The Vampire Diaries Season 5, Episode 6: "Handle With Care" Recap/Review
[Just a note, I wanted to say sorry about the lateness of this recap! I have had a bunch of exams, papers, and lab reports due this week, plus I somehow caught a nasty cold or some kind of bug, which reeeeally slowed me down. I had this recap completely written by Wednesday, but I didn't have time to proofread it and add gifs/screen caps until today, so you have my apologies! This weeks recaps for The Originals and The Vampire Diaries should be done by Tuesday and Thursday, respectively. Thanks for your patience!]
In the words of pretty much everyone in the TVD fandom on Tumblr, THIS EPISODE WAS SO FUCKING WEIRD. But, it was weird in an AWESOME way. Damon was hilarious and heart-breakingly conflicted. Caroline and Katherine made the best and most unexpected team in the history of the show, even more than Elena and Rebekah. Stefan actually wasn't that terrible, Tessa was annoying, but still badass (and even proved to be a huge genius) AND, most importantly, PETROVA DOPPELGANGERS FOR EVERYONE! Seriously, can someone just give Nina Dobrev ALL THE FUCKING AWARDS EVER? Because she fully deserves it. And that's not even getting into Katherine's weirdo Benjamin Button-syndrome, the reality of Silas and Amara's ~true love~, all the crazy, cryptic shit we learned from Wes Maxfield, and fucking Bonnie being the most kind and loyal friend EVER. A ton of crazy shit happened this week, so I'm going to stop flailing in all-caps and get into the actual details. Let's get moving, shall we?
Previously, on the Vampire Diaries: Love brought Stefan to Mystic Falls, and also somehow landed him at the bottom of a quarry for the better part of a summer. Along the way, the Mystic Falls supernatural club has lost nearly everything, including Stefan's memories of his entire life, and the life of the gang's dear friend and witch cohort, Bonnie Bennett. Dr. Wes Maxfield revealed that he's onto Elena and Caroline, as well as the rest of their friends who showed up to Whitmore College for the costume ball last week, and he urged them to leave school before they're outed as vampires. Damon concocted a plan to bring Bonnie back by leveraging Silas' death for her life. Unfortunately, that means they have to team up with Silas, who isn't exactly someone you can count on to do the right thing. Another problem is that Qetsiyah, now going by Tessa, is still pretty pissed at him for standing her up at the altar/cheating on her all those years ago, so she's bound and determined to kill him before he can destroy the Other Side and reunite with his ~one true love~, Amara. Silas needed the cure to be able to die, and since Katherine accidentally took the cure, he ultimately was able to drink her blood, thanks to Damon's help, though he seemed to regret doing it. Also, Katherine didn't die! Woo! And that's where we start this episode...
Our beloved Katerina Petrova is still alive and kicking, THANK GOD, and is now celebrating by buying a dozen plates full of fruit and breakfast items at what appears to be the restaurant where she staked Nadia in front of anyone. That makes no sense, but whatever! The waitress is skeptical that Katherine can eat all of the food she just ordered, being the skinny girl that she is, but never doubt the hunger of a girl who actually has to live life like a regular girl after 500+ years of compelling everyone to do, say, and give her anything she wants.
Katherine vaguely explains that she had a near-death experience, hence the celebratory feast. "It's a good day!" The waitress smiles, and before she leaves, she comments on Katherine's 'do. "Love the hair, by the way. Bold choice!" Katherine gets suspicious and picks up a chrome napkin dispenser to look at her reflection. As she looks at herself at various angles, she finds a thick stripe of hair that is completely gray. Horrified, she pulls the gray strand forward so she can see it with her own eyes, and proceeds to totally freak out. TITLE CARD!
In the parlor of Casa Salvatore, Damon and Elena are super adorable as they cuddle on the couch, while a fire in the fireplace warms them. Elena sighs and talks about how much she loves moments like this, where it's quiet and calm and no one is trying to kill or threaten them/their loved ones. Damon agrees that these moments are awesome, but then turns into a huge buzzkill. "But, it is OUR life, which probably means that somebody's gonna walk through that door and shatter it." Elena groans at Damon for killing the moment, and in response, he cutely starts to count down from ten as she burrows her head in his chest and pouts.
When he gets to five, Elena interrupts him and reminds him, "DAMON, today is the day that we're going to bring Bonnie back! It's a good day!" He keeps counting, so she kisses him to shut him up. She pulls away and puts a finger to his lips when she hears footsteps. Who has come to cockblock them? Silas, of course! He greets them, and Damon is like, "Aaaand, one." Silas: "Good morning, frenemies!" He walks into the parlor and magically pulls open the curtains. "Ah, you know, I'm only a few hours into my old life as a witch, but somehow, the sun feels warmer! Probably because I'm not cursed with having to outlive it anymore." Damon calls him out on just barging into their house, and asks him what is going on. Silas turns to him, and gleefully explains that he is finally going to be killing himself, after two millenia of a miserable life. GOD, I HOPE SO.
