Oh look. Sad music is sad
This entire episode revolves around big heavy emotions
around characters I don’t care about, relationships I don’t care about or don’t
buy or otherwise don’t invest in. It’s painful, more than a little dull and
relies waaaay too much on us all caring about the extras and hangers on.
A lot of this involves lots and lots of grief around
Tyler, everyone pretending he’s been an integral part of this show rather than
a completely absent extra for several seasons. Everyone is sad. We have a
funeral in a fair ground with everyone playing nice and everyone still managing
to drag Elena into it.
It’s actually almost painful to hear everyone act like
this is the worst ever when we consider how many many many many many many
people have died.
Meanwhile Damon is having the same ongoing conflict
because he think he’s totally killed everyone’s love and affection for him and
broken all ties, woooo. Of course this is ridiculous because Damon has killed
an enormous number of people and absolutely no-one has cared. Yep, Tyler’s not
even cold yet and Stefan is already playing “oh poor Damon how do we bring him
back”. Damon continues to be an arsehole but there’s absolutely no way that anyone
is going to make him responsible for his actions (hah, you expected otherwise,
this is Vampire Diaries!) and
everyone decides he’s still mind controlled
Like most of the audience and at least 60% of the
writers, Damon also has no idea why he’s doing what he’s doing so goes to see
Sybil in her completely unguarded prison (because of course) to accuse her of
still being in his mind. Sybil is not happy because Damon still isn’t 100% hers
because his humanity switch isn’t alllll the way off: hence the reason he’s all
mopey about how everyone will hate him (they don’t) over killing Tyler (no-one
cares). She insists he go full non-human so he will then be hers forever
I’m not actually seeing how this works. With the humanity switch all the way, feel-absolutely-nothing-off, Damon and any vampire becomes the ultimate loose canon. She’s been controlling him with fear of hell – but he feels no fear. He feels no loyalty. He feels no affection so even threatening to kill his friends fails. There’s absolutely no way you can control a humanity-less vampire and you can only really get them to hang around by being vaguely entertaining until they get bored and decide to go to new killy-people-places for their own amusement. Turning Damon’s humanity switch off absolutely makes Damon the worst minion in the world.
In the end Stefan and Caroline decide, belatedly, that
they need to dose Damon with vervain and lock him up until they can kill lots
of sirens and make everything good
Seriously, this is 5 episodes in and they’ve only just
realised this is a thing they should actually do. This works (only because Caroline
ignored Stefan when he decided to protect her by keeping her out of the line of
fire despite the fact 2 vampires vs 1 is a good idea). Damon decides that his
friends trying to non-lethally stop him so he can never actually hurt anyone as
proof of their deep betrayal of him because…
…oh fuck it, it’s Vampire
Diaries no-one has to have understandable motivations.
Meanwhile Bonnie has locked up Enzo in magical bondage to
make him get his humanity back. By trying to burn herself to death. Of course.
Sigh. Y’know Bonnie deciding she’d rather burn to death
than have Enzo leave her would be a lot easier to swallow if the Bonnie/Enzo
relationship didn’t seem like such a desperate, foundationless add on taped to
this show
Actually, no, scrap that – this would be a lot easier to
swallow if ENZO didn’t seem like such a desperate foundationless add on taped
to this show. In fact the relationship IS the tape. It exists because someone
asked the writer, in that break between the crack wearing off and the
hallucinogens kicking in, why is Enzo here and they quickly realised they
needed to drag up some kind of reason for him to be there.
Unlike Matt who we have no reason for him being around. He
is working through his epic daddy issues which, again, we have no reason to care
about. But among that we find someone left Tyler a big sheaf of papers and a
quest to find a siren (which is only conveniently now being mentioned of
course) and he’s now inherited them. The siren he’s supposed to find is Selene
who managed to escape the armoury in the past
Selene is busy looking after the twins and planning
nefarious things with the Siphoning kiddies including burning Georgie’s body
and plotting something sinister with Arcadius. Caroline compares notes with
Matt just a bit too late – Selene has already vanished with the kids
While Sybil escapes (there’s an alarm but, again, no-one
is checking it) and frees Damon who, for reasons that make no sense at all (see
above) has turned off his humanity and declared eternal loyalty
