The Vampire Diaries, Season 5, Episode 3: "Original Sin" Recap/Review
This episode, as full of exposition and flashbacks as it was, was still pretty fucking thrilling to watch, IMHO. We got a lot more doppelgänger mythology, which is awesome, and figured out who Silas' ~one true love~ really was, too. Although, chances are you weren't so surprised about that. I am really pumped to see where these storylines are leading us, though!
Unfortunately though, with the massive info-dump we got this episode, there will probably be a LOT of just straight-up quoting the dialogue, because you never know what is going to end up being important later, and I don't want to ruin the finer details by paraphrasing. So yeah, my apologies in advance, but this wasn't as fun to recap as it was to watch (although you know I still managed to write like, 8,000 words about it, so maybe I'm a liar) Hopefully you'll all still find this recap worth reading! So, here's what's up:
Previously, on the Vampire Diaries: Elena loved Stefan, and then she loved Damon. Silas' real face looks just like Stefan's, which made it really easy to steal his identity after locking him in a safe at the bottom of a quarry. Gregor (with help from Nadia) did some weird spell to put himself in Matt's head, so that way when Nadia killed him, he'd still be alive in Matt's body, though he's not always in control of it. Silas has crazy mind reading/compulsion powers, which he's been using to track down Katherine, but we don't know why. Oh, and someone pulled Stefan's safe out of the quarry and left it in the woods, but when Damon and Elena found it (with help from Liz the Sheriff), Stefan wasn't inside. Oops!
We pick up this week just about exactly where we left off last week--a very tired and hungry Stefan stumbles his still-slightly-desiccated ass down a country road, where he sees a run-down bar a couple hundred feet away. When he finally makes it inside, he startles the blonde bartender (named Jo) with his disheveled appearance. Seriously, dude looks super strung-out. Jo, who is definitely a little unnerved, says, "Hey man, last call was four hours ago. If you want some coffee, I could put some on, or...?" Stefan continues to walk slowly towards her until he can't take it anymore. As expected, he sinks his fangs into her carotid artery while she screams in terror. YESSSS THE RIPPER IS BACK!
...Except, not really, because after whetting his palate with her blood for a few seconds, he pulls himself off of her and yells at her to RUN, far far away. She wisely heeds his warning, and after she's run off, he slowly walks out the door to ditch the scene. Unfortunately, he runs into another problem; the sun has just come up, and since he doesn't have his daylight ring (which was stolen by Silas and then stolen back by Damon) his skin immediately starts to fry. He falls to his knees in pain and groans. Man, he really cannot catch a break, can he?
Across town, Elena wakes up with a gasp from a dream, and once she realizes she's home safe at Casa Salvatore, she sits up to catch her breath. Damon stirs and notices she's up, again. "Unnngh, you must have restless sleep syndrome or something. It's like sleeping with a tornado!" She anxiously runs a hand through her glorious hair cape, and after a moment, he realizes that she's upset. He rubs her back and urges her to come back to sleep, since they've both been up all night. Elena admits that she had a dream about Stefan, which really doesn't seem to please her boyfriend too much. She goes on to say that it wasn't just a weird feeling, it was a real dream, as if she were there with him. Damon sighs; "I know I said that it didn't bother me that you have some psychic connection to your ex-boyfriend, but I don't need a play-by-play, Elena."
He turns and lies back down in bed, and after a beat, Elena agrees that it's weird to talk about this kind of stuff to him, and apologizes as she lays back down next to him. He turns around so he's facing her, and changes his mind. "Fine. Tell me. I'm sure whatever's in my imagination is ten times worse than what's going on in your subconscious." She describes the dream as being extremely vivid--she saw Stefan walking out of a bar with a red awning and broken neon-sign, and he was outside, screaming in pain. While this is likely much better than Damon was expecting, he's still not really buying into the whole psychic-dream thing, and snarks that they should consult a crystal ball to get an address. Luckily for them, that won't be necessary; Katherine joins their discussion and answers for them. "Route 29. Joe's bar." The sleep twosome sit up in bed in confusion and just gape at Kat, who is standing in the doorway. "I think I had the exact same dream." OH SHIT. Also, Elena's drowsy, confused bitchface gives me SO MUCH LIFE. Just look at it! TITLE CARD!
It's later in the morning now, and Elena is dressed and ready for the day. She jots something down in a notebook before she gets distracted by Stefan's daylight ring, which I'm sure he could really use right now. Damon walks in and reveals that he has found nine bars so far that are on Route 29, but none of them are called "Joe's." Elena's more concerned with the fact that she had a hunch that something awful was going on with Stefan all summer, and just shrugged it off, but it really was true--Stefan was in that safe the whole time, and likely killed whoever found him. She admits she knows that this all sounds insane, but they don't have any other leads, so they have to see what they can dig up from it. "It doesn't sound crazy, it IS crazy. But, I'm open-minded!" Damon smirks.
Katherine is finally dressed in actual clothes, and has done her hair and looks like the Katherine we know and love/loathe. She calls shotgun on this little impromptu road trip. "What? I get carsick in the backseat. Another charming, human side effect you stuck me with." You and me both, Kiki. Dramamine is your friend! Elena is not okay with Katherine tagging along, but Damon reminds her that since Silas wants her, they need to keep hold of her, and since literally anyone can get into Casa Salvatore, they can't just leave her unsupervised/unprotected. Elena suggests stashing her in the cellar, or throwing her into the Lockwood Well with water-wings.
"Do you really think that I wanna take a road trip with YOU, America's most boring, self-righteous vampire?" Oh, Kitty Kat, play nice! She adds that she would be more than capable of protecting herself if she hadn't been force-fed the cure by Elena, but Elena has a pretty solid excuse, considering she was about a second away from having her heart ripped from her chest at the time. Katherine changes tactics, and taunts Elena about wasting the cure that Elena wanted so badly on her. Damon is D-O-N-E with their little cat fight, and tells Kat to cállate ahora, lest he reconsider the "deep, dark well" idea. She responds by getting serious, and reminding them that she wants to find Stefan as much as anyone, because she cares about him, as she always has. (Although, the fact that she is sick of being "the moonstone" in the Silas situation definitely helps) She adds that since Elena had the same dream, she must care about him just as much, which Damon does NOT want to hear. "Okay, train's leaving the station. Choo-choo!" Oh, Damon.
Somewhere in or near Mystic Falls, Silas is sitting in a car, plotting on the phone with Nadia, who is at the Grill. Wait a minute, how did Silas learn how to drive a car so quickly? Does his psychic, mind-reading ability mean that he can learn EVERYTHING by reading the minds of people who know how to do that stuff? Sigh. Silas: "You ever play the 'What If?' game? When you're calcified for 2,000 years, you learn to entertain yourself with these little brain-teasers." Nadia's not really in the mood, and basically tells him to get to the point, but he doesn't really care. "Oh, no, no, no. It's really easy, I'll go first: You know how much I hate Travelers, so to prove your allegiance to me, you killed your Traveler friend, Gregor. BUT, what if it was all an act? What if he's still alive?"
Nadia points out that not only did he watch Gregor bleed out in front of him, but he also buried him himself, so he's being a liiiittle paranoid about the whole double-crossing thing. Silas is worried that Matt's "tacky ring" brought Gregor back to life too, since their minds are connected or whatever. Nadia's feigns boredom, so Silas gets to the point by stating his terms for working with her: she has to find out if Matt Donovan is still alive, and if he is, she must kill him. Wasn't killing GREGOR supposed to be what proved her loyalty to him in the first place? JFC, stop moving so fast, show! Nadia's got Silas' number, though. "Fine. Say Matt is still alive. What if he could help us to find Katherine Pierce? She's still your priority, is she not?" Silas concedes that she is, so he clarifies the terms of their little deal to Nadia forcing Matt to give her the intel they need, THEN ripping the ring off his hand and killing him, f'reals this time. Nadia is watching Matt as he works the bar at the Grill, and assures Silas that she'll handle it.. Ohhhh, no you don't. NO ONE TOUCHES MY SWEET BABOO, LADY.
Stefan awakens on a cot in a cabin in the woods to find a beautiful brunette woman standing and staring at him. He's overwhelmed with hunger, and urges the girl to GTFO ASAP before he rips her head off and sucks her dry of blood. She's all, "Hello to you too!" and hands him a blood bag. Stefan is clearly suspicious of this kind offer, but after several seconds of eyeballing it, his hunger wins out and he chugs it down in a couple gulps. "A vampire doppelgänger who's burdened by a conscience. Now, I've seen everything," the woman remarks with a chuckle, and Stefan suddenly realizes that she's the one who saved him from burning to death in the sun. She confirms it, and adds that she's also the one who pulled him from his watery grave. Or, rather, she's the one who asked the man who owns this cabin to pull his safe from the quarry, a kind gesture in which he was repaid by having his throat ripped out by Stefan himself.
Now that Stefan is sated, his brain is actually starting to work through all this new information, and he asks how she knows he's a doppelgänger. "Because I've seen your face before, on someone who wasn't you." When he asks who she is, she ignores him, and asks him how much he knows about Silas. Stefan obviously doesn't know much, but what he DOES know is that Sila is a ruthless immortal being who killed a ton of people, stole his identity, and left him to rot in a lockbox thrown into a quarry. Mystery woman points out that he made it through in one piece, but Stefan corrects her. "Barely. I came very close to flipping off my humanity switch, but I didn't, because I knew if I ever got out, I wanted to be myself when I killed him." She thinks those are pretty strong words, but Stefan means it, though he doesn't know just how powerful he's become since he's been in captivity.
Plus, the woman points out that he's not going anywhere while he's still vulnerable to the sun. She explains that Silas wasn't always the monster we've known. "He used to be a simple man, in love with a simple girl...his soulmate. She was his ~one true love~. [...] Heh. you know how that goes; they thought their love would last forever." Stefan, like everyone else in the audience, has no idea how she could know any of this, so the woman reveals that she knows because she lived it, with Silas. He can't believe that this woman was Silas' ~one true love~, and she admits she would have done anything for him. Stefan asks how on earth she's possibly still alive, as though he's never met someone who once was dead and who came back to life, or known someone who has been alive for hundreds or thousands of years. (Which is like EVERYONE ON THE SHOW) The woman realizes she has a lot of explaining to do, so she leads us into the first flashback of the evening...
We're in Ancient Greece, in ~100 B.C., where we see a very Grecian Silas approach a similarly Grecian version of the mystery woman who is helping Stefan, who narrates in voiceover. "Silas and I were the two most powerful members of a gifted people called Travelers. When we were engaged to be married, we decided to reach even further." Silas tells the woman that he never wants to live without her. "We wanted to find a way for our love to last forever." Silas and the woman almost kiss, but they are distracted by a sound. They look back to a man-made pond thing that is full of flowers, where a woman, whose face is concealed by a scarf, kneels to pick flowers.