(via britneypsears)
Meanwhile, Stefan is passed out on the couch in Tessa's cabin, in front of a table full of liquor bottles. Tessa approaches him and wakes him up in a suspiciously nice and friendly way. When he's understandably unnerved by waking up at her home, she's all, "You're confused. Is that the amnesia, or the tequila?" Stefan correctly assumes that it is both, and continues to try to piece the night back together. She helpfully informs him that they got drunk on body shots and whined about their misery together, and now as a result, they're less miserable. She offers him a basket full of blueberries to eat, and Stefan suspicion at her kindess continues to grow, so he comments on how nice she's being. Tessa explains that she's in such a fantastic mood because last night, after he passed out, she saw a text on his phone from Damon that said that Silas had taken the cure. She's totally thrilled that he is now mortal, and thus, killable. "Get up, gorgeous, your doppelgänger dies today."
The next scene cuts back and forth between Casa Salvatore with Damon/Elena/Silas, and Tessa's cabin with Tessa/Stefan. Silas recaps what we've already learned, for Elena's benefit; once Silas fucked Tessa over, she became super obsessed with getting revenge for her heartbreak, which is why she killed Amara. Today, Silas will reunite with Amara after 2,000 years, which is why he's also so sunshine-y this morning. Damon wants him to quit mooning over his long-lost love and get to the goods. "Look, my girl here is just trying to have a good day, and there are promises that she's expecting you to keep." Aw, Damon! Silas is a little offended that Elena doesn't trust him to keep his word, so Elena reminds him of their deal: Silas said, once he was a witch again, that he would resurrect Bonnie before he destroyed the Other Side. Silas agrees that he did say that, and that he CAN do that.
Elena continues by reminding him that since their part of the deal was that Damon would help him, which he did, they really need him to hold up his end of the bargain. Silas himself even takes no offense at the fact that she called him evil, which does nothing to help the fact that she just doesn't know how she can trust that Silas won't renege on their deal. It's not like she doesn't have a lot of proof as ammo that he's untrustworthy: Silas killed her brother, traumatized her best friends (both Bonnie AND Caroline), staked all of them in the gut at least once over a span of several episodes, almost killed Caroline's mom, ACTUALLY killed Bonnie's dad, locked Stefan in a box at the bottom of a lake all summer. Need I continue? No? Okay.
Anyway, Silas kind-of-hilariously cracks, "Did you want me to pinky swear?" Seriously, Paul Wesley's delivery was perfect this week, I actually enjoyed both Stefan and Silas, for the most part, in this episode. Damon's getting a little antsy, so he asks Silas to just give them a rundown of what's going to happen today, to ease their mind. "I want to destroy the Other Side, so I don't get stuck in that pit of a purgatory when I finally do kill myself. Before I do that, I'll bring Bonnie back. And, being the amazing, and incredible, and all-powerful witch I am, I can totally do both things. I just have to find the anchor, first, and destroy it." Elena hasn't been filled in on the anchor part, so she's understandably confused.
Tessa picks up where Silas left off, and explains the anchor to Stefan, who is still sleepy and lost. "Silas is looking for the anchor. It's the object I used to bind the spell when I created the Other Side. Destroy it--the spell is broken. No more supernatural limbo. AND, Silas can die and find peace. I would rather that his lying, cheating ass not have that." Yeah, we get it, lady. Stefan, who is still pretty pissed at Silas for all of the bullshit he's put him through, is 100% cool with her plan to kill Silas before he's able to destroy the Other Side. He asks her where the anchor is, but before she can answer, we hop back over to...
...Casa Salvatore, where Damon has just learned the anchor's location. "New Jersey? The supernatural other-world is bound by an object in Snooki's backyard?" Silas, though pretty hip to the modern times, must not know about Jersey Shore, because he just ignores him and informs them that the anchor is in a stockyard there, and is about to be shipped out. He's about to instruct them all to hop to it so they can find it before it's moved, but he's distracted by Jeremy, who has just approached them with a crossbow that is aimed at him. "Hello, Hunter. Banner day for you, huh? Didn't you and the Bennett witch used to...[*suggestive tongue-clicking/whistling/eyebrow waggling*]" Elena is really into hearing about her bestie's sex life with her brother, so she tells Silas to shut up before turning to assure Jer that everyone is on the same side today. Damon puts it more bluntly. "AKA, put the damn crossbow down, Pocahontas!"
Jeremy still isn't really convinced that they should be putting all of their trust in him to do something nice for them, and for good reason. SILAS KILLED YOUR BROTHER, ELENA.. He's literally the reason you burnt your house to the ground and ran around with no humanity for like, months. Silas doesn't even really blame him. "Well, I hope not. I mean, I am kind of a monster." Jeremy re-aims the crossbow at his chest, which doesn't please Silas. He claims that he feels like he's being dogpiled by them, and hints that if he loses his temper, something bad could happen. Of course, he demonstrates his seriousness by using magic to shoot flames from his fingers. Everyone instinctively backs away from him, and Silas chuckles at himself. "Man, I really love being a witch again! I feel like I'm constantly reinventing myself. I'm like a supernatural Madonna, don't you think?" Oh, hardly, bro.
