over him.
For that matter, Stefan and Caroline had two witchpires
at their mercy as well. Honestly this episode could have ended with Lily having
only two of her “family” left alive. They set the witchpires up to be this
major threat (seriously, the original family didn’t prompt them to evacuate the
town) but the only reason they’re not all slaughtered is the forbearance of the
main cast. And we go from terrified of them to the point of evacuating a town
to Stefan and Caroline happily threatening two of them and not caring about the
consequences.
So the witchpires will kill innocent humans until they get Oscar back. You know they could kill every human on campus and still not match Damon and Stefan’s kill count – yet this is a threat to them.
Valerie/Stefan/Caroline – do not want. Not only is the
whole love triangle thing done to death but no-one is calling out the obvious
unhealthiness of this. Stefan and Valerie had sex over a century ago… and
Caroline is jealous? This whole idea that having dated in the past is a source
of major angst is really creepy. Your romantic partner will probably have had
previous romantic partners. Deal with it. Especially if they haven’t seen each
other for a century.
Oh poor Bonnie is YET AGAIN doing woo-woo shit she knows
is a bad idea.
Mary Lou and Nora – I quite like them so far. They have
their own storyline (which is a lot more than any LGBT character has had on the
show so far) they are in love, they have addressed and commented on homophobia (albeit
with some dubious dismissal of modern homophobia still being a thing) and they have
real relationship issues that are not based on clichés or stereotypes – but the
honest difficulty of adapting to a new world, to having different boundaries
and dependencies. No they’re not the most prominent of major of characters,
they’re not going to have scenes near as overt as Stefan and Caroline and I’m
certainly not adding Vampire Diaries
to my list of shows with major LGBT characters because of it, but so far there’s
no real problems with them (even their willingness to kill and slaughter kind
of just makes them on par with EVERYONE on this show). Except, of course, they
are villains and highly likely to die…