In the present day, Stefan impatiently snarks that he already knows the story--how Silas' life was all fine and good until the witch Qetsiyah ruined everything, but the woman is not a bit amused. "Wrong. You don't know the story. Silas convinced Qetsiyah that he loved her, so she would make the immortality spell. But, when she found out he was just using her, she dumped him in a tomb with a cure, hoping he would take it and die, because she had created a supernatural limbo to trap his soul." Stefan spills some misogynistic crap about women being crazy and irrational, blah blah blah, which the woman kindly overlooks for the moment. She summarizes the rest of the present-day story, which we already know: Silas wants to destroy the Other Side, take the cure, die, and then be reunited with his ~one true love~, which basically was the running theme of the last 2/3 of last season.
Stefan's getting a little annoyed, and is like, "Look, if you really are Silas' ~one true love~, and you're not dead, then why don't you just do us all a favor and run off into the sunset together?" That's when the woman spills the tea. "Silas was MY ~true love~. I never said that I was his. I'M Qetsiyah, that sane, rational, well-adjusted woman you seem to know SO much about." Way to go, Steffo! I know you're cranky from being locked up and starved for 90+ days, but haven't you learned by now to not to mess with witches? Especially super powerful ones? She demonstrates her powers by running a finger along the edges of the fireplace, which leaves a trail of blue-white flames in its wake.
(via spookygailpeck)
She points out that it's clear that he's heard Silas' side of the story, where she's a back-stabbing lunatic/life-ruiner/witch-bitch who is so obsessed with vengeance that she created a supernatural purgatory so that Silas would be stuck with her for eternity. Stefan asks the obvious question--WTF is she doing here, since everyone thought she was dead and on the Other Side? "I was--for 2,000 years. But, I came back...for you." She is so bananas, but AWESOME. I am kind of loving her, to be honest.
Damon is driving his car, with Elena riding shotgun, and Katherine in the back. Hopefully they gave her some Benadryl or something, otherwise I hope Damon has some barf bags handy. Damon asks his girlfriend if she's sure she knows what they're looking for, since they've stumbled upon several bars that fit her description so far. She shrugs and says she'll know when she sees it, and Kat pops her head up between the two to add that she will, too. Damon, who is not enjoying this road trip at all, tries to keep the peace, but that's not really Katherine's style. "I'm just trying to make conversation. Anything to drown out the sound of eggshells breaking." She continues on her quest of planting the seeds of doubt between the two by bringing up Elena's dreams about Stefan that she got all summer, and gets a dig in about how stressful it must be on their new relationship, especially considering she was having these dreams while she was in bed with Stefan's brother. Ouch.
Elena corrects her, and tells her they weren't dreams, just unsettling feelings that something wasn't right. "Oh, no, yeah, sure. I totally get it--there's still a connection between you two. Maybe deep down, you know that he was your ~one true love~ and breaking up with him was a huge mistake." Elena is looking pretty murderous, so Damon encourages her to ignore her, and promises that when the vervain is out of her system, they'll compel her to shut the fuck up. Kat continues as if they didn't say anything, and suggests that perhaps Stefan was trying to reach out to her, and since she was so distracted by fucking Damon, that he decided to reach out to someone that he trusts, which would be herself. Elena side-eyes Damon again as they aggressively ignore her. "Nah, you're probably right," Katherine blathers on. "Elena and I had the exact same dream on the exact same night. Why would that mean something?" They continue to ignore her, but Damon doesn't seem unaffected by Katherine's words.
Matt has gone out the back door of the Grill to take out the trash when he spots Nadia standing in the alley. He's understandably pissed, and approaches her for answers. "What the hell did you do to me? Look, I know you and your creep-show boyfriend screwed with my head the other night, so who the hell are you, and what do you want?" She promises that she's here to keep him safe from Silas, which causes Matt to be like, "Bwuh?" She informs him that Silas still wants him dead, and insists that he's going to have to trust her. She grabs his face, shuts his eyes, and mutters, "Vyjdou [Come forth] Gregor." When he opens his eyes, they're black. Of COURSE Gregor is still hanging out in Matt's head, despite the fact that his physical body is both dead and buried.
Gregor as Matt (who has a Czech accent even though every other time someone's body has been possessed by someone else, their accents have never transferred with them) is completely enraged that Nadia killed him. She apologizes, but reminds him that Silas was about to kill him, and that jumping the gun and killing him herself was the only way to salvage the deal. That doesn't really do anything to make him feel better, as you can probably guess. "You knew the stakes. It is why we put you inside the person with the invincibility ring." Yeah, that ring only protects him from death at the hands of supernatural beings, but since literally EVERYONE in this show is supernatural now, I guess that's not really a problem. Gratt is like, "So now what? I am just a passenger that you can call out of Matt's head and put away whenever you want?" Nadia assures him that she'll find away to permanently give him Matt's body, because she loooooves him, and will do anything for him. Except not kill him while they're undercover, I guess. SERIOUSLY THOUGH, GET YOUR DIRTY PAWS OFF OF MATT OKAY.
They kiss, but after a moment, Gratt pulls away, and asks him where they buried his body. She promises that she will, but he has to call up Elena Gilbert first so they can learn where Katherine is. Matt's kind of hot as an Eastern-European dude, I have to say. (Also, I spy with my little eye a little, Lapis Lazuli daylight ring on Nadia's finger! I was about to say that I thought daylight rings were a relatively unknown thing, considering what we've learned over the seasons, but since she runs with witches/possibly was one herself before she was turned, I imagine she probably knew people who could hook her up with one.)
Back at the cabin, Stefan is rifling through a bag when Qetsiyah comes back from picking flowers/herbs outside. He asks if she has a cell phone, because he needs to update his pals on what's going down, but she informs him that there's no cell-service, and advises him to not go outside, what with the sunshine and all. He still hasn't learned to check his attitude.
A few notes, before we move on; 1) If I were a betting girl, (and I'm not) I would bet good money that Qetsiyah leveraged Bonnie's life for her own. We already know that nature seeks a balance, and you can't give something/someone life without something in return. 2) We already know that it was an ancestor of Qetsiyah who created the Brotherhood of the Five hunters to kill Silas/vampires, but when that plan failed, why didn't she just join up with Bonnie to help take down Silas together? Sigh.
Anyway, Stefan points out that 2,000 years is a really, really long time to hold a grudge, but she reveals that he left her at the altar via another flashback (with voiceover, again). She is standing at her wedding garden, waiting for Silas, while people are setting up around her. "Like a lovesick idiot, I created an entire garden for our wedding, and I made a spell that would keep us alive forever; an immortality spell so we would never have to part." The plan was to drink the "immortality elixir" as part of their wedding vows, but as she waited for Silas to meet her at the altar, everything around her began to wilt and die--the flowers, the ivy growing on a trellis, the harvest they had grown. When she looked into the chalice from which they would drink their elixir, it was already gone. "And then I realized why. Silas had already used the immortality spell. He was already drinking the elixir somewhere else. He took what he wanted, and then the bastard abandoned me."
In the present day, Qetsiyah (who I am going to call Tessa from now on because it is way easier) tells Stefan to go on ahead and call her a vindictive bitch or whatever, but she trusted and loved him, and he fucked her over. Stefan sincerely apologizes to her for what happened, because he does get it, even though his situation is nowhere near the same. She continues her story, and says she wanted and deserved an opportunity to make him feel the pain that she felt. She followed him into the wooded area where he was staying with his ~one true love~, the woman with whom he shared HER immortality spell. In flashback, we see her spying on Silas and his love. "And just when I thought his betrayal couldn't cut any deeper, I learned that his actual ~true love~ was someone very close to me...my handmaiden."
Tessa watches Silas as he approaches his love, and as he removes her scarf from her face, we see that she is, as predicted, yet another character played by Nina Dobrev! Silas puts a hand on the side of her face, and smarms, "Just as you are mine, I am yours forever, because when I look at you, Amara...all I see is an angel." BARFFFF. I am an equal-opportunity shipper, who likes/has liked both Stefan/Elena and Damon/Elena, but if anything, all this storyline proves to me is that Stefan and KATHERINE are the ~true loves~ in this generation of doppelgängers. /unpopularopinion
Stefan is like, "So, Silas was the first version of me, and your friend was the first version of Elena?" Tessa spits that Amara was NOT her friend, and explains that when they drank the immortality potion, they violated natures laws of balance, namely, "all living things must die," which is how the shadow-selves came about. "Like you, and Katherine, and Elena, all caused by the ripple effect from Silas and Amara's sin." Wouldn't it have been just as sinful if Tessa had ended up taking it, though? Like, is this a morality thing, as in consequences for being shitty people, or is she just so bitter about what happened that she's acting like she never wanted it in the first place? A little of both?
This whole time, she's been messing with a blue fire in the fireplace, where she's placed a pan. She takes off a thick metal cuff bracelet from her wrist and places it on the pan, where it begins to melt. He asks wtf she's doing, and she calmly explains that since Silas took his daylight ring, he's going to need a new one. In return, she'll need his help to take down Silas. Oh Stefan, this is so obviously a lie.
Damon and Elena have finally found Joe's Bar, and quietly get out of Damon's Camaro, where Katherine must be zonked-out in a dramamine haze in the backseat. Elena isn't sure that they should just leave her there by herself, but Damon claims that she only shuts up when she's asleep, so they should just enjoy the quiet while they still have it. When Elena suddenly stops walking as they approach the bar, Damon assumes that means that this isn't the right one after all, but Elena clarifies that it is; she's just freaked out that it's exactly like how it was in the dream. Damon agrees that it is indeed freaky, but urges her to stop thinking about it and join him inside. Inside, Jo is STILL working the bar, with a completely unsubtle bandage covering her neck. She asks what she can get them, and Damon turns on the compulsion-eyes to ask her what happened to her neck.
"Some sicko attacked me, bit me, told me to run, so I did, and when I looked back, he was on fire." Just a regular Wednesday night, I guess? Mystic Falls is so weird. Elena figures the sun must have come out, and he accidentally walked into it, since they're all so used to not ever worrying about the sun. When Damon presses her for more details, she tells him that some woman managed to push him into a truck and drive off with him. She didn't know who the woman was, but she recognized the truck as belonging to a regular named Cam Peterson, who lives ten miles down the road. She smiles and tells Damon he looks like he could use a drink, and pours him a shot of whiskey. He downs it in one and is immediately brought to his knees as his mouth burns. Vervain, obviously. Dude, they all really need to start taking prophylaxis vervain again, JFC. Just because the Originals are gone doesn't mean that they're not vulnerable!
Elena asks her what the fuck she just did, but Jo doesn't get a chance to answer, because Nadia comes out from the back room and points a gun at Damon and Elena. "I told her to pour him a drink or I'd kill her." Oh, wonderful. As Damon asks who the fuck Nadia is, Katherine chooses the worst possible moment to come in to look for Damon and Elena. Nadia sees her and asks which one of them is Katherine. Of course, Katherine's first instinct is to point at Elena and say, "She is!" which results in yet another amazing face from Elena. Nadia points the gun at Katherine first, and says, "Katherine is a compulsive liar...but, I need her alive," before pointing the gun back at Elena, who zoops straight toward her and pins her against a table. She yells for Katherine to run, which of course she totally does. Aw, Katherine! Methinks you should probably give Elena a little break when this is all over.