(via bestprankever)
Tessa and Stefan continue to exposition about the anchor to the Other Side. Stefan asks what she's going to do now, since Silas read her mind at the party and figured out where the anchor is. "You know that old, ancient story I told you about the Travelers? Oh, wait, you don't, I fried your brain and took your memories. Sorry." Did she take his memories on purpose? At first, I thought it was just a side-effect of having his brain fried like an egg, but now I'm wondering if she did it because she thought it would make it easier on him, especially after what she does at the end of the episode. Anyway, Tessa continues her story. "Well, the Travelers...You know how Silas wants to destroy the Other Side, so he can be at peace with that slut, Amara, that he calls his ~one true love~? The Travelers don't want that."
When Stefan asks her why they don't want that to happen, she dodges the question by saying that though it's an important part of the story, it's not something she's going to share with us, at least not yet. Stefan is already annoyed with this exposition, and starts drinking again to try to make it a more pleasant experience. (I suggest you do the same!) Tessa goes on to say that the Travelers have possessed the anchor since they killed Tessa, and they have been keeping it safe by constantly moving it to different locations so that the wrong people don't end up getting their hands on it. She is sure that the Travelers won't allow Silas to get anywhere close to it, but ideally, she'd like to kill Silas before he can even attempt to find it. Stefan is like, "What if the Travelers suck as bad as the hunters and fail?" but Tessa isn't worried; all she'll say about is that even if Silas can find the anchor, he won't be able to destroy it. Of course, we get no other details, because suspense and drama.
Back at Casa Salvatore, the gang is getting ready to take off as Silas barks out orders. He tells Jeremy to grab as many crowbars as he can find, and then tells Elena that she's staying home. Elena is SO not cool with that plan whatsoever, and both she and Damon think that Silas is just joking, but he isn't. "Actually, I'm 100% serious. She's a freaky carbon-copy of my ~one true love~, Amara. You can understand why I don't want to stare at her imposter face all day." Rude, dude! The only reason why she exists in the first place was because you and Amara wanted to live forever together, so I'd say that's your bad, dude.
Damon agrees with me, but Silas argues that he would make more sense if Damon had ever been in love with somebody who looked just like her. UH, HELLO SILAS, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Damon was in love with Katherine for 145 years, remember? Silas is just petty and stupid. Elena proclaims this to be ridiculous, and demands that she be allowed to go, so Silas uses his magic to cause Jeremy's crossbow, which is laying on a nearby table, to shoot an arrow into Elena's leg. Elena falls to her knees, and Damon, who is PISSED, now, runs over to help her pull it out. Silas cares not, and states, "The next one goes in the heart. Now, hurry up! I only have until sundown before Tessa tries to stop me." OH LORD THIS IS GOING TO BE SO MESSY.
Stefan cracks that there is one upside to not having his memories, which is that he has no memories of how he got caught up in such a fucked-up, supernatural life. Tessa just laughs, and brags, "Rest easy, sweet pea. Don't you worry about the details. Silas IS going to die today, and he will spend an eternity on the Other Side, as far away from Amara, and peace, as possible." Yeah, that kind of cockiness is what ruins EVERY SINGLE PLAN in this universe. She walks to the door to leave, and adds, "I have it all covered. You don't scheme as long as I have without considering every possibility." Yeah, famous last words, sister. She tries to leave the cabin, but she gets stuck at the threshold, no matter how much she tries to push through it. Furious and annoyed, she pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs. Stefan asks what the deal is, so she huffs that Silas put a spell on the cabin that is trapping them inside it until the sun sets. She knows this because apparently, she was the one who taught him the spell in the first place. Oh, wonderful.
Katherine somehow managed to get to Whitmore College and into Caroline and Elena's dorm room, where she has taken a shower and dyed her hair back to it's original dark brown hue. She stands and stares at herself in the mirror, and is startled when Caroline walks in and immediately starts rambling. "I don't want to know if Tyler called, so don't even tell me. So, do you want to do small appliances, or toiletries?" Katherine tries to maintain cover as best as she can, and just stares at Caroline as she starts packing up herself. Luckily for her, Caroline is too distracted by packing and worrying, so she just continues to pack and babble about how she considered compelling a cute boy to pack for them, but she's kind of done with cute boys for a while, due to her breakup with Tyler and the fact that Jesse has been ignoring her calls since she brought him to Mystic Falls.
