For a few brief
moments, everyone seems to be happy. Klaus, Hope and Freya are having a super
polite breakfast. Isn’t it nice, all the family together and Rebekkah will be
back soon and isn’t it nice?
And then Elijah
arrives and it all starts falling apart. Hope is super pissed with him still
and leaves after magically bending a fork. Klaus has a tantrum with Freya for
helping Hope and filling her full of black magic which Freya still holds is the
best decision and everyone is just not happy
But Klaus and Freya
do have a nice moment where at least Klaus acknowledges that Freya does love
and care for Hope - and Freya gives Hope a nifty bracelet of suppressing evil
dark magic. While this is a touching, I note that Klaus finds love and
understanding for his family when they happen to bring out something useful to
him. Ultimately, the core issue of the Original Family is that Klaus treats his
siblings as supporting cast
Hope does try to
pretend she’s totally ok with all these evil magic bubbling inside her and
she’s just destroying cutlery because she has evil voices inside of her. This
fiction doesn’t last long as she’s quickly driven to panic and destruction by
the evil voices battering in her head - and Freya’s anti-dark magic bracelet
catches fire so not an ideal solution here
Well done Hope, you
have continued a glorious Mikkaelson tradition of making things worse while
trying to make them better
We also have utterly
pointless character Declan back in time - and why is he even here? I honestly
have no idea why he is here.
He sees Freya and
isn’t thrilled that they had a funeral for Hayley without him and wants to know
how she died - and she tells him it was a car accident
Which he… doesn’t
believe? I don’t get this - it’s such a bizarre denial. He doesn’t believe in
car accidents? He’d rather believe everyone he knows is running some kind of
bizarre conspiracy over her death. This is a weird form of denial and, perhaps
because this show has made no real effort to establish why I should care about
Declan or his relationship with Hayley, it just feels bizarre
To make this worse,
an angst laden Elijah decides to visit him so he can get even more angsty with
the other man who loved Hayley because why not? We can always use more angst it
seems. And then Declan realises Elijah is the ex who broke Hayley’s heart so
MORE ANGST
Time to make things
even worse with Hope turning up and having a dark magic angst moment and being
all “you killed my mother!” before belatedly remembering to magically put
Declan to sleep so he doesn’t get involved in all the supernatural shenanigans.
Hope and Elijah start
to talk but her black magicness takes over and she starts shredding him with
magic which is sort of understandable - until Klaus arrives and is collateral
damage which shocks Hope out of her massacre mood.
Klaus and Elijah take
a moment to tell Declan all the supernatural is real etc etc but it’s all
irrelevant because Elijah basically glamours him into forgetting everything and
not being so damn awkward.
Which leaves Klaus
free to catch up with his daughter who reveals that the big bad black magic
voices are super awful and, worse, the only thing that quieted them is when she
went sadistically violent on Elijah. Klaus doesn’t consider this a problem
since he goes randomly violent every second Tuesday anyway so he’s happy to
train his daughter in the art of semi-regular whimsical massacres.
This is not going to
end well.
While the Original
Family is busy with their own angst the whole city is falling apart while they
don’t pay attention while the vampire Nazis continue to cause problems. This is
extra frustrating because, really, if these are Vampire supremacists, vampires
are the big most important thing in the world evah then surely the Originals
should be like gods to them. But the Originals seem to have no power over them
and no interest in engaging. I think The Originals has used familiarity
to greatly weaken the meaning of what these vampires are, but way back in The
Vampire Diaries days the Original family was viewed with at least some
level of fear and awe.
What’s also annoying
is that neither they, Marcel the witches or anyone else in New Orleans has
decided “hey let’s kill Emmet (the new Nazi in chief) and all his followers, go
nazi slaughter!”. Let’s face it, none of these characters have even the
slightest qualms about murdering people who look at them funny - what’s with
all this mercy towards Nazis? Here we have Marcel outright confronting a huge
pack of Nazi vampires, in daylight where they’re protected only by a curtail
and he just does some menacing rather than slaughter. Vincent has a private
meeting with Emmet who tries to key threaten him and doesn’t just get with the
murdering. Hey we even have Elijah angsting
Don’t tell me they
couldn’t do it. Way back when we saw Marcel try to bring down Klaus with an
army of vampires we saw just how damn scary an Original vampire could be and
Klaus alone could probably bring down Emmet and all his little followers.