Nadia's face goes all vamp-y, and she snits, "You really do look exactly alike," before she straightens herself up and throws Elena against the wall. Ooh, a Travelerpire? I'm gonna take it she's a lot older than Elena. Nadia zooms after Katherine while Damon goes over to help his girlfriend back onto her feet. "Wonderful. Now we've got a vampire bounty hunter to deal with. Let me guess: Euro-bitch was not part of the dream?" Elena confirms that she's never seen her before, and Damon figures that she's likely a spy for Silas. Elena decides to go chase after Nadia and Katherine, and urges him to find his brother. As you can imagine, Damon is not a fan of this plan, but Elena reminds him they don't have time to argue, because Stefan is hurt and needs their help. He stops her before she leaves, and insists that she give Kat up at the first sign of trouble. "I don't care how badly Silas wants Katherine, she's not worth a hair on your head. You got me?" He tells her to kiss him one last time before she leaves, and then they both part ways.
Stefan is watching Tessa work over the fire at the cabin, and she gets a little snippy about him hovering over her. He backs off a little, and asks her what her plan is. "Take the cure and shove it down Silas' throat? Kill him?" Man, Stefan has missed a lot, hasn't he? Tessa reminds him of how powerful Silas' mind control is, and tells him that as long as he has his mental powers, there is literally zero chance of them winning. He points out that she's put him down before, but that was back when he was still a newbie immortal. "A long time ago. That was before he could compel masses, and 2,00 years of consuming dribbles of blood from thousands of people...it's allowed him to hone his skill. It prepared him to escape from the tomb I put him in."
OH SHIT, I totally forgot all about that! If you have forgotten, when Silas was in his tomb in that weirdo cave in Nova Scotia, there was this well that basically fed right into Silas' open mouth. The story was that it was a magical well that would allow people to see their deceased loved ones if they cut themselves and dripped their blood into the well. Naturally, people traveled from everywhere to visit the well. Once Silas had consumed their blood, it gave him a connection to them, and he was able to mind-whammy them into thinking they were seeing/talking to their dead friends and family. That was how he was able to brainwash Professor Shane into doing his bidding, by making him think his dead wife was helping him do a spell to bring her back. A similar thing happened to Bonnie when they were trying to find Silas' tomb--he made her think she was seeing Grams, who told Bonnie she could bring Grams back by waking up Silas. SNEAKY. And awesome!
ANYWAY, Stefan asks if Tessa locked Amara in a tomb too, but she replies flatly that she didn't. In flashback, we see Tessa in front of Silas and Amara's little tent/hut thing, where kneeling in front of a bowl of water and wrings out a cloth. Silas walks toward her, and asks what she's doing here, so she reveals that she has brought him two gifts. When she presents the chalice that held the immortality elixir, he pulls a super douchey-move. "I know you must be very angry with me." REALLY? Tessa concedes that she was, but decided that she had found a way to forgive him--by making him a cure for his immortality, which is held in the same small chest that Silas was holding in the tomb when they woke him.
Silas insists that it's impossible, but it isn't. "I promise you, it works. I just used it on someone else immortal." OH YIKES! This is crazy and awesome, even the second time. He realizes that something hinky is happening, and runs into his tent to find blood staining pretty much EVERYTHING. As he starts frantically calling out for Amara, Tessa follows him into the tent and describes how she cut her throat out so that she couldn't speak. She pulls Amara's bloody heart out of the chalice, and holds it out to him. "But, I could tell by the way her heart was beating...she knew she was going to die." So, all the female shadow-selves died in horrifying ways, then? Silas about gags, and then threatens to kill her, but since he's immortal now, he can't protect himself with magic. She gives him a witchy migraine that brings him to his knees, and says she won't allow him to come anywhere near her unless he takes the cure and lives a long, human life with her.
In the present day, Tessa maintains that no one can say she didn't give him a second chance, but Stefan stupidly disagrees with her. "I'm a complicated person, but Silas remains a simple man. I created the Other Side as a supernatural barrier between Silas and the peaceful afterlife he craved. Then, I dropped him in that tomb with the cure, thinking eventually he would take it and kill himself to be with Amara, just so he could realize that he was caught with me for all eternity." How did he know not to take it? Did he just know Tessa well enough to know she'd try to pull off something like that for revenge? Or could he read her mind too?
When Stefan asks how that plan is working out, she admits he's been a little stubborn, and Stefan realizes that she's not actually planning on making him a daylight ring. DUH, Stefan! Come on, you're smarter than that. Tessa isn't planning on giving Stefan anything until she gets what she wants, and she cuts him off when Stefan pleads that they're on the same side."Have you not been listening to me? I have trust issues. I'm controlling, and paranoid, and a little crazy." She hits him with another mystic migraine, and assures him it's working out just fine for him as he grasps at his head and groans in pain. Oh man, I both love Tessa and am completely terrified at her at the same time.
Katherine is running through the woods, much more slowly than if she was a vampire, but still pretty impressively considering the four-inch heels on those boots she's wearing. She finally comes to a stop, crouches down, and looks over her shoulder for anyone following her. Someone suddenly grabs her from behind and spins her around. When she sees that it's Elena, she seems visibly relieved. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm really glad it's you. My leg is cramping, and I'm freezing. Do you mind if I, uh...[sighs] can I borrow your sweater?" Elena hilariously ignores her request and suggests they leave now before she doubles back, but Katherine stops to ask why Elena didn't kill her.
Elena reminds her about the whole Silas-leverage thing, but Katherine means last season, when she rammed the cure down her throat--Kat was seconds from killing her, so it would have been completely justified if she had killed her after curing her, but she still let her live. "You think that because we share the same dreams and both care about Stefan, that we're alive, but we're not. I value my humanity, which is why I let you live--to give you a chance to find whatever shred of humanity is buried under 500 years of bad behavior."
Katherine figures it's more like she realized that being human was a fate worse than death for her, but Elena says that was just icing on the cake. Katherine actually seems pretty grateful, and I was pretty shocked when I heard her utter this line. "Well...thank you. I'm glad to know that you care, even if you are a condescending bitch." Their tender little moment is interrupted by Nadia, who snaps Elena's neck from behind before descending upon Katherine. She asks if she needs to knock Kat out too, but she's smart enough to say no before she's pulled away by the arm.
(via sheneedstobeprotected)
Stefan has just awoken after having a couple billion aneurysms in his brain to find that he is bound to a chair with some vines. There is a really thick ring of herbs circling him on the floor. Damon through the door, and when he sees Stefan tied up, he can't help but snark a little. "Stefan, you couldn't call a brother?" Stefan explains that Qetsiyah/Tessa is back from the Other Side as Damon tries to untie him, but Tessa chooses that moment to walk in. "You won't be able to break those vines. The spell won't release him until I get what I want." YIIIKES. Damon snarks that clearly the rumors about her were true, and asks for what purpose Stefan being tied up and covered in herbs serves her plan.
Bahaha, oh Stefan, you're a little behind the times. Tessa asks where Katherine is, so Damon has to confess that they kind of lost her. She decides to start without her, and chants over a bowl of what looks like the melted metal from her bracelet. Damon's like, "Okay, well, thanks for the hospitality, but we should really get going if we want to beat traffic!" Stefan is quite game for the "get the fuck out of here" plan, but as you can guess, Tessa isn't. She warns Damon not to get on her bad side, which is a pretty wise warning, tbh, but he retorts that she's not the only one with a bad side.
DUDE. She's a 2,000 year old witch who has managed to: create an immortality spell, create an immortality CURE, desiccate Silas and lock his ass in a tomb, AND created a whole new dimension in which to trap supernatural souls. And, you know, she brought herself back to life. SO, you probably should just pretend to work with her for now while you come up with a better plan. "Aren't you brave," Tessa sneers. "Without Silas' mental powers, he's an immortal nobody. We can defeat him. Isn't that what you want?" Stefan is tired of fighting, and just snaps at them to shut up and just get it over with already. Ohhh, this is going to be bad, isn't it?
Nadia drags Katherine by the arm out of the woods and over to her station-wagon, parked by an overpass. Katherine is a little pissed that she doesn't know who she is. "Sorry to sound like a broken record, but I like to know the identity of my kidnappers. Who are you, and what do you want?" Nadia threatens to sew her mouth shut if she doesn't quit asking, but she's cut off by Silas, who has just showed up out of nowhere. Katherine is not at all surprised that Silas has hired Nadia to take her hostage, but Nadia is shocked to see that he found her. He pulls a little GPS device out from under her car and shows it to her. "GPS tracker. It's even better than a locator spell!"
Back at the cabin, Damon watches as Tessa dips her fingers into the hot, molten metal in the bowl (YEEOWCH) and presses her fingers against Stefan's temples from behind him as she chants.
Silas thanks Nadia for finding Katherine so quickly, but she's not ready to hand Kat over just yet. Apparently, Nadia has some kind of connection to Katherine, because Silas brings up her "fascinating unfinished business [he] doesn't care about." She yells at him to get out of her head, while poor Katerina is like, "WTF IS GOING ON." Silas is about done with the drama, so he mind-whammies Nadia into letting go of Katherine, which she reluctantly does. Then, he orders her to pull out her gun and point it at her heart.
Meanwhile, Tessa is still chanting and pressing her fingers against Stefan's temples.
Nadia takes out the gun, and points it at her chest, though she's trying really hard to fight it. Isn't she a vampire? A bullet to the heart isn't going to do much to her except put her down for a little nap, unless they're wooden. Silas is mid-way through instructing her to pull the trigger when he groans and falls down to his knees, grasping his head. Nadia immediately pulls the gun away from her body, and she and Katherine watch in confusion as Silas moans and groans and whines.
At the cabin, the ring of herbs have ignited themselves and the flames grow pretty high as Tessa continues her spell. Damon is like, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO MY BRO?" Tessa reveals that she's frying Silas' brain, and reminds him that she never said this was going to be a pleasant experience. Stefan's eyes start to bleed, and when we cut over to Silas and the girls, we see that his eyes are bleeding as well, and both of the dude doppelgängers lose consciousness. Damon's ready for this to stop, but Tessa assures him that it's over, and that the spell worked. OH THANK GOD, Silas' mind control thing was really starting to bug me. Villains with little-to-no vulnerabilities are sooo boring, it's part of why the Originals' presence on this show was starting to become such a drag, before they left and got awesome again.
Damon grabs Stefan's head in his hands and tries to gently shake him awake. After a few moments with no luck, he demands that she undo whatever it is she did to him. Tessa tells him that she only burned through his conscious mind, and that once he's healed himself, he'll wake up. "You sure you want to take him home? You and Elena were doing so well without your guilt getting in the way." He calls her out on spying on him, both on the Other Side and on this one, but she assures him that it wasn't really out of choice. She admits that there was only thing worse than being on the Other Side and watching Silas resist the cure; "Century after century, I watched versions of Stefan and Elena find each other, like magnets, always the same story--conquering all, falling in love. [beat] You didn't think your brother was Silas' first shadow? Destiny has been trying to get the doppelgängers together forever."
As you can imagine, Damon's not really feeling all the Stelena fangirling that has been going on today, from Katherine and now from Tessa, and he snits that she should dial down the crazy a bit. Tessa knows he doesn't want to hear it, but the universe is working against him. I don't really see how this could be true though, and this isn't even my inner Delena shipper talking--Stefan and Katherine were together too, and it didn't work out. In fact, Stefan and Damon pretty much openly dislike her, although their history keeps them from truly screwing her over. Stefan and Elena have been broken up for a while now, too, so it seems more like the universe TRIES to get the two doppelgängers together, but just like their progenitors, it doesn't work out.