Kat to innocuously ask about Caroline and Elena moving out without arousing her suspicions, and for a moment, Caroline continues to be oblivious--she just recaps about how Dr. Maxfield knows that they're vampires somehow, and threatened to expose them if they didn't leave Whitmore. She immediately gets suspicious when Katherine's only response is, "That suuuucks;" it takes less than a second for her to zoop over and throttle Katherine against the wall. She demands to know why she's pretending to be Elena, but Katherine rasps that she just needed a place to crash. Caroline is understandably not cool with this. "What? I loathe you!" Katherine: "I'm desperate, okay? Damon kicked me out, Stefan doesn't remember me, and I just spent my last twenty dollars on a meal that I didn't even get to enjoy!"
As you can imagine, Caroline doesn't really feel that bad for her, especially considering that Katherine is the one who killed her, which turned her into a vampire. Katherine brings up the fact that Caroline obviously needs her, since she's running away and giving up, which are not very Caroline-like qualities. She decides to offer up her services to make Caroline more likely to help her out. "In exchange for a place to stay--and Elena's meal card--I will help you deal with Dr. Whoever." Caroline explains that it's Maxfield, and that he's a bio professor at this school. Katherine is pretty amused by the fact that Caroline is running scared from a puny little teacher, and offers to show her how to be the villain, for once. "What do you say, roomie?" Wait, has Katherine ever even been to school in her life? Can we get a spin-off that is just flashbacks of her life over the last 500+ years? GIVE IT TO ME NOW.
At the cabin, Stefan's phone starts to ring as Elena calls him from Casa Salvatore. (Hey, I thought there was no cell service there? Tessa is a liar!) He seems to be in the shower, or sleeping, or something, because she ends up picking up the phone and answering it. Elena, naturally, wants to know who the fuck is answering Stefan's phone, and Tessa's like, "Uncanny. Your doppelgänger voice is exactly like Amara's. So whiny." Elena quickly figures out who she's talking to, and asks her what she did with Stefan. Tessa is enjoying messing with Elena's slight jealousy issues, and lies that Stefan is off in the shower after a couple rounds in the sack with her. She asks if she can leave a message, and Elena's like, "Yeah, remind him that you're a crazy bitch!" Not to be outdone, Tessa retorts, "I would, but I think that's maybe his type." BURN!
Elena hangs up the phone and immediately calls Damon up to tell him what just happened. She informs him that Stefan is with Tessa, and wants to know why he keeps going back to her. Damon tries to write this off as New-Stefan being fickle and annoying, but Silas asks, "Wait, you didn't tell Elena what we did to Stefan?" And, of course, Elena hears it and demands that he tell her what happened. "Silas needed his psychic juju to get into Tessa's head, and the only way to temporarily reactivate his abilities was to break Stefan's neck..." After a moment, he adds, "...a couple times." Elena is PISSED, because even though they're not together anymore, she doesn't want him to hate them, and he already has enough ammo against them as it is.
She tells Damon that she's going over there to find him, which Silas thinks is an excellent idea, but Damon warns her that she should give him his space, since he's obviously still mad. "Sounds like he's more mad at you," Elena snits. "Maybe he and I can find some common ground." OUCH. I can understand her being jealous--Stefan was Elena's first love, and Tessa is a dangerous, magical mess of a person, so she wants to protect him from that, I get it. But giiiiiirl, just keep those feelings to yourself! It really doesn't do anything to help anyone to act out on jealousy. When they hang up, Damon throws his phone onto the floor of the SUV in frustration. Silas, the most epic shit-stirrer of all time, decides to lighten the mood by telling a joke, which resulted in this happening:
(via marystuart)
Sidebar: Why would Silas help manipulate Elena into going over to look for Stefan at Tessa's cabin? He had to have known she'd get trapped inside, and since Tessa now knows that Damon is working with Silas, it wouldn't be hard to guess that she'd use Elena for leverage to get Damon to kill him for her. Like it or not, he DOES need Damon's help, so it just doesn't seem wise to for Silas to contribute to something that could possibly result in his death, or at the very least, Damon's help, you know? That just kind of bugged me.
Time to check in with the bad doctor Wes Maxfield, who is looking at some samples in a microscope and is talking into his audio recorder. He starts with, "Subject 62547, blood film analysis," but cuts himself off when he hears a noise. He looks around a bit, and when he sees nothing of note, he gets back to his experiments. "Cellular growth rate is phenomenal, as expected--" We hear another soft *whoosh*, so he sets his recorder down and gets up to investigate. When he comes back, the recorder is gone. That's when Caroline approaches him. He asks her wtf she's doing here, but he doesn't get an answer. What he DOES get is an injection of some kind of drug, right in the neck, courtesy of Katherine Pierce. Once he's passed out, Katherine smiles smugly at Caroline, who returns it with a genuine smile of her own. BEST TEAM EVER. I hope the fact that they'll be living together means we'll get more team-ups, because seriously, they are awesome and get so much shit done when they join forces.
