Last night’s episode of Vampire
Diaries asks a pretty simple question: Why can Damon be forgiven over and
over, for being a serial-killer and bad friend, when Katherine is beyond
forgiveness? The answer seems to be: moral relativism is sexy, dammit.
Spoilers ahead…
It’s worth remembering that Vampire Diaries started out as a
show with a very strong moral framework. Stefan was good because he didn’t kill
humans, or even feed on human blood. Damon was evil because he did kill humans,
without much compunction.
Over time, though, we all fell in love with Damon’s sarcastic
smirk and big blue eyes. And meanwhile,
Stefan’s uprightness was recontextualized as a sign that he couldn’t handle
human blood because there was something wrong with him.
And now that we’re in the fifth season, almost everybody has
been a monster at one point or another — Elena’s killed an innocent waitress,
and masterminded the deaths of thousands of vampires in one instant. Who’s
innocent at this point? Caroline, maybe. Matt, I guess. That Adam guy.
In any case, here’s a brief summary of last night’s episode,
followed by some of the questions I have: Damon escapes his cell using a bullet
trick that I’m not sure would work and tries and fails to use Adam as leverage
to rescue Elena, only to run into his old cellmate Enzo. Eventually Stefan
rescues Elena, while being moderately dickish to Katherine, who wants one last
chance at love before she dies — and then Katherine decides to take her
daughter up on her offer of survival by possessing someone else’s body.
The crux of the episode is that Stefan can’t forgive
Katherine for 147 years of evil deeds (to be fair, most of that time he thought
Katherine was entombed or dead). While Elena can forgive Damon for the latest
revelations, including the fact that he killed almost Adam’s entire family for
generations and abandoned his cellmate Enzo to die. Why is Damon forgiveable
but not Katherine? Umm… reasons.
Anyway, here are some questions:
1) Is it even
possible for this show to have a villain any more? It was vaguely
surprising a few episodes back, when the show’s “Big Bad” Silas
unceremoniously snuffed it. Apparently for good? In any case, now we’re back to
a status where everybody’s more or less the same level of bad.
There’s a villain in Dr. Wes, the mad-scientist guy — but the reveal that
Elena’s sainted father did the same stuff and their work saves innocent people
sort of blunts Dr. Wes’ villainy. Plus Dr. Wes is right — the world would be a
better place if all the vampires killed each other and stopped murdering
humans. Even if you see Dr. Wes as the baddie, though, he’s not much of an evil
mastermind. He’s already been outsmarted six times, and the season is only half
over.
Maybe there’s no room for a real villain on this show, because by definition such a person would have to be more evil than the other characters. And maybe that’s no longer possible.
2) Is it possible to
replace good and evil with other values, such as loyalty? You know, at
various points this show has tried to pose an alternative value system to conventional
morality, based on standing by your family or friends. So even if Elena is a
mass murderer, she will do anything for Jeremy, Bonnie, Caroline and the
Salvatores.
That breaks down when there are conflicts within the group
— like when Elena kills Jesse to save Damon, but Caroline had a thing for
Jesse. It also breaks down when Elena is a flake, like when she gets psychic
premonitions that Stefan is in a bank vault in a quarry and ignores them
because she’s busy canoodling.
But most of all, it fails Kant’s Categorical
Imperative: act only according to a maxim that you would like to be a
universal law (that everybody else follows). If everybody followed Elena’s
moral dictum of only caring about the well-being of a handful of people, you’d
get a post-apocalyptic nightmare in no time. Mystic Falls would become The Road if everyone followed Elena’s
example.
3) Do social
institutions exist only to be destroyed? Most of us behave in a moral
fashion not because we have any kind of moral core (ha)
but because we fear getting caught and thrown in prison.
https://gizmodo.com/25-of-the-scariest-science-experiments-ever-conducted-5390389
In Vampire Diaries,
authority figures generally don’t last that long — we’ve seen multiple mayors
die, and pretty much all the members of the secret council of Mystic Falls have
snuffed it. Sheriff Forbes is miraculously alive, but she’s so co-opted that
people talk about her like some kind of servant. “Oh, I’ll get Sheriff
Forbes to clean that up. Oh, let’s get Sheriff Forbes to bring pizza over. We’ll
give her a $5 for her trouble.” Etc. The secret society that runs the Augustine
experiments seems like a pathetic shadow of its 1950s self, which Damon already
slaughtered. Not to mention that nobody
has parents any more, or any kind of older relatives who could offer moral
censure or advice.
Meanwhile, on The
Originals, the entire city government of New Orleans has already bitten the
dust. Probably just the first of many civic massacres on that show.
The problem with strong social institutions, of course, is
that they probably won’t approve of people palling around with serial killers
— so if we’re going to sympathize with Damon, we’re going to wind up rooting
for the dissolution or undermining of every form of government or authority in the
world. Over time, though, you’re going to end up with a world that feels less and
less real — because social institutions are a key form of world-building, and because
it’s not clear what’s keeping people from open cannibalism on the streets of
Mystic Falls at this point.
4) So why is Damon
better than Katherine? I think it has to do with individualism, maybe.
Vampires are the ultimate individualists because they’re powerful enough to do
what they want, and because their quasi-immortality ensures the survival of the
individual rather than of a family or community. Sure, we see vampires living
in “nests” sometimes — but the interesting vampires are usually individuals,
or even loners.
Katherine is depicted as a bad individualist — she only
ever cares about herself, we’re told over and over. She has thrown the people
in her life under the bus, but also she’s perfectly happy to be running on her
own for years at a time. If Katherine hadn’t been cursed with mortality, she
wouldn’t be giving any of these suckers a second thought, probably not even
Stefan.
Damon is an individualist, too, but at least during the time
we’ve known him he’s seemed to care about a tiny handful of people (following
Elena’s dictum), and he has loyalty to his family and friends. Within a very
small radius. Damon is a good individualist where Katherine is a bad
individualist — because they’re both happy to be selfish, but Damon also wears
his heart on his sleeve and has emotional weaknesses.
So there you have it: the absolute moral core of Vampire
Diaries: It comes down to feels.