Damon's like, "If you're trying to downplay your reputation as being a psychopath, you might not want to say you're spokesperson for the universe." Tessa: "You and I are the same, Damon--the obstacle standing between two fates. Silas had his true love, Stefan has Elena. We're merely the conflict that makes it interesting." Damon doesn't get what she's trying to say, and asks if she is really suggesting he just leave his brother here with her while he goes and continues to play house with Elena. She confirms that this is what she's suggesting, and promises she'd keep him safe. Anyone else think she's having some like, transferred romantic feelings for Stefan, since he's the kind of guy who wouldn't do what Silas did to someone he cared about?
Damon doesn't believe she's being genuine, but she promises she's being straight with him. "I want to keep him safe. Now that he's linked to Silas, Silas can't mess with our heads, and as long as Stefan's in the way, you will NEVER be with Elena. Take it from a woman who'se had front row seats for years. [...] No one has to know." However, we all know that the only person Damon loves more than Elena is his brother, so he turns down her offer pretty rudely. He grabs her in a chokehold, but DUH, she's a witch, and a powerful one, so she can give a vampire a mystic migraine in her sleep. He lets go and groans in pain, so she takes the opportunity to throw him to the floor. An unknown amount of time passes, and Damon wakes up to the sound of Elena calling out his name. When she opens the door, she sees Stefan bound to the chair, and immediately runs to him first. She touches his face and tries to get him to wake up, while Damon watches her from the floor and worries about what Tessa said.
Katherine is digging around in Nadia's bag in what looks like a hotel room when Nadia comes back. "Fine, I was snooping. Trying to find a passport, or a business card, or maybe even a parking ticket, because you won't tell me who you are." Nadia walks over to her, and tosses a bag of chips into her hands, because Kat told her she was hungry. Katherine sneers, "For food, not packaged poison," which makes me laugh, because I never thought Katherine would be a food snob, but in hindsight it totally makes sense. I'm pretty sure we've only seen her eat fruit and booze, since she never needed human food before. Nadia's phone rings as she shrugs at Katherine's picky food habits, and we cut back and forth between Nadia and Silas as they talk on the phone.
(via giftvd)
"Silas the Betrayer. Someone lived up to his reputation today." He ignores that dig and asks her where she is, but of course she won't answer, because she doesn't have to anymore. He reminds her that though he may not be able to read her mind anymore, he will still kill her if she doesn't hold up her end of the bargain. He tells her he doesn't give a fuck about what weird revenge thing she has with Katherine, but he demands that she be kept alive. Nadia's like, "We'll see," but Silas wasn't asking. He points out that Katherine is still his priority, and losing his powers hasn't changed that. Unfortunately though, he seems to think the only person capable of taking them is Qetsiyah/Tessa, whom he refers to as his "ex-fiancée," which means that she's alive again and on her way to Mystic Falls.
Nadia jokes that maybe they'll get back together, which does get a chuckle out of Silas. We cut back to the cabin for a moment, where Tessa has literally covered the room in lit candles. She sits cross-legged on the floor, and cuts her hand over a bowl, allowing the blood to drip inside.
"Reconciliation isn't really her thing," Silas explains. "She hates me as much as I hate her, and if you think that I don't play fair, wait 'til you see what she's capable of, because Qetsiyah and I have some common ground--neither one of us will stop until we get what we want, and both of us want the cure." Katherine rips the phone from Nadia's hands and decides to talk to Silas herself.
KATHERINE: "Enough with the games, Silas. What do you want with me?"
SILAS: "You know, it's funny. The love of my life looked exactly like you, and yet the mere thought of your face makes me want to vomit."
KATHERINE: "I don't know what you're talking about, but if I'm nothing but a gag reflex to you, why not cut me loose, and then we could call it a day?"
SILAS: "Because the cure still exists, and I still want it. It's just running through your veins right now. Your blood is the cure, Katherine. Does that clear things up for you?"
YESSSS I TOTALLY CALLED IT. Naturally, Katherine is horrified, because she figured once Elena got sacrificed to break Klaus' hybrid curse, and then got turned into a vampire, this whole "I'm gonna kill you for your blood!" thing was finally over. I wonder if like, just a sip is enough to cure a vampire, or if she'd have to be drained to death? At least this gives Katherine a little protection from hungry vampires--if they feed on her, they'll be human again too!
Matt, who has been passed out on the floor of the Lockwood Mansion, wakes up to the sound of his phone ringing. Disoriented, he answers it to find that it's Elena. She is just calling to tell Matt that they did find Stefan, although they lost Katherine in the process. After a beat, she asks if he's okay, and brings up how weird he sounded on the phone earlier. Of course, Matt is like, "We talked on the phone today? When?" Elena reminds him of how he called her earlier to ask if they found Stefan, and if Katherine was still safe and in their custody. "I told you where we were headed. You don't remember?"
Matt looks down at his feet, which are covered in what looks like either mud, or blood, or both. I can't really tell. The camera pans back, and we can see that there are muddy/bloody footprints leading through the open front door right to where he's sitting on the floor. He lies that he does remember, and asks if he can call her back tomorrow. She still sounds worried, but agrees, and they hang up. Confused, Matt reaches into his pocket and pulls out a knife, which looks like the one Gregor used to threaten Silas, and is covered in blood. OH NO! This is like some possessed-version of Alaric's blackouts, isn't it? I'm still so pumped that Matt has an actual storyline, though.
At Casa Salvatore, Stefan is lying unconscious on the couch, and Elena sits at his side, where she puts his daylight ring back onto his finger. Damon walks in, and points out he's all set now that he's back home and no longer vulnerable to sunlight. Elena replies that Stefan's lucky to have a brother who looks out for him. "Otherwise, you might have pawned it for a pinball machine!" I could totally see Jeremy doing that, tbh. She notices Damon's uncharacteristic quietness, and asks him what Tessa said to him at the cabin. He recaps what he learned--the universe more or less programmed her to love Stefan, and not Damon, and they're a lost cause, blah blah blah. Elena asks if Tessa is crazy, which YES, but Damon really isn't sure that means that she's automatically wrong. You can tell he's starting to take her words from earlier to heart.
Elena knows that she's been a little preoccupied with finding Stefan the last couple days, but promises that it has nothing to do with her feelings for him, and she won't allow an ancient witch put a wedge between them. "What, you think I am? I mean, no one tells me how I live my life, no one tells me who I love, especially not some vindictive prehistoric witch, and DEFINITELY not the universe! And I'm not gonna let anyone else's idea of destiny stop me from loving you, or being with you, or building a future with you, because...you are my life."
(via 1864damon)
Cue millions of Damon fangirls swooning. Elena is overwhelmed with happiness at this declaration of love, and wraps her arms around his neck. She's about to kiss him when they both hear Stefan wake up. He sits himself up, and then gets to his feet. They both welcome him back, and Elena gushes about how much they missed her. Unfortunately, they have another little problem. "Uh, I'm sorry...I-I have no idea who you people are." The smiles are wiped off of Elena and Damon's faces, and they all look at each other in shock. OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIIIIIIIT.
Next week: Elena and Stefan relive their past encounters, Damon presumably gets jealous, and flips his car, and Jeremy most likely spills the beans about Bonnie being dead.
[screencaps are from this album]
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NOTES/SPECULATION:
-Okay, first things first! STEFAN HAS AMNESIA. The rumor of this happening started near the end of last season, and everyone figured that it would be a side-effect of taking the cure--whoever took it would lose all of the memories they had while they were vampires, and everyone figured it would be Damon who took the cure, since it would be the most unexpected. However, as we all know, Katherine took the cure, and not Damon, and amnesia had nothing to do with it. I hated the idea of Damon losing his memories, but with Stefan, this opens up SO MANY POSSIBILITIES. I know everyone is acting like Stefan/Elena are going to be back on again, and while you can't really rule anything out when it comes to Julie Plec, I think this will ultimately just help Stefan get over Elena, because all of the painful memories will be gone. I'm more curious about how this will affect him, personality-wise AND vampire-wise. Like, part of Stefan's main problem is that he's plagued with guilt and self-loathing for his actions in the past; forcing Damon to complete the transition, his various decade-long Ripper-binges, all the shit he's done to Elena, including (but not limited to) not saving Elena when she was drowning in the river that flows under Wickery Bridge, etc. Without all that emotional baggage, maybe he'll just be able to be a regular old vampire again? And maybe he could even lose some of his self-righteousness? God, I hope so. I used to love Stefan, but last season sort of killed my buzz for him.
-I am LOVING Qetsiyah/Tessa and her balls-out insanity, and I definitely enjoy her more than Silas. This is an amazing play on the whole "scorned woman" trope and I am excited to see what kind of trouble she stirs up. I am hoping for two things, which I have discussed with my dear friend Simon: 1) we want Qetsiyah to either bring Bonnie back, or at least end up leading the Scooby Gang to a way that they can bring her back, because let's face it, they are floundering without a witch who is squarely on their side; and 2) we want Qetsiyah to make another immortality elixir for Katherine so she can be a vampire again, because the glimpses of Katherine's humanity that we have been getting so far this season have been AMAZING, and I think it will be a lot better when she knows that she's not in danger from ANYONE. I'll settle for her just becoming a regular old vampire, though, or an enhanced-Original like Alaric was before he died.
-I do think that Nadia has some kind of beef with Katherine, specifically, though. I saw some speculation on tumblr that she could be Katherine's daughter, or another descendant of her daughter, like Isobel, which would be awesome. I figure it's probably more likely that Katherine killed one of her loved ones somehow. God knows Katherine has about a zillion enemies and won't hesitate to do anything to anyone if it means protecting herself. I am so anxious to see where that storyline goes.
-As much as I am loving this season and its plots, there are a couple plotholes that I can't help but notice. Specifically, the geography thing. Silas, Amara, and Tessa lived somewhere in Greece, back in like 100 BC or so. According to Esther, a doppelganger appears every 500 years or thereabout, which would suggest that Silas and Amara have had five shadow-selves each. We only know of Stefan on Silas' side, but on Amara's, we have Tatia (born in the 900s), Katherine (born in the 1470s), and Elena (born in the 1990s). I would guess there is probably one more who lived in the 400s as well. BUT, each of those doppelgangers have lived in different areas. I know that families move around a lot over the centuries, but they're EVERYWHERE. Amara lived in Greece, Tatia was in the New World in what is now Mystic Falls, along with Elena, and Katherine was born in Bulgaria, where she lived until she was disowned by her family. It just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. That's not even getting into how Silas ended up entombed in fucking NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA.