Tessa opens the door of the cabin to find Elena on her doorstep, and doesn't even try to not mince her words. "Well, if it isn't Stefan's fated love? [...] Come on in, who am I to stand in the way of destiny?" She smiles fakely at her, and though Elena seems a bit suspicious, she still ends up walking in the cabin. As soon as Stefan sees her, he tells her she shouldn't have come, but Elena figures that he means he doesn't want to see her. She explains that she wouldn't have let Damon do what he did if she'd known. Stefan disagrees, and says she has an "annoying tendency" to do whatever Damon says. Ummm, first of all, HOW WOULD HE KNOW? He has no memories. Secondly, Elena pretty much always disagrees with Damon's methods, except during that blasted sire-bond story line, in which case it wasn't even her fault, so EW, Stefan, cut it out.
Not wanting to miss out on an opportunity to pick on Elena in some weirdo attempt to deal with her Amara issues, Tessa chirps, "I'm no shrink, but I think it's called 'codependence.'" Elena is pretty much done with these games, so she admits that while he has plenty of reasons to be pissed at them, sleeping with Tessa isn't going to change anything. Stefan's like, "Um, when did I sleep with Tessa?" It takes them a moment to realize that Tess totally lied to her, but Tessa admits that she did exaggerate for effect. Elena, now knowing that Stefan is more-or-less safe, goes to take her leave, but finds out the hard way that she can't, thanks to Silas' spell. "Yeah, you really shouldn't have come inside," Stefan replies.
Silas, Damon and Jeremy have finally arrived at the warehouse in New Jersey, where this hilarious and awesome exchange happened:
Get it, Damon! Like I've said before, Silas gets off on screwing with people's heads, even without his telepathic abilities, so the fact that Damon is not letting that guy get to him, for once, just makes me so fucking happy and proud of him. After Damon breaks the lock on the door handle, they enter the warehouse, where Jeremy asks where the anchor is. Silas admits he has no idea, and when Damon is like, "The fuck you say?" Silas replies that it's still impressive that he managed to dig through her mind and get the warehouse location. When Jeremy asks what the anchor is/looks like, we learn that Silas has no idea about that, either, since Tessa created the Other Side AFTER he was entombed on Nova Scotia's random ass island. Damon is understandably annoyed at the news that Silas doesn't know what the anchor is, nor what it looks like, but Silas retorts, "It binds a spell to a supernatural Hell-dimension, it's not going to look like a freaking IKEA sink!" LOL FOREVER.
Back at the MaxLab, the Dream Team is waiting for Wes to wake up. Caroline asks Kat what the fuck she injected him with, but Kat has no idea. "I don't know, it just said 'avoid contact with eyes'...and 'do not ingest.' Oops!" Bahahaha. Wes starts to wake up, and notices the bottle in Katherine's hand. He groggily informs them that it's etorphine, but Katherine just shrugs. Wes is still a little confused, because he assumes that Katherine is Elena. Caroline informs him that they're planning to drain the vervain out of his system so they can compel him to forget that she and Elena are vampires. Wes is not game for this plan, because he's convinced that they will end up killing him, but Caroline shushes him so she can calculate. "I'm just--I'm trying to do some math, okay? So, if the average male has five liters of blood in his system...then...carry the one..." Kat advises her to round up, so Caro exclaims, "Perfect! 4.7 pints. Should I use the right arm, or the left arm?"
Wes is terrified now, and begs the girls to untie him so that he can find the vein himself. "You WILL kill me!" LOL, that's what he's worried about? I don't know, sticking IVs into a healthy, well-hydrated dude is really not that difficult. It's not like it's a 90 year old woman with tiny, hard veins or something. Plus, Caroline's a vampire, so I think she'd know her way around a circulatory system. Katherine reminds them that she knows also knows what to do, having been a torturer for the better part of five centuries, and deftly inserts the needle into his arm. After Caroline provides her with some IV tubing and some tape, Katherine drops the end of the tube in a large beaker, which begins to fill with blood. Katherine grabs a scalpel and presses it to Wes' neck as she asks him how many more people know about them. He tells them they should have left when he told them to, because apparently people are onto them, now.
Caroline is like, "Who's THEY? The people you want to expose us to? That secret society thingy that you belong to?" Agh, so many sentences ending in prepositions. *shudders* Wes reveals that there is a gathering at Whitmore House that day, and that it's a cover for the society to get some ideas of new recruits. He adds that they had planned to invite Elena, but then they started suspecting that she's a vampire. Katherine smugs, "So, all I have to do is convince them that Elena Gilbert isn't a vampire? Done." YES! Wes still thinks she's Elena, and insists that they will never invite her in, which suggests that it's owned by a member so that no vampires can enter. Unfortunately for him, Katherine Pierce is totally a human, and can make it in without an invite anyway. YESSSS. The girls smile at each other once again, and revel in how much shit they get done when they actually work together.
