Vampire Diaries: Sometimes There’s Honour in Revenge |
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| Written by April Yorke |
| Thursday, 12 May 2011 17:17 |
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Alright, so there’s some other stuff in between. Stuff like Jenna totally dying. As much as I liked Jenna, Sara Canning was wildly underused for most of the series’ run, so it’s better for the show (and the actress, I hope) to cut its losses. A lot of her scenes in this ep, outside of the serious emotional stuff with Elena, were Vampire 101, and we’ve already been through that with Vicki and Caroline (come to think of it, why no new male vampires, show?). Again, as much as I like Jenna and Canning as Jenna, we’ve done this. Let’s move on to the good stuff, like Klaus totally ripping out Jules’ heart. Admit it: you cheered. No one liked Jules, did they? Right, Jenna. Jenna, heartbreakingly, realizes that she’s failed Elena as her guardian (it was really more of a fail by omission, in that she never knew enough about what was happening to do a better job), so she gives protecting her ward one last effort: she sinks those brand-new vampire fangs into Greta’s neck. Unfortunately, Klaus pulls her off before she can finish the job and stakes Jenna. She dies. It’s both a devastating blow and not much of one, all things considered. If anything, Stefan lying in the grass helpless as all this went down was more of an emotional hit. See, Stefan decided that if everything was going to be this shitty for Elena, the least he could do is help her hang on to her beloved aunt. So he heads on down to the sacrifice and offers himself in Jenna’s place. Klaus, however, prefers the symmetry of three women (“three goddesses,” he says, practically begging me not to scream “SEXISM!”) and, more ominously, has “plans” for Stefan. And with that, he breaks off a stake in Stefan’s back, leaving him prone and forced to watch the violence that follows. Poor Stefan looks like he’s having a heart attack when Klaus finally sinks his teeth into Elena’s neck. Klaus must have super-human sucking skills to go along with everything else because he drains Elena in a matter of seconds. Pretty soon, it’s the Quickening, and Elijah’s there to rip his heart out. Meanwhile, Damon – having had a wall-punching flip-out about how nobody has to die re: Stefan taking off for the quarry (“That's my brother for ya, always cleaning up my messes.”) – carries Elena’s lifeless body away after removing the stake from his brother’s back, while Stefan stays for the final showdown. Bonnie does her 100 witches trick, but it’s all for naught: Klaus and Elijah strike a deal. Being as how I thought their one little tiff wasn’t a good enough motivation for Elijah to see Klaus dead, this one is a little better: for whatever reason, Klaus hunted down and killed all the other Originals and threw their bodies to the sea, so Elijah couldn’t even give them a proper burial. Admittedly, I don’t entirely follow this one since we’ve been told that a silver blade with white oak ash wielded by a human is the only way to kill an Original, and, really, all Elijah has to do is find the bodies and get a human to yank the blade out, but okay. As motivators go, “he murdered my family” is a good one. Klaus explains, upon his word, that he didn’t threw their brothers’ and sisters’ itty bitty bits to the sea and can give their bodies back to Elijah, so Elijah breaks his word in service of another. I would have liked this development a lot more if it hadn’t come out of nowhere in this episode alone, but I can handle it. Perhaps the writers felt like they needed the looming shadow of an un-killable Klaus forever and always. Who knows? As for Elena’s lifeless body, it’s lifeless no longer when Jon, via Bonnie’s witchy prowess, transfers his life energy to Elena after reading about Emily doing the same for a mother and her baby. Of course, this spell is a killer (way to leave your baby alone, 1800s mom), so Jon drops dead alone, unnoticed, out in the shadows while Elena begins to gasp for air. Good thing, too: Damon was going to have to stake vamp Elena to avoid having Elena mad at him for all eternity (come on, selfish love, just last the year). Honestly, though, no one cares that Jon died. They have a big funeral scene for Jenna (in which Elena wears WAY too much eye makeup), and Jon just gets to be dead. He did nod to Alaric that he’s responsible for Jer and Elena now, and he wrote Elena a lovely little note about how he loves her no matter what, so he’s got that going for him. Before they get to the graveyard, Jer says to Elena that they only have each other now. When they get there, surrounded by people who love them and will fight for them even unto death, I reply, “No, you’ve got all these people.” Family. Oh, and remember that little nip Tyler gave Damon? Well, he finally tells Stefan about it when Damon tries to take off before the wake/reception, and Stefan – and this fucking kills, the way he’s extending this olive branch – tells Damon that Elena needs all of them right now. Stefan is STUNNED SPEECHLESS by the bite, just sort of guppying around for something, anything to make it better, and finally he whispers that beating unbeatable odds is sort of their thing now, so surely they will find a way to help Damon. HE will find a way. Damon, “You wanna help me? Don’t tell Elena.” Girl’s got enough on her plate, what with the no parents at all, not even a little. Damon walks further into the cemetery and toward the sunset while everyone heads in the opposite direction. In other news:
Next time, as in TONIGHT, as in SEASON TWO FINALE: And here’s what I mean when I say that it’s all about Damon’s feelings. No way, no day is Damon going to die, so there’s only this: Damon fretting about settings things right before he dies while going crazy. Then he drinks magic elixir or something and survives. Maybe Elijah will come back with the cure because he feels he owes them. Do come back, my most badass Elijah!
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I’ve left it way too late to give you a proper recap of last Thursday’s The Vampire Diaries, “The Sun Also Rises,” but feel I must write something, so here goes: relentlessly advertizing it as the episode before the season finale, even though it focused on the season-long obsession (the sacrifice) made it pretty clear to me FROM THE JUMP that we haven’t seen the last of Klaus. If I were a betting woman, I would have split my monies thusly: the sacrifice goes according to plan (for Klaus, obvs), and he spends the next episode terrorizing everyone who tried to stop him OR the sacrifice doesn’t go according to plan, and he spends the next episode terrorizing everyone who stopped him. Instead, Klaus gets everything he wants, and we’re going to spend the next episode dealing with . . . Damon’s feelings? (More on this in a minute).
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