Unfortunately though, with the massive info-dump we got this episode, there will probably be a LOT of just straight-up quoting the dialogue, because you never know what is going to end up being important later, and I don't want to ruin the finer details by paraphrasing. So yeah, my apologies in advance, but this wasn't as fun to recap as it was to watch (although you know I still managed to write like, 8,000 words about it, so maybe I'm a liar) Hopefully you'll all still find this recap worth reading! So, here's what's up:
Previously, on the Vampire Diaries: Elena loved Stefan, and then she loved Damon. Silas' real face looks just like Stefan's, which made it really easy to steal his identity after locking him in a safe at the bottom of a quarry. Gregor (with help from Nadia) did some weird spell to put himself in Matt's head, so that way when Nadia killed him, he'd still be alive in Matt's body, though he's not always in control of it. Silas has crazy mind reading/compulsion powers, which he's been using to track down Katherine, but we don't know why. Oh, and someone pulled Stefan's safe out of the quarry and left it in the woods, but when Damon and Elena found it (with help from Liz the Sheriff), Stefan wasn't inside. Oops!
We pick up this week just about exactly where we left off last week--a very tired and hungry Stefan stumbles his still-slightly-desiccated ass down a country road, where he sees a run-down bar a couple hundred feet away. When he finally makes it inside, he startles the blonde bartender (named Jo) with his disheveled appearance. Seriously, dude looks super strung-out. Jo, who is definitely a little unnerved, says, "Hey man, last call was four hours ago. If you want some coffee, I could put some on, or...?" Stefan continues to walk slowly towards her until he can't take it anymore. As expected, he sinks his fangs into her carotid artery while she screams in terror. YESSSS THE RIPPER IS BACK!
...Except, not really, because after whetting his palate with her blood for a few seconds, he pulls himself off of her and yells at her to RUN, far far away. She wisely heeds his warning, and after she's run off, he slowly walks out the door to ditch the scene. Unfortunately, he runs into another problem; the sun has just come up, and since he doesn't have his daylight ring (which was stolen by Silas and then stolen back by Damon) his skin immediately starts to fry. He falls to his knees in pain and groans. Man, he really cannot catch a break, can he?
Across town, Elena wakes up with a gasp from a dream, and once she realizes she's home safe at Casa Salvatore, she sits up to catch her breath. Damon stirs and notices she's up, again. "Unnngh, you must have restless sleep syndrome or something. It's like sleeping with a tornado!" She anxiously runs a hand through her glorious hair cape, and after a moment, he realizes that she's upset. He rubs her back and urges her to come back to sleep, since they've both been up all night. Elena admits that she had a dream about Stefan, which really doesn't seem to please her boyfriend too much. She goes on to say that it wasn't just a weird feeling, it was a real dream, as if she were there with him. Damon sighs; "I know I said that it didn't bother me that you have some psychic connection to your ex-boyfriend, but I don't need a play-by-play, Elena."
He turns and lies back down in bed, and after a beat, Elena agrees that it's weird to talk about this kind of stuff to him, and apologizes as she lays back down next to him. He turns around so he's facing her, and changes his mind. "Fine. Tell me. I'm sure whatever's in my imagination is ten times worse than what's going on in your subconscious." She describes the dream as being extremely vivid--she saw Stefan walking out of a bar with a red awning and broken neon-sign, and he was outside, screaming in pain. While this is likely much better than Damon was expecting, he's still not really buying into the whole psychic-dream thing, and snarks that they should consult a crystal ball to get an address. Luckily for them, that won't be necessary; Katherine joins their discussion and answers for them. "Route 29. Joe's bar." The sleep twosome sit up in bed in confusion and just gape at Kat, who is standing in the doorway. "I think I had the exact same dream." OH SHIT. Also, Elena's drowsy, confused bitchface gives me SO MUCH LIFE. Just look at it! TITLE CARD!
It's later in the morning now, and Elena is dressed and ready for the day. She jots something down in a notebook before she gets distracted by Stefan's daylight ring, which I'm sure he could really use right now. Damon walks in and reveals that he has found nine bars so far that are on Route 29, but none of them are called "Joe's." Elena's more concerned with the fact that she had a hunch that something awful was going on with Stefan all summer, and just shrugged it off, but it really was true--Stefan was in that safe the whole time, and likely killed whoever found him. She admits she knows that this all sounds insane, but they don't have any other leads, so they have to see what they can dig up from it. "It doesn't sound crazy, it IS crazy. But, I'm open-minded!" Damon smirks.
Katherine is finally dressed in actual clothes, and has done her hair and looks like the Katherine we know and love/loathe. She calls shotgun on this little impromptu road trip. "What? I get carsick in the backseat. Another charming, human side effect you stuck me with." You and me both, Kiki. Dramamine is your friend! Elena is not okay with Katherine tagging along, but Damon reminds her that since Silas wants her, they need to keep hold of her, and since literally anyone can get into Casa Salvatore, they can't just leave her unsupervised/unprotected. Elena suggests stashing her in the cellar, or throwing her into the Lockwood Well with water-wings.
"Do you really think that I wanna take a road trip with YOU, America's most boring, self-righteous vampire?" Oh, Kitty Kat, play nice! She adds that she would be more than capable of protecting herself if she hadn't been force-fed the cure by Elena, but Elena has a pretty solid excuse, considering she was about a second away from having her heart ripped from her chest at the time. Katherine changes tactics, and taunts Elena about wasting the cure that Elena wanted so badly on her. Damon is D-O-N-E with their little cat fight, and tells Kat to cállate ahora, lest he reconsider the "deep, dark well" idea. She responds by getting serious, and reminding them that she wants to find Stefan as much as anyone, because she cares about him, as she always has. (Although, the fact that she is sick of being "the moonstone" in the Silas situation definitely helps) She adds that since Elena had the same dream, she must care about him just as much, which Damon does NOT want to hear. "Okay, train's leaving the station. Choo-choo!" Oh, Damon.
Somewhere in or near Mystic Falls, Silas is sitting in a car, plotting on the phone with Nadia, who is at the Grill. Wait a minute, how did Silas learn how to drive a car so quickly? Does his psychic, mind-reading ability mean that he can learn EVERYTHING by reading the minds of people who know how to do that stuff? Sigh. Silas: "You ever play the 'What If?' game? When you're calcified for 2,000 years, you learn to entertain yourself with these little brain-teasers." Nadia's not really in the mood, and basically tells him to get to the point, but he doesn't really care. "Oh, no, no, no. It's really easy, I'll go first: You know how much I hate Travelers, so to prove your allegiance to me, you killed your Traveler friend, Gregor. BUT, what if it was all an act? What if he's still alive?"
Nadia points out that not only did he watch Gregor bleed out in front of him, but he also buried him himself, so he's being a liiiittle paranoid about the whole double-crossing thing. Silas is worried that Matt's "tacky ring" brought Gregor back to life too, since their minds are connected or whatever. Nadia's feigns boredom, so Silas gets to the point by stating his terms for working with her: she has to find out if Matt Donovan is still alive, and if he is, she must kill him. Wasn't killing GREGOR supposed to be what proved her loyalty to him in the first place? JFC, stop moving so fast, show! Nadia's got Silas' number, though. "Fine. Say Matt is still alive. What if he could help us to find Katherine Pierce? She's still your priority, is she not?" Silas concedes that she is, so he clarifies the terms of their little deal to Nadia forcing Matt to give her the intel they need, THEN ripping the ring off his hand and killing him, f'reals this time. Nadia is watching Matt as he works the bar at the Grill, and assures Silas that she'll handle it.. Ohhhh, no you don't. NO ONE TOUCHES MY SWEET BABOO, LADY.
Stefan awakens on a cot in a cabin in the woods to find a beautiful brunette woman standing and staring at him. He's overwhelmed with hunger, and urges the girl to GTFO ASAP before he rips her head off and sucks her dry of blood. She's all, "Hello to you too!" and hands him a blood bag. Stefan is clearly suspicious of this kind offer, but after several seconds of eyeballing it, his hunger wins out and he chugs it down in a couple gulps. "A vampire doppelgänger who's burdened by a conscience. Now, I've seen everything," the woman remarks with a chuckle, and Stefan suddenly realizes that she's the one who saved him from burning to death in the sun. She confirms it, and adds that she's also the one who pulled him from his watery grave. Or, rather, she's the one who asked the man who owns this cabin to pull his safe from the quarry, a kind gesture in which he was repaid by having his throat ripped out by Stefan himself.
Now that Stefan is sated, his brain is actually starting to work through all this new information, and he asks how she knows he's a doppelgänger. "Because I've seen your face before, on someone who wasn't you." When he asks who she is, she ignores him, and asks him how much he knows about Silas. Stefan obviously doesn't know much, but what he DOES know is that Sila is a ruthless immortal being who killed a ton of people, stole his identity, and left him to rot in a lockbox thrown into a quarry. Mystery woman points out that he made it through in one piece, but Stefan corrects her. "Barely. I came very close to flipping off my humanity switch, but I didn't, because I knew if I ever got out, I wanted to be myself when I killed him." She thinks those are pretty strong words, but Stefan means it, though he doesn't know just how powerful he's become since he's been in captivity.
Plus, the woman points out that he's not going anywhere while he's still vulnerable to the sun. She explains that Silas wasn't always the monster we've known. "He used to be a simple man, in love with a simple girl...his soulmate. She was his ~one true love~. [...] Heh. you know how that goes; they thought their love would last forever." Stefan, like everyone else in the audience, has no idea how she could know any of this, so the woman reveals that she knows because she lived it, with Silas. He can't believe that this woman was Silas' ~one true love~, and she admits she would have done anything for him. Stefan asks how on earth she's possibly still alive, as though he's never met someone who once was dead and who came back to life, or known someone who has been alive for hundreds or thousands of years. (Which is like EVERYONE ON THE SHOW) The woman realizes she has a lot of explaining to do, so she leads us into the first flashback of the evening...
We're in Ancient Greece, in ~100 B.C., where we see a very Grecian Silas approach a similarly Grecian version of the mystery woman who is helping Stefan, who narrates in voiceover. "Silas and I were the two most powerful members of a gifted people called Travelers. When we were engaged to be married, we decided to reach even further." Silas tells the woman that he never wants to live without her. "We wanted to find a way for our love to last forever." Silas and the woman almost kiss, but they are distracted by a sound. They look back to a man-made pond thing that is full of flowers, where a woman, whose face is concealed by a scarf, kneels to pick flowers.
In the present day, Stefan impatiently snarks that he already knows the story--how Silas' life was all fine and good until the witch Qetsiyah ruined everything, but the woman is not a bit amused. "Wrong. You don't know the story. Silas convinced Qetsiyah that he loved her, so she would make the immortality spell. But, when she found out he was just using her, she dumped him in a tomb with a cure, hoping he would take it and die, because she had created a supernatural limbo to trap his soul." Stefan spills some misogynistic crap about women being crazy and irrational, blah blah blah, which the woman kindly overlooks for the moment. She summarizes the rest of the present-day story, which we already know: Silas wants to destroy the Other Side, take the cure, die, and then be reunited with his ~one true love~, which basically was the running theme of the last 2/3 of last season.
Stefan's getting a little annoyed, and is like, "Look, if you really are Silas' ~one true love~, and you're not dead, then why don't you just do us all a favor and run off into the sunset together?" That's when the woman spills the tea. "Silas was MY ~true love~. I never said that I was his. I'M Qetsiyah, that sane, rational, well-adjusted woman you seem to know SO much about." Way to go, Steffo! I know you're cranky from being locked up and starved for 90+ days, but haven't you learned by now to not to mess with witches? Especially super powerful ones? She demonstrates her powers by running a finger along the edges of the fireplace, which leaves a trail of blue-white flames in its wake.