Silas, Damon, and Jeremy are searching through various crates at the warehouse. Jeremy seems to be taking out his frustrations on the crate, and Bonnie appears beside him. "What did that crate do to you?" Jeremy is surprised to see her, so she jokes that she didn't want to miss any of the excitement of the day. Jeremy is afraid she's going to jinx it, but she admits that she just hasn't really gotten her hopes up that she'll actually be brought back to life. "I'm not jinxing it, I'm being realistic. It's not a dime-store spell, Jer. When I brought you back, it killed me, remember? [beat] What I meant was it's just--it's not something I'm going to count on, okay?" Jeremy wants her to have some faith, and spouts some Peter Pan-y, "clap your hands if you believe in fairies!"-type stuff to insist that if they believe it will work, it will work. She repeats, "It'll work," which seems to satisfy Jeremy for now, though she does add that she would happily die a hundred times if it meant he was alive. Jer goes to brush her cheek with his finger, and reminds her that by the end of the day, they'll be able to touch, for reals. OMG STOP IT, YOU TWO.
A few feet away, Silas and Damon are still looking for the anchor. Silas whines at Damon to hurry it up, since he figures the Travelers will eventually show up to move it. Damon doesn't quite understand why the Travelers are so obsessed with the anchor in the first place, so Silas breaks it down for him. "They hate me for creating the immortality spell, and they know the anchor's the only thing standing between me and my soul mate. Every love story needs to have one thing that keeps getting in the way. [beat] Kind of like you, Damon!" Meowwww. Damon reminds him that though he may be an "all-powerful witch," but Damon is still happy to kill him if he keeps pushing that particular button. Silas knows he won't, though, because he's determined to bring Elena's best friend back.
This sass-fest is interrupted by Damon's phone ringing. The caller ID says it's Stefan, but unfortunately, it isn't. Tessa informs him that since she's currently indisposed, Damon is going to have to kill Silas for her. Damon's like, "Happily, lady," but adds that Silas, being the control freak that he is, wants to kill himself, rather than allowing someone else to do it. "You mean, after he destroys the Other Side? Yeah, that's not gonna happen, plus, I want him dead before he has the pleasure of finding the anchor." Damon still doesn't know wtf she's talking about, but she's still not giving details--she simply orders him to kill him, STAT. In the background, Elena pleads for Damon, which Damon hears so Tessa adds insult to injury by quipping, "Did I mention I lured your girlfriend here to me? I used the oldest trick in the book--jealousy, of Stefan! Thought you should know!"
Elena is pissed, and goes to walk away from all the negativity wafting off of Tessa, but Tessa lifts a hand to give her a witchy migraine, which brings her to her knees. Surprisingly, this seems to piss Stefan off, too, and he yells at her to stop. Damon pleads the same, and admits that he needs Silas to do something for him before he dies. "Is that something more important than Elena? Because Silas put a spell on this house and bound it to the sun, which means we're trapped here until sundown, which means you have until then to kill Silas, or I kill Elena. [beat] With a face like Amara's, it might be cathartic. Bye now!" She hangs up before Damon can say anything more, so he smashes a bunch of boxes in anger and frustration. Man, Tessa, I can get on board with your brand of crazy, but if you harm a hair on Elena's head, I S2G...
Katherine-as-Elena is dressed up in her church-y best, in a cute sundress and wavy hair. Diane Freeman, the campus police chief, answers the door and is shocked to see Elena at the doorstep. She greets her by name, and Katherine is, like, "You know me?" Diane reminds her that they met the night that Megan died, so Katherine immediately covers for herself, and blames her forgetfulness on the craziness of that evening. Diane tells her she didn't know that she was coming, and Katherine chirps, "Did I forget to RSVP? Sorry, I've just been so busy, with my studies." Diane smiles and tells her they just started the tea as she gestures for Katherine to enter the house. She very noticeably avoids giving her a verbal invitation, I should add. When Katherine easily crosses the threshold, Diane looks pretty stunned.
Our fair Katerina makes a bee-line for the table full of party food, and hilariously wastes no time in stuffing her face (and purse) with sandwiches and snacks. After a few moments, she notices Aaron standing beside her, staring at her as she shamelessly pilfers whatever she can reach. She gives him a look, and deadpans, "What? Are you the sandwich police?" LOL, I love Katherine so fucking much this season, I didn't think it was possible. Aaron admits that he isn't, he's just wondering why Wes told him to stay away from her. Of course, Katherine has no idea who he is, and asks if she knows him. He reintroduces himself as Aaron, and adds that they met the previous day, on campus and at the costume ball. She comically says, "Aaron, duh! Hi! So, what are you doing here? Are you a part of [lowers voice to a stage-whisper] the secret society?"
Aaron's pretty puzzled at this question, and asks her wtf she's talking about, so she whispers, "You know, the SOCIETY." He still isn't following, so Katherine proclaims him to be either genuinely clueless, or a very good liar. Her attempts at gathering intel are interrupted, however, when she begins to cough. She gets a very horrified look on her face and quickly turns her back to Aaron as she spits a molar into her hand. SHE COUGHED UP A TOOTH. That is so gross and terrifying, I'm going to have nightmares forever, now. Aaron didn't miss this new development, either, and asks her if that's actually a tooth in her hand. Katherine starts to panic. "No. What is happening to me?" She quickly dashes away before more of this crazy, reverse-Benjamin Button syndrome's symptoms start to present themselves.