Especially since he can kill with a nibble.
It’s frustrating to
see such an easy solution to the problem being completely ignored by everyone
and there’s no reason why they’d do this beyond the fact the plot needs this.
This goes back to the whole narrative problem of having protagonists as
powerful as the Originals - you then need to find convoluted reasons why they
don’t squish anything that they come across.
So Emmet & co are
now threatening everyone, specifically they want to go back to the old ways
where the vampires get the French quarter, the werewolves get the swamp and
stay there while the witches just stay out the way
Lisinia and the
werewolves are passionate in their hell no to this and are determined to be
part of Mardi Gras parade even after Emmet & co sabotage their float.
Vincent has a brief
waffly moment where he thinks the witches should just stay out of it before Ivy
points out that attacking the werewolves is clearly step one on the plan and
witches are definitely next and, seriously man, what is wrong with you that you
think neutrality is ok here?
Ok, sidebar AGAIN,
but this ongoing failure of the entire cast to recognise just how objectionable
the Nazi vampires gets on my last nerve, makes no sense and is again used by
the writers to desperately try to deal with the whole Originals are too
powerful issue. This kind of writing fudge has been a problem since season one.
Anyway during this,
Josh (who still exists! He keeps dragging himself out of that plot box!)
snarkily points out to Marcel that this whole “vampires in the French quarter,
werewolves in the swap” was kind of his idea and Marcel has apologies to make.
Which I agree with but I also have to point out the important distinction of
motive. Marcel brutally upheld an awful system in the city because he wanted
control and power - not especially because he’s declaring the inherent
superiority of vampires. Alright, it’s a thin distinction for the victims but
it matters.
Anyway Marcel is now
in the habit of saying “yeah my bad” whenever he has his old reign thrown back
in his face.
Keelin is also back
in town so Freya is snatching some moments with her but at the same time aware
that Freya is still all about her broken family and Keelin intends to leave
So everyone gets
ready for Mardi Gras with Lisinia in particular saying how very important the
whole parade is for her which is just foreshadowing for Emmet mind controlling
someone into bombing the werewolf float and killing Lisinia and injuring Keelin
Let us say again how
nonsensical it is that Emmet has been making big ominous threats all episode
and everyone decided the appropriate response was to carry on as normal and
pretend nothing is happening.
Marcel rallies the city
with a determined speech that they stand together (and a mea culpa about the
whole doing this same shit before) and they all march in solidarity - and are
all prepared to face the army of nazi vampires (seriously, why are there so
many?!) who gather to oppose them. The werewolves have weapons and are prepared
- but the vampires have one upped things byu not being there. They astrally
projected (apparently they have a witch who is on side with vampire supremacy?)
and this was a test to see if Vincent and the witches were going to listen to
Emmet’s threats or join the werewolves. Since Vincent chose to join they
response by poisoning Ivy so we can have more dramatic angst
And that leaves me
annoyed that we have 2 prominent but poorly used women of colour, both powerful
and vital leaders of their people while both equally not having any real time
centred on this. Ivy with all her power and place among the witches became Vincent’s
personal seer, love interest and fridged angst source. While Linisia is like a
leader of the werewolves but just didn’t get any regard or respect of that even
when Hayley disappeared as ostensible head of the werewolves. It feels both of
these characters who should have been very important were just set up to have
emotional deaths to motivate the rest of the castr to hate nazis following a
whole day of people not just killing the Nazis who threatened to kill everyone
else
Which, y’know, nazis.
Do we need motivation?
We have a bright
spark in that Keelin’s near injury has convinced Freya she really loves her and
wants to marry her so she will stay in New Orleans in harm’s way and Originals
you need to seriously step back from killing Keeling. Oh I can see you thinking
it, don’t even try. Not only have you unnecessarily slaughtered two powerful
women of colour for no damn reason but so far you have killed a whole lot of
gay folks and smashed anything resembling a same-sex relationship. The ice
is thin here, Plecverse, behave yourselves. I actually have more investment in
Freya than any previous relationship because she’s far more important than
previous LGBTQ characters and so far has not been faced by the, frankly, truly
appalling tropes that have dogged this world. Hey it’s not flawless - being the
last season, Keelin being plot boxed for most of it and the whole kidnapping
and experimenting thing… but it’s better? I guess.