(via spookygailpeck)
She points out that it's clear that he's heard Silas' side of the story, where she's a back-stabbing lunatic/life-ruiner/witch-bitch who is so obsessed with vengeance that she created a supernatural purgatory so that Silas would be stuck with her for eternity. Stefan asks the obvious question--WTF is she doing here, since everyone thought she was dead and on the Other Side? "I was--for 2,000 years. But, I came back...for you." She is so bananas, but AWESOME. I am kind of loving her, to be honest.
Damon is driving his car, with Elena riding shotgun, and Katherine in the back. Hopefully they gave her some Benadryl or something, otherwise I hope Damon has some barf bags handy. Damon asks his girlfriend if she's sure she knows what they're looking for, since they've stumbled upon several bars that fit her description so far. She shrugs and says she'll know when she sees it, and Kat pops her head up between the two to add that she will, too. Damon, who is not enjoying this road trip at all, tries to keep the peace, but that's not really Katherine's style. "I'm just trying to make conversation. Anything to drown out the sound of eggshells breaking." She continues on her quest of planting the seeds of doubt between the two by bringing up Elena's dreams about Stefan that she got all summer, and gets a dig in about how stressful it must be on their new relationship, especially considering she was having these dreams while she was in bed with Stefan's brother. Ouch.
Elena corrects her, and tells her they weren't dreams, just unsettling feelings that something wasn't right. "Oh, no, yeah, sure. I totally get it--there's still a connection between you two. Maybe deep down, you know that he was your ~one true love~ and breaking up with him was a huge mistake." Elena is looking pretty murderous, so Damon encourages her to ignore her, and promises that when the vervain is out of her system, they'll compel her to shut the fuck up. Kat continues as if they didn't say anything, and suggests that perhaps Stefan was trying to reach out to her, and since she was so distracted by fucking Damon, that he decided to reach out to someone that he trusts, which would be herself. Elena side-eyes Damon again as they aggressively ignore her. "Nah, you're probably right," Katherine blathers on. "Elena and I had the exact same dream on the exact same night. Why would that mean something?" They continue to ignore her, but Damon doesn't seem unaffected by Katherine's words.
Matt has gone out the back door of the Grill to take out the trash when he spots Nadia standing in the alley. He's understandably pissed, and approaches her for answers. "What the hell did you do to me? Look, I know you and your creep-show boyfriend screwed with my head the other night, so who the hell are you, and what do you want?" She promises that she's here to keep him safe from Silas, which causes Matt to be like, "Bwuh?" She informs him that Silas still wants him dead, and insists that he's going to have to trust her. She grabs his face, shuts his eyes, and mutters, "Vyjdou [Come forth] Gregor." When he opens his eyes, they're black. Of COURSE Gregor is still hanging out in Matt's head, despite the fact that his physical body is both dead and buried.
Gregor as Matt (who has a Czech accent even though every other time someone's body has been possessed by someone else, their accents have never transferred with them) is completely enraged that Nadia killed him. She apologizes, but reminds him that Silas was about to kill him, and that jumping the gun and killing him herself was the only way to salvage the deal. That doesn't really do anything to make him feel better, as you can probably guess. "You knew the stakes. It is why we put you inside the person with the invincibility ring." Yeah, that ring only protects him from death at the hands of supernatural beings, but since literally EVERYONE in this show is supernatural now, I guess that's not really a problem. Gratt is like, "So now what? I am just a passenger that you can call out of Matt's head and put away whenever you want?" Nadia assures him that she'll find away to permanently give him Matt's body, because she loooooves him, and will do anything for him. Except not kill him while they're undercover, I guess. SERIOUSLY THOUGH, GET YOUR DIRTY PAWS OFF OF MATT OKAY.
They kiss, but after a moment, Gratt pulls away, and asks him where they buried his body. She promises that she will, but he has to call up Elena Gilbert first so they can learn where Katherine is. Matt's kind of hot as an Eastern-European dude, I have to say. (Also, I spy with my little eye a little, Lapis Lazuli daylight ring on Nadia's finger! I was about to say that I thought daylight rings were a relatively unknown thing, considering what we've learned over the seasons, but since she runs with witches/possibly was one herself before she was turned, I imagine she probably knew people who could hook her up with one.)
Back at the cabin, Stefan is rifling through a bag when Qetsiyah comes back from picking flowers/herbs outside. He asks if she has a cell phone, because he needs to update his pals on what's going down, but she informs him that there's no cell-service, and advises him to not go outside, what with the sunshine and all. He still hasn't learned to check his attitude.
STEFAN: "Well, no offense Qetsiyah, I'm having a bit of a hard time believing what you're saying."
QETSIYAH: " 'Qetsiyah' sounds so...ancient-time-y, don't you think? How about 'Tessa?' It's a little different, but not so different you wouldn't find it on one of those souvenir keychains."
STEFAN: "So, that's why you rejoined the land of the living? Souvenir keychains?"
QETSIYAH: "I'm here because the Bennett witch lowered the veil. I saw an opportunity to make myself a living, breathing mortal, and I thought, 'Why not?' My hunters have failed in their task to kill Silas. I figured it was time to handle things in person."
A few notes, before we move on; 1) If I were a betting girl, (and I'm not) I would bet good money that Qetsiyah leveraged Bonnie's life for her own. We already know that nature seeks a balance, and you can't give something/someone life without something in return. 2) We already know that it was an ancestor of Qetsiyah who created the Brotherhood of the Five hunters to kill Silas/vampires, but when that plan failed, why didn't she just join up with Bonnie to help take down Silas together? Sigh.
Anyway, Stefan points out that 2,000 years is a really, really long time to hold a grudge, but she reveals that he left her at the altar via another flashback (with voiceover, again). She is standing at her wedding garden, waiting for Silas, while people are setting up around her. "Like a lovesick idiot, I created an entire garden for our wedding, and I made a spell that would keep us alive forever; an immortality spell so we would never have to part." The plan was to drink the "immortality elixir" as part of their wedding vows, but as she waited for Silas to meet her at the altar, everything around her began to wilt and die--the flowers, the ivy growing on a trellis, the harvest they had grown. When she looked into the chalice from which they would drink their elixir, it was already gone. "And then I realized why. Silas had already used the immortality spell. He was already drinking the elixir somewhere else. He took what he wanted, and then the bastard abandoned me."
In the present day, Qetsiyah (who I am going to call Tessa from now on because it is way easier) tells Stefan to go on ahead and call her a vindictive bitch or whatever, but she trusted and loved him, and he fucked her over. Stefan sincerely apologizes to her for what happened, because he does get it, even though his situation is nowhere near the same. She continues her story, and says she wanted and deserved an opportunity to make him feel the pain that she felt. She followed him into the wooded area where he was staying with his ~one true love~, the woman with whom he shared HER immortality spell. In flashback, we see her spying on Silas and his love. "And just when I thought his betrayal couldn't cut any deeper, I learned that his actual ~true love~ was someone very close to me...my handmaiden."
Tessa watches Silas as he approaches his love, and as he removes her scarf from her face, we see that she is, as predicted, yet another character played by Nina Dobrev! Silas puts a hand on the side of her face, and smarms, "Just as you are mine, I am yours forever, because when I look at you, Amara...all I see is an angel." BARFFFF. I am an equal-opportunity shipper, who likes/has liked both Stefan/Elena and Damon/Elena, but if anything, all this storyline proves to me is that Stefan and KATHERINE are the ~true loves~ in this generation of doppelgängers. /unpopularopinion
Stefan is like, "So, Silas was the first version of me, and your friend was the first version of Elena?" Tessa spits that Amara was NOT her friend, and explains that when they drank the immortality potion, they violated natures laws of balance, namely, "all living things must die," which is how the shadow-selves came about. "Like you, and Katherine, and Elena, all caused by the ripple effect from Silas and Amara's sin." Wouldn't it have been just as sinful if Tessa had ended up taking it, though? Like, is this a morality thing, as in consequences for being shitty people, or is she just so bitter about what happened that she's acting like she never wanted it in the first place? A little of both?
This whole time, she's been messing with a blue fire in the fireplace, where she's placed a pan. She takes off a thick metal cuff bracelet from her wrist and places it on the pan, where it begins to melt. He asks wtf she's doing, and she calmly explains that since Silas took his daylight ring, he's going to need a new one. In return, she'll need his help to take down Silas. Oh Stefan, this is so obviously a lie.
Damon and Elena have finally found Joe's Bar, and quietly get out of Damon's Camaro, where Katherine must be zonked-out in a dramamine haze in the backseat. Elena isn't sure that they should just leave her there by herself, but Damon claims that she only shuts up when she's asleep, so they should just enjoy the quiet while they still have it. When Elena suddenly stops walking as they approach the bar, Damon assumes that means that this isn't the right one after all, but Elena clarifies that it is; she's just freaked out that it's exactly like how it was in the dream. Damon agrees that it is indeed freaky, but urges her to stop thinking about it and join him inside. Inside, Jo is STILL working the bar, with a completely unsubtle bandage covering her neck. She asks what she can get them, and Damon turns on the compulsion-eyes to ask her what happened to her neck.
"Some sicko attacked me, bit me, told me to run, so I did, and when I looked back, he was on fire." Just a regular Wednesday night, I guess? Mystic Falls is so weird. Elena figures the sun must have come out, and he accidentally walked into it, since they're all so used to not ever worrying about the sun. When Damon presses her for more details, she tells him that some woman managed to push him into a truck and drive off with him. She didn't know who the woman was, but she recognized the truck as belonging to a regular named Cam Peterson, who lives ten miles down the road. She smiles and tells Damon he looks like he could use a drink, and pours him a shot of whiskey. He downs it in one and is immediately brought to his knees as his mouth burns. Vervain, obviously. Dude, they all really need to start taking prophylaxis vervain again, JFC. Just because the Originals are gone doesn't mean that they're not vulnerable!
Elena asks her what the fuck she just did, but Jo doesn't get a chance to answer, because Nadia comes out from the back room and points a gun at Damon and Elena. "I told her to pour him a drink or I'd kill her." Oh, wonderful. As Damon asks who the fuck Nadia is, Katherine chooses the worst possible moment to come in to look for Damon and Elena. Nadia sees her and asks which one of them is Katherine. Of course, Katherine's first instinct is to point at Elena and say, "She is!" which results in yet another amazing face from Elena. Nadia points the gun at Katherine first, and says, "Katherine is a compulsive liar...but, I need her alive," before pointing the gun back at Elena, who zoops straight toward her and pins her against a table. She yells for Katherine to run, which of course she totally does. Aw, Katherine! Methinks you should probably give Elena a little break when this is all over.