Tessa is flipping through a foodie magazine and marveling over all of the delicious concoctions that have been created since she was alive back in Ancient Greece, like pineapple on pizza. Elena sulks in the corner, which doesn't go unnoticed by the ancient witch. She cracks, "So sad. Let me guess, gluten-free?" More like the "eat for your blood type" diet, am I right?What Elena really wants to know is how Tessa is alive, after being dead and on the Other Side for two millenia. Tessa is vague, as usual, which makes me suspicious. "Ahh, yeah, that. You can blame your friend Bonnie for that. She opened the door and distracted herself when she brought your little brother back, SO, I just walked right through when she died."
Honestly, I'm not buying it. I know that Jeremy said that the only reason why he is alive is because Bonnie died to maintain the balance of nature, but I still have a sneaking suspicion that she either managed to kill Bonnie, or profited from her death somehow in order to bring her back to life. Her cagey-ness just really pings my hinkiness radar, I guess. Elena, still angry, snaps, "Well, today, Silas was going to bring her back to life after he got the anchor, but you told my boyfriend-who has never put anyone's life before mine, including his own--to kill Silas before he could do that. So, no, I'm not sad about the pizza." YOU TELL HER, GIRL. Tessa just smirks at her, taking pleasure in her pain, and goes back to drooling over magazine recipes. Stefan tells her to forget about pizza, because he's going to cook instead. Didn't he lose his memories of cooking stuff? Sigh. Tessa suggests roasted duck, so Stefan is like, "Wait, do you have a duck?" She admits that she doesn't, but she figures since she managed to lure Elena into the cabin, catching a duck the same way can't be more difficult than that. They both giggle, and Elena continues to pout in the corner. Pobrecita!
Outside the warehouse, Damon and Jeremy are discussing their current predicament, and Jeremy is furious. "We can't kill Silas, Silas is the only one who can bring Bonnie back, and he's not going to bring her back until right before he destroys the Other Side." Damon reminds him that Tessa wants him to do it now, so he doesn't really have a choice, but Jeremy argues that he promised Elena that they would bring Bonnie back. Damon is more than a little frustrated and stressed right now, too. "You don't think I'm aware of that? But, if Tessa kills Elena, guess who's not going to make it to Bonnie's "Welcome Home!" party? [beat] The plan's off, Jeremy. Bonnie's not coming back. Sorry." Both boys are super bummed, and Damon reluctantly returns back to the warehouse to finish the job.
Bonnie joins Jeremy outside the warehouse, and his face as he explains what happened is so fucking heartbreaking. She assures him that it's okay. "Jeremy Gilbert, do you not know me at all? Is there a part of you that thinks for one minute that I'd let one of my friends die, just so I could come back to life?" Bonnie Bennett really is the best friend ever, seriously. She reminds Jer that she's dead, and that this whole plan failing is just more proof that she's supposed to accept the reality of her death. Jeremy is just so upset at how close they were to bringing her back for good, and Bonnie concedes that he's right. "Now, go help him kill Silas." Bonnie Bennett is a beautiful soul.
Damon, who has returned to wandering around the warehouse, turns into a new aisle where he's approached by a random male Traveler. The manwitch starts to chant, "Sul opraem chele kuzlo." Damon: "I've met a lot of witches in my day, never quite heard that one before." Being the language nerd that I am, I'm really interested in the various languages that witches use in their spells. Esther, Bonnie, and Sheila seem to use a vaguely Latin-esque language, but the Travelers we've seen thus far have spoken Czech. Tessa's spells aren't in either of those languages, but I haven't heard enough to be able to identify what it is. I figure it's probably either Ancient Greek, or maybe Aramaic, like the spell that entombed Silas? Any other fellow language nerds have any better guesses?
ANYWAY, another male Traveler comes up behind Damon, and they continue to chant, "Sul opraem chele kuzlo," over and over again. Damon correctly identifies them as Travelers, but they ignore him and keep chanting, which eventually causes his daylight ring to stop working. His arm starts to burn in the sunlight, so he backs up into the shadows and yells, "Why do you witches always go for the daylight ring?" It's true, really; that and witchy migraines are the witches' first line of defense against vampires. He runs over to the second Traveler and plunges his hand into his chest as he informs them that he was about to do them a favor by killing Silas for them. How do the Travelers already know that he's cured, anyway? Did someone have a prophetic vision or something? The first Traveler reveals that they don't want him dead just yet, but since this goes against Damon's current plans, he grabs a knife from the second Traveler, throws it into the first Traveler's chest, and then rips out the heart of the second. Badass! Also, I'm almost positive that the knife he threw looked JUST like Gregor's knife that Matt is currently guarding, which Damon might have noticed if anyone on this show gave a fuck whatsoever about Matt Donovan. So, now I'm even more curious about wtf that knife is about.
Wes is still being bled of the vervain, while Caroline sits and zones out nearby. He's a little unnerved by how calm she his, which is starting to freak him out. I'm wondering if he's surprised at Caroline's ability to keep herself in control, despite the beaker full of blood that is right in front of her. All of the vampires on this show were pretty easily triggered when humans were bleeding around them, near the beginning of the series. Even Stefan and Damon had difficulties at first. So, I'm wondering if maybe their recently-gained level of control is unusual in the vampire community or something? Anyway, Caroline apologizes for spacing out, but Wes is still pissy, because he claims that he could have died from bleeding to death had he not spoken up. She blames her spaciness on her broken heart, and basically tells him to cut her some slack before she turns on the compulsion eyes and mind-whammies him into answering her questions truthfully.
Her first question is, what is the secret society? He explains that it's called Augustine, and to be a member, you usually have to be a legacy. (which explains why Elena would have been asked to be a member, since it's pretty obvious her dad was involved somehow) But some members, like him, are offered admission for particular talents, like having a vampire science lab. "Not to mention that you're willing to lie on autopsy reports, like my roommate's! You knew she was killed by a vampire. Is that why you covered up her death?" Wes confesses that he had to cover up her death because she wasn't just killed by your regular, run-of-the-mill vampires, she was killed by the Augustine vampire! Oh god, is the Augustine vampire going to be Grayson Gilbert? I can't decide if that would be super stupid or super brilliant.
Unfortunately, we don't get the chance to find out who the Augustine vampire is, because someone knocks on the lab's door. After a moment, a voice calls out, "Wes, are you in there? It's Diane Freeman." Caroline hurries up and compels him to forget that she and Elena are vampires, and that they drained him of blood. The excuse for his light-headedness is because he donated blood. Diane walks in and asks if he's there. Caroline has disappeared, thankfully, and Wes is like, "Duh, I'm here." She reminds him of the Whitmore party, which he totally missed. He's a little puzzled as to why he can't remember the last few hours, and tells her that the time must have gotten away from him while he was working. "That's not all you missed," Diane explains. "Guess who I watched strut right in the front door? Elena Gilbert. Clearly not a vampire. What made you so convinced she was?" Wes is understandably spacey from the blood loss, and now super confused from the compulsion, so he admits he must have been mistaken or something. She looks a little suspicious of his behavior, but I doubt she'd think he had been confronted by vampires and compelled, since they all must ingest/wear vervain religiously.
At the cabin, Stefan is cooking for Tessa, and asks her to sample whatever it is that he's prepared. She tastes a spoonful and coos at him about how good it is, and they continue to act all shmoopy to really get under Elena's skin. Elena may be jealous, but she's not an idiot, so she calls them out on their pettiness. She reminds Stefan that while he may not remember who he is, she does, and insists that Tessa isn't the kind of person he would like. Tessa feigns offense at this comment. "That's not very nice, especially considering I've allowed you to remain alive until sundown." She looks out the window and realizes the sun is beginning to set, so she adds, "Ahh, almost sundown!" Tessa skips away to grab Stefan's phone to call Damon, and Stefan pretends to keep cooking as he whispers so quietly that only Elena can hear him. "Elena, don't say a word. I've got this. I know you think I hate you, but I don't. I won't let her hurt you, I promise."
Tessa, on the phone, waits for Damon to pick up. When he finally does, she asks if he's dead yet. Damon runs into Jeremy and mutters, "Man up, we're under attack." He then returns to Tessa, and admits that no, he's not dead, because he got held up by "some of her inbred Traveler cousins." He asks her why the fuck the Travelers wouldn't want to kill Silas right away, and Tessa figures they probably want his blood. My mind immediately went to Silas' gravestone, which contained Tessa's calcified blood, that everyone wanted to use as a power source. Sadly, that's not it-- The Travelers want Silas' blood, because, just like Katherine's blood became the cure after she ingested it, Silas' blood is now the cure because he drank Katherine's cured blood. That's one crazy potion, jfc!
Damon reminds Tessa that the Travelers aren't immortal, since they hate immortality, so they have no reason to need it. "Think about it, Damon. The Travelers aren't fans of immortality. I had to bind the Other Side to something, something that would last forever, something that Silas couldn't destroy." OH SHIT OH SHIT. At the warehouse, Silas starts to open a huge crate.
Damon is totally lost, so Tessa continues to encourage him to fill in the blanks. "Something a little closer to his heart. 2,000 years old, immortal, indestructible. You're a quick boy, Damon. Figure it out." OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD. Tessa hangs up the phone. Stefan sees that the sun has finally set, so he grabs a kitchen knife and stabs Tessa with it before throwing her up against the wall. He orders Elena to run, and the two dash away. Tessa may be super-injured, but she's also LIVID, as you'd imagine.
At the warehouse, Damon has finally figured it out. When he mutters, "No way..." Jeremy approaches him and asks him wtf is happening. