When our civilization crumbles to dust and nothing remains
of our great works of art and literature, we’ll probably still have The Vampire Diaries and The Originals to teach us the secrets of
a good and happy life. Centuries from now, these texts will continue to guide
and enlighten. So what did we learn from this week’s outings?
Spoilers ahead…
This week’s outings of Vampire
Diaries and Originals were all
about A) People sacrificing family for loveB) People making incredibly stupid and self-destructive decisions C) People
discovering terrible secrets and D) Someone trying to manipulate one sibling
into killing another sibling. These four thingsbasically explain all of human suffering, making TVD and TO foundational
documents for the new society I am going to be founding in my underground
bunker soon.
Let’s go through these one by one, OK?
A) People sacrificing
family for love
The theme of “family” wasn’t all that important in
the VampDi universe at first —
ironically, as everybody’s family members have gotten killed off, it’s gained
prominence. There are only three members of the once-sprawling Original family
left, and Elena just has Jeremy at this point. Back when Damon killed his
“Uncle” Jesse, nobody really spared much of a tear for the last human
member of the Salvatore clan, but now it’s all-family, all the time.
And in the view of the shows’ writers, not only is family
super-important, but choosing to put other things over family will usually bite
you in the ass.
This time around, Nadia realizes that even though she
sacrificed everything to save Katherine by transplanting Katherine into Elena’s
body, Katharine will always put her lust for Stefan ahead of loyalty to her
daughter.
The most affecting scene in last night’s TVD is probably
where the always-great Matt — as Katherine observes, “Everybody loves
Matt!” — compares Katherine to Matt’s own mom, who would take off for
days at a time with her latest guy, before crawling home for Matt tomake her another grilled-cheese sandwich. (Matt
neglects to mention that he actually kicked his mom out once and for all.) I
love when this show actually remembers the backstories of its characters and
brings them up in ways that make emotional sense like that.
Nadia is never going to come first in Katherine’s life —
and Katherine’s messed-up priorities are the proximate cause of Nadia getting
bitten by Tyler Lockwood and probably dying of werewolf venom.
Meanwhile, the Original Sin of The Originals turns out to be that Marcel and Rebekah, who were in
love and knew Klaus would never let them be together, decided to put their love
over Rebekah’s family loyalty. And so they convinced a gullible witch named
Genevieve in 1919 to summon Rebekah’s psycho father, Mikael, to New Orleans to chase
Klaus away. Except that it backfired in some way we haven’t seen yet.
B) People making
incredibly stupid and self-destructive decisions
Well, summoning Mikael to New Orleans probably comes under this heading
as well. So does Katherine deciding to hang around Stefan instead of getting
the heck out of Dodge with her daughter and running off to Europe
while she has the chance.
But also, the witches in this weeks’ Originals are dumb as rocks. So they have Klaus, by far the most
powerful and unstoppable of the Mikaelson clan, already imprisoned and
immobilized with Papa Tunde’s magic knife. They also have Rebekah right where
they want her. If it’s revenge they’re after, they’re pretty much there
already. This is the part where you dig a deep hole miles from anywhere, put
the still-daggered Klaus inside, and then pour a few thousand tons of concrete
on top of him. With Klaus and Rebekah out of the picture, you just have to deal
with Elijah, who’s like a cat with a laser pointer when anybody dangles shiny
clues in front of him. (And now I want someone to make an Elijah/laser-pointer
GIF, where his eyes are following a red dot.)
Instead of doing the obvious thing and pressing their
advantage, Celeste and the witch gang come up with a Rube Goldberg plan to reveal
Rebekah’s 1919 treachery to Klaus via telepathic memory-flashes, so Klaus will
be really really pissed until something distracts him. (Actually, all of the
Originals are like cats with laser pointers, now that I think about it.)
Oh, also Dr. Wes? Even dumber than most doctors who use
their first name instead of their last name. Dr. Wes has injected Damon with
the “cannibal vampire” virus that makes him feed on other vampires,
but instead of just moving on and maybe testing it on some other experimental
subjects who are more easily controlled, he gets the Travelers to trap Damon
and Enzo in a house together, to force Damon to feed on Enzo. Nothing about
this test is particularly scientific, and there’s no control group or research
protocols.
Most of all, Dr. Wes has apparently decided to rely on the
Travelers to be his “backup” without knowing anything about them or
what their goals are — and judging by every other alliance of expediency on
this show, this is clearly going to turn out to be a terrible, horrible idea.
I guess the main lesson here? Keep it simple. If you have
your worst enemy immobilized with a magic knife, don’t un-immobilize him. Don’t
infect your most dangerous test subject with an experimental virus and then
trap him in a house with his best friend, just kill him and find other
subjects. Like Paul McCartney says, “What does it matter to ya? When you
got a job to do, ya better do it well.”
C) People discovering
terrible secrets
See Klaus and Rebekah — but also, at long last, thanks to
the ever-lovable Matt, Caroline finally got the clue that Elena isn’t Elena.
And Stefan, who spends the whole episode acting as though he couldn’t spot a
clue if one landed between his freakishly prehensile eyebrows, suddenly twigs
to the facts about Elena as well.
Oh, and we’re still playing the fallout from Tyler finding
out that Caroline slept with Klaus — because Tyler will never be okay with her
sleeping with the man who killed Tyler’s mom after Tyler tried to kill him
first. I thought the statute of limitations on murder in Mystic
Falls was down to a month, but
apparently Tyler
has a freakishly long memory.
The main lesson here: Umm… don’t do anything you wouldn’t
want everybody to know about within three episodes?
D) Brother killing
brother (or sister)
That’s the climax of both of these episodes, and in both
cases we know it’ll never happen. I guess Klaus isn’t really going to kill
Rebekah, per se— just stab her with
the magic knife, which will immobilize her in horrible anguish forever. It’s
not clear whether, having stabbed her with the magic knife, Klaus will be able
to pull it out of her again. (Or, now that Elijah has re-stabbed Klaus with it,
whether he’ll be able topull it out.)
Even with Klaus still weakened by his ordeal and overcome by
the psychic television feed of Rebekah’s memories, he has to be aware that he’s
being manipulated here. I half-expected Klaus to turn around and stab Genevieve
instead of Rebekah — but no, he’s just enough of a slave to his own rage that
he goes after his sister instead.
The witches’ plan to get Klaus to attack Rebekah and Marcel
is a masterpiece, compared to Katherine’s incredibly dunder-headed plan to get Stefan
to kill Damon. Really, the notion that Katherine is a mastermind or a brilliant
manipulator is seeming less and less plausible the more we see of her. She
tries to goad the blood-crazed Damon into feeding on her, and then kicks a
stake towards Stefan, who just stands there looking even more bewildered than
usual. And then instead of stabbing his
brother, Stefan offers up his own blood as a substitute — then snaps Damon’s neck
and gets him chained up in his comfy old basement cell.
Because in the Vampire Diaries teachings, Stefan is the
ultimate sage. He sees without seeing. He acts without deliberation. He knows
when the Holy Roman Empire fell. He cannot be
seduced in tawdry hotel rooms by his possessed ex-girlfriend, because his heart
is a calm pond. He was once the Ripper, but now he is a weaver. Or something.