Nadia's face goes all vamp-y, and she snits, "You really do look exactly alike," before she straightens herself up and throws Elena against the wall. Ooh, a Travelerpire? I'm gonna take it she's a lot older than Elena. Nadia zooms after Katherine while Damon goes over to help his girlfriend back onto her feet. "Wonderful. Now we've got a vampire bounty hunter to deal with. Let me guess: Euro-bitch was not part of the dream?" Elena confirms that she's never seen her before, and Damon figures that she's likely a spy for Silas. Elena decides to go chase after Nadia and Katherine, and urges him to find his brother. As you can imagine, Damon is not a fan of this plan, but Elena reminds him they don't have time to argue, because Stefan is hurt and needs their help. He stops her before she leaves, and insists that she give Kat up at the first sign of trouble. "I don't care how badly Silas wants Katherine, she's not worth a hair on your head. You got me?" He tells her to kiss him one last time before she leaves, and then they both part ways.
Stefan is watching Tessa work over the fire at the cabin, and she gets a little snippy about him hovering over her. He backs off a little, and asks her what her plan is. "Take the cure and shove it down Silas' throat? Kill him?" Man, Stefan has missed a lot, hasn't he? Tessa reminds him of how powerful Silas' mind control is, and tells him that as long as he has his mental powers, there is literally zero chance of them winning. He points out that she's put him down before, but that was back when he was still a newbie immortal. "A long time ago. That was before he could compel masses, and 2,00 years of consuming dribbles of blood from thousands of people...it's allowed him to hone his skill. It prepared him to escape from the tomb I put him in."
OH SHIT, I totally forgot all about that! If you have forgotten, when Silas was in his tomb in that weirdo cave in Nova Scotia, there was this well that basically fed right into Silas' open mouth. The story was that it was a magical well that would allow people to see their deceased loved ones if they cut themselves and dripped their blood into the well. Naturally, people traveled from everywhere to visit the well. Once Silas had consumed their blood, it gave him a connection to them, and he was able to mind-whammy them into thinking they were seeing/talking to their dead friends and family. That was how he was able to brainwash Professor Shane into doing his bidding, by making him think his dead wife was helping him do a spell to bring her back. A similar thing happened to Bonnie when they were trying to find Silas' tomb--he made her think she was seeing Grams, who told Bonnie she could bring Grams back by waking up Silas. SNEAKY. And awesome!
ANYWAY, Stefan asks if Tessa locked Amara in a tomb too, but she replies flatly that she didn't. In flashback, we see Tessa in front of Silas and Amara's little tent/hut thing, where kneeling in front of a bowl of water and wrings out a cloth. Silas walks toward her, and asks what she's doing here, so she reveals that she has brought him two gifts. When she presents the chalice that held the immortality elixir, he pulls a super douchey-move. "I know you must be very angry with me." REALLY? Tessa concedes that she was, but decided that she had found a way to forgive him--by making him a cure for his immortality, which is held in the same small chest that Silas was holding in the tomb when they woke him.
Silas insists that it's impossible, but it isn't. "I promise you, it works. I just used it on someone else immortal." OH YIKES! This is crazy and awesome, even the second time. He realizes that something hinky is happening, and runs into his tent to find blood staining pretty much EVERYTHING. As he starts frantically calling out for Amara, Tessa follows him into the tent and describes how she cut her throat out so that she couldn't speak. She pulls Amara's bloody heart out of the chalice, and holds it out to him. "But, I could tell by the way her heart was beating...she knew she was going to die." So, all the female shadow-selves died in horrifying ways, then? Silas about gags, and then threatens to kill her, but since he's immortal now, he can't protect himself with magic. She gives him a witchy migraine that brings him to his knees, and says she won't allow him to come anywhere near her unless he takes the cure and lives a long, human life with her.
In the present day, Tessa maintains that no one can say she didn't give him a second chance, but Stefan stupidly disagrees with her. "I'm a complicated person, but Silas remains a simple man. I created the Other Side as a supernatural barrier between Silas and the peaceful afterlife he craved. Then, I dropped him in that tomb with the cure, thinking eventually he would take it and kill himself to be with Amara, just so he could realize that he was caught with me for all eternity." How did he know not to take it? Did he just know Tessa well enough to know she'd try to pull off something like that for revenge? Or could he read her mind too?
When Stefan asks how that plan is working out, she admits he's been a little stubborn, and Stefan realizes that she's not actually planning on making him a daylight ring. DUH, Stefan! Come on, you're smarter than that. Tessa isn't planning on giving Stefan anything until she gets what she wants, and she cuts him off when Stefan pleads that they're on the same side."Have you not been listening to me? I have trust issues. I'm controlling, and paranoid, and a little crazy." She hits him with another mystic migraine, and assures him it's working out just fine for him as he grasps at his head and groans in pain. Oh man, I both love Tessa and am completely terrified at her at the same time.
Katherine is running through the woods, much more slowly than if she was a vampire, but still pretty impressively considering the four-inch heels on those boots she's wearing. She finally comes to a stop, crouches down, and looks over her shoulder for anyone following her. Someone suddenly grabs her from behind and spins her around. When she sees that it's Elena, she seems visibly relieved. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm really glad it's you. My leg is cramping, and I'm freezing. Do you mind if I, uh...[sighs] can I borrow your sweater?" Elena hilariously ignores her request and suggests they leave now before she doubles back, but Katherine stops to ask why Elena didn't kill her.
Elena reminds her about the whole Silas-leverage thing, but Katherine means last season, when she rammed the cure down her throat--Kat was seconds from killing her, so it would have been completely justified if she had killed her after curing her, but she still let her live. "You think that because we share the same dreams and both care about Stefan, that we're alive, but we're not. I value my humanity, which is why I let you live--to give you a chance to find whatever shred of humanity is buried under 500 years of bad behavior."
Katherine figures it's more like she realized that being human was a fate worse than death for her, but Elena says that was just icing on the cake. Katherine actually seems pretty grateful, and I was pretty shocked when I heard her utter this line. "Well...thank you. I'm glad to know that you care, even if you are a condescending bitch." Their tender little moment is interrupted by Nadia, who snaps Elena's neck from behind before descending upon Katherine. She asks if she needs to knock Kat out too, but she's smart enough to say no before she's pulled away by the arm.
(via sheneedstobeprotected)
Stefan has just awoken after having a couple billion aneurysms in his brain to find that he is bound to a chair with some vines. There is a really thick ring of herbs circling him on the floor. Damon through the door, and when he sees Stefan tied up, he can't help but snark a little. "Stefan, you couldn't call a brother?" Stefan explains that Qetsiyah/Tessa is back from the Other Side as Damon tries to untie him, but Tessa chooses that moment to walk in. "You won't be able to break those vines. The spell won't release him until I get what I want." YIIIKES. Damon snarks that clearly the rumors about her were true, and asks for what purpose Stefan being tied up and covered in herbs serves her plan.
TESSA: "I'm going to link Stefan to Silas. Casting a spell on his doppelgänger will neutralize Silas' mental powers. Once he's weakened, I will force him to take the cure."
DAMON: "Well, that's a great idea, force the cure down his throat. The cure is gone, done, it's ingested."
TESSA: "Katherine, you mean? I'm aware of her condition. She was supposed to be with you."
STEFAN: "Wait, Katherine took the cure?"
DAMON: "We have a lot to catch up on, Stefan. [beat] Wait a minute, what do you mean, 'supposed to be with me?'" Did you plant those dreams? What is it, some kind of, like, witch party-trick?"
Bahaha, oh Stefan, you're a little behind the times. Tessa asks where Katherine is, so Damon has to confess that they kind of lost her. She decides to start without her, and chants over a bowl of what looks like the melted metal from her bracelet. Damon's like, "Okay, well, thanks for the hospitality, but we should really get going if we want to beat traffic!" Stefan is quite game for the "get the fuck out of here" plan, but as you can guess, Tessa isn't. She warns Damon not to get on her bad side, which is a pretty wise warning, tbh, but he retorts that she's not the only one with a bad side.
DUDE. She's a 2,000 year old witch who has managed to: create an immortality spell, create an immortality CURE, desiccate Silas and lock his ass in a tomb, AND created a whole new dimension in which to trap supernatural souls. And, you know, she brought herself back to life. SO, you probably should just pretend to work with her for now while you come up with a better plan. "Aren't you brave," Tessa sneers. "Without Silas' mental powers, he's an immortal nobody. We can defeat him. Isn't that what you want?" Stefan is tired of fighting, and just snaps at them to shut up and just get it over with already. Ohhh, this is going to be bad, isn't it?
Nadia drags Katherine by the arm out of the woods and over to her station-wagon, parked by an overpass. Katherine is a little pissed that she doesn't know who she is. "Sorry to sound like a broken record, but I like to know the identity of my kidnappers. Who are you, and what do you want?" Nadia threatens to sew her mouth shut if she doesn't quit asking, but she's cut off by Silas, who has just showed up out of nowhere. Katherine is not at all surprised that Silas has hired Nadia to take her hostage, but Nadia is shocked to see that he found her. He pulls a little GPS device out from under her car and shows it to her. "GPS tracker. It's even better than a locator spell!"
Back at the cabin, Damon watches as Tessa dips her fingers into the hot, molten metal in the bowl (YEEOWCH) and presses her fingers against Stefan's temples from behind him as she chants.
Silas thanks Nadia for finding Katherine so quickly, but she's not ready to hand Kat over just yet. Apparently, Nadia has some kind of connection to Katherine, because Silas brings up her "fascinating unfinished business [he] doesn't care about." She yells at him to get out of her head, while poor Katerina is like, "WTF IS GOING ON." Silas is about done with the drama, so he mind-whammies Nadia into letting go of Katherine, which she reluctantly does. Then, he orders her to pull out her gun and point it at her heart.
Meanwhile, Tessa is still chanting and pressing her fingers against Stefan's temples.
Nadia takes out the gun, and points it at her chest, though she's trying really hard to fight it. Isn't she a vampire? A bullet to the heart isn't going to do much to her except put her down for a little nap, unless they're wooden. Silas is mid-way through instructing her to pull the trigger when he groans and falls down to his knees, grasping his head. Nadia immediately pulls the gun away from her body, and she and Katherine watch in confusion as Silas moans and groans and whines.
At the cabin, the ring of herbs have ignited themselves and the flames grow pretty high as Tessa continues her spell. Damon is like, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO MY BRO?" Tessa reveals that she's frying Silas' brain, and reminds him that she never said this was going to be a pleasant experience. Stefan's eyes start to bleed, and when we cut over to Silas and the girls, we see that his eyes are bleeding as well, and both of the dude doppelgängers lose consciousness. Damon's ready for this to stop, but Tessa assures him that it's over, and that the spell worked. OH THANK GOD, Silas' mind control thing was really starting to bug me. Villains with little-to-no vulnerabilities are sooo boring, it's part of why the Originals' presence on this show was starting to become such a drag, before they left and got awesome again.
Damon grabs Stefan's head in his hands and tries to gently shake him awake. After a few moments with no luck, he demands that she undo whatever it is she did to him. Tessa tells him that she only burned through his conscious mind, and that once he's healed himself, he'll wake up. "You sure you want to take him home? You and Elena were doing so well without your guilt getting in the way." He calls her out on spying on him, both on the Other Side and on this one, but she assures him that it wasn't really out of choice. She admits that there was only thing worse than being on the Other Side and watching Silas resist the cure; "Century after century, I watched versions of Stefan and Elena find each other, like magnets, always the same story--conquering all, falling in love. [beat] You didn't think your brother was Silas' first shadow? Destiny has been trying to get the doppelgängers together forever."
As you can imagine, Damon's not really feeling all the Stelena fangirling that has been going on today, from Katherine and now from Tessa, and he snits that she should dial down the crazy a bit. Tessa knows he doesn't want to hear it, but the universe is working against him. I don't really see how this could be true though, and this isn't even my inner Delena shipper talking--Stefan and Katherine were together too, and it didn't work out. In fact, Stefan and Damon pretty much openly dislike her, although their history keeps them from truly screwing her over. Stefan and Elena have been broken up for a while now, too, so it seems more like the universe TRIES to get the two doppelgängers together, but just like their progenitors, it doesn't work out.
Damon's like, "If you're trying to downplay your reputation as being a psychopath, you might not want to say you're spokesperson for the universe." Tessa: "You and I are the same, Damon--the obstacle standing between two fates. Silas had his true love, Stefan has Elena. We're merely the conflict that makes it interesting." Damon doesn't get what she's trying to say, and asks if she is really suggesting he just leave his brother here with her while he goes and continues to play house with Elena. She confirms that this is what she's suggesting, and promises she'd keep him safe. Anyone else think she's having some like, transferred romantic feelings for Stefan, since he's the kind of guy who wouldn't do what Silas did to someone he cared about?
Damon doesn't believe she's being genuine, but she promises she's being straight with him. "I want to keep him safe. Now that he's linked to Silas, Silas can't mess with our heads, and as long as Stefan's in the way, you will NEVER be with Elena. Take it from a woman who'se had front row seats for years. [...] No one has to know." However, we all know that the only person Damon loves more than Elena is his brother, so he turns down her offer pretty rudely. He grabs her in a chokehold, but DUH, she's a witch, and a powerful one, so she can give a vampire a mystic migraine in her sleep. He lets go and groans in pain, so she takes the opportunity to throw him to the floor. An unknown amount of time passes, and Damon wakes up to the sound of Elena calling out his name. When she opens the door, she sees Stefan bound to the chair, and immediately runs to him first. She touches his face and tries to get him to wake up, while Damon watches her from the floor and worries about what Tessa said.
Katherine is digging around in Nadia's bag in what looks like a hotel room when Nadia comes back. "Fine, I was snooping. Trying to find a passport, or a business card, or maybe even a parking ticket, because you won't tell me who you are." Nadia walks over to her, and tosses a bag of chips into her hands, because Kat told her she was hungry. Katherine sneers, "For food, not packaged poison," which makes me laugh, because I never thought Katherine would be a food snob, but in hindsight it totally makes sense. I'm pretty sure we've only seen her eat fruit and booze, since she never needed human food before. Nadia's phone rings as she shrugs at Katherine's picky food habits, and we cut back and forth between Nadia and Silas as they talk on the phone.
(via giftvd)
"Silas the Betrayer. Someone lived up to his reputation today." He ignores that dig and asks her where she is, but of course she won't answer, because she doesn't have to anymore. He reminds her that though he may not be able to read her mind anymore, he will still kill her if she doesn't hold up her end of the bargain. He tells her he doesn't give a fuck about what weird revenge thing she has with Katherine, but he demands that she be kept alive. Nadia's like, "We'll see," but Silas wasn't asking. He points out that Katherine is still his priority, and losing his powers hasn't changed that. Unfortunately though, he seems to think the only person capable of taking them is Qetsiyah/Tessa, whom he refers to as his "ex-fiancée," which means that she's alive again and on her way to Mystic Falls.
Nadia jokes that maybe they'll get back together, which does get a chuckle out of Silas. We cut back to the cabin for a moment, where Tessa has literally covered the room in lit candles. She sits cross-legged on the floor, and cuts her hand over a bowl, allowing the blood to drip inside.
"Reconciliation isn't really her thing," Silas explains. "She hates me as much as I hate her, and if you think that I don't play fair, wait 'til you see what she's capable of, because Qetsiyah and I have some common ground--neither one of us will stop until we get what we want, and both of us want the cure." Katherine rips the phone from Nadia's hands and decides to talk to Silas herself.
KATHERINE: "Enough with the games, Silas. What do you want with me?"
SILAS: "You know, it's funny. The love of my life looked exactly like you, and yet the mere thought of your face makes me want to vomit."
KATHERINE: "I don't know what you're talking about, but if I'm nothing but a gag reflex to you, why not cut me loose, and then we could call it a day?"
SILAS: "Because the cure still exists, and I still want it. It's just running through your veins right now. Your blood is the cure, Katherine. Does that clear things up for you?"
YESSSS I TOTALLY CALLED IT. Naturally, Katherine is horrified, because she figured once Elena got sacrificed to break Klaus' hybrid curse, and then got turned into a vampire, this whole "I'm gonna kill you for your blood!" thing was finally over. I wonder if like, just a sip is enough to cure a vampire, or if she'd have to be drained to death? At least this gives Katherine a little protection from hungry vampires--if they feed on her, they'll be human again too!
Matt, who has been passed out on the floor of the Lockwood Mansion, wakes up to the sound of his phone ringing. Disoriented, he answers it to find that it's Elena. She is just calling to tell Matt that they did find Stefan, although they lost Katherine in the process. After a beat, she asks if he's okay, and brings up how weird he sounded on the phone earlier. Of course, Matt is like, "We talked on the phone today? When?" Elena reminds him of how he called her earlier to ask if they found Stefan, and if Katherine was still safe and in their custody. "I told you where we were headed. You don't remember?"
Matt looks down at his feet, which are covered in what looks like either mud, or blood, or both. I can't really tell. The camera pans back, and we can see that there are muddy/bloody footprints leading through the open front door right to where he's sitting on the floor. He lies that he does remember, and asks if he can call her back tomorrow. She still sounds worried, but agrees, and they hang up. Confused, Matt reaches into his pocket and pulls out a knife, which looks like the one Gregor used to threaten Silas, and is covered in blood. OH NO! This is like some possessed-version of Alaric's blackouts, isn't it? I'm still so pumped that Matt has an actual storyline, though.
At Casa Salvatore, Stefan is lying unconscious on the couch, and Elena sits at his side, where she puts his daylight ring back onto his finger. Damon walks in, and points out he's all set now that he's back home and no longer vulnerable to sunlight. Elena replies that Stefan's lucky to have a brother who looks out for him. "Otherwise, you might have pawned it for a pinball machine!" I could totally see Jeremy doing that, tbh. She notices Damon's uncharacteristic quietness, and asks him what Tessa said to him at the cabin. He recaps what he learned--the universe more or less programmed her to love Stefan, and not Damon, and they're a lost cause, blah blah blah. Elena asks if Tessa is crazy, which YES, but Damon really isn't sure that means that she's automatically wrong. You can tell he's starting to take her words from earlier to heart.
Elena knows that she's been a little preoccupied with finding Stefan the last couple days, but promises that it has nothing to do with her feelings for him, and she won't allow an ancient witch put a wedge between them. "What, you think I am? I mean, no one tells me how I live my life, no one tells me who I love, especially not some vindictive prehistoric witch, and DEFINITELY not the universe! And I'm not gonna let anyone else's idea of destiny stop me from loving you, or being with you, or building a future with you, because...you are my life."
(via 1864damon)
Cue millions of Damon fangirls swooning. Elena is overwhelmed with happiness at this declaration of love, and wraps her arms around his neck. She's about to kiss him when they both hear Stefan wake up. He sits himself up, and then gets to his feet. They both welcome him back, and Elena gushes about how much they missed her. Unfortunately, they have another little problem. "Uh, I'm sorry...I-I have no idea who you people are." The smiles are wiped off of Elena and Damon's faces, and they all look at each other in shock. OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIIIIIIIT.
Next week: Elena and Stefan relive their past encounters, Damon presumably gets jealous, and flips his car, and Jeremy most likely spills the beans about Bonnie being dead.
[screencaps are from this album]
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NOTES/SPECULATION:
-Okay, first things first! STEFAN HAS AMNESIA. The rumor of this happening started near the end of last season, and everyone figured that it would be a side-effect of taking the cure--whoever took it would lose all of the memories they had while they were vampires, and everyone figured it would be Damon who took the cure, since it would be the most unexpected. However, as we all know, Katherine took the cure, and not Damon, and amnesia had nothing to do with it. I hated the idea of Damon losing his memories, but with Stefan, this opens up SO MANY POSSIBILITIES. I know everyone is acting like Stefan/Elena are going to be back on again, and while you can't really rule anything out when it comes to Julie Plec, I think this will ultimately just help Stefan get over Elena, because all of the painful memories will be gone. I'm more curious about how this will affect him, personality-wise AND vampire-wise. Like, part of Stefan's main problem is that he's plagued with guilt and self-loathing for his actions in the past; forcing Damon to complete the transition, his various decade-long Ripper-binges, all the shit he's done to Elena, including (but not limited to) not saving Elena when she was drowning in the river that flows under Wickery Bridge, etc. Without all that emotional baggage, maybe he'll just be able to be a regular old vampire again? And maybe he could even lose some of his self-righteousness? God, I hope so. I used to love Stefan, but last season sort of killed my buzz for him.
-I am LOVING Qetsiyah/Tessa and her balls-out insanity, and I definitely enjoy her more than Silas. This is an amazing play on the whole "scorned woman" trope and I am excited to see what kind of trouble she stirs up. I am hoping for two things, which I have discussed with my dear friend Simon: 1) we want Qetsiyah to either bring Bonnie back, or at least end up leading the Scooby Gang to a way that they can bring her back, because let's face it, they are floundering without a witch who is squarely on their side; and 2) we want Qetsiyah to make another immortality elixir for Katherine so she can be a vampire again, because the glimpses of Katherine's humanity that we have been getting so far this season have been AMAZING, and I think it will be a lot better when she knows that she's not in danger from ANYONE. I'll settle for her just becoming a regular old vampire, though, or an enhanced-Original like Alaric was before he died.
-I do think that Nadia has some kind of beef with Katherine, specifically, though. I saw some speculation on tumblr that she could be Katherine's daughter, or another descendant of her daughter, like Isobel, which would be awesome. I figure it's probably more likely that Katherine killed one of her loved ones somehow. God knows Katherine has about a zillion enemies and won't hesitate to do anything to anyone if it means protecting herself. I am so anxious to see where that storyline goes.
-As much as I am loving this season and its plots, there are a couple plotholes that I can't help but notice. Specifically, the geography thing. Silas, Amara, and Tessa lived somewhere in Greece, back in like 100 BC or so. According to Esther, a doppelganger appears every 500 years or thereabout, which would suggest that Silas and Amara have had five shadow-selves each. We only know of Stefan on Silas' side, but on Amara's, we have Tatia (born in the 900s), Katherine (born in the 1470s), and Elena (born in the 1990s). I would guess there is probably one more who lived in the 400s as well. BUT, each of those doppelgangers have lived in different areas. I know that families move around a lot over the centuries, but they're EVERYWHERE. Amara lived in Greece, Tatia was in the New World in what is now Mystic Falls, along with Elena, and Katherine was born in Bulgaria, where she lived until she was disowned by her family. It just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. That's not even getting into how Silas ended up entombed in fucking NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA.
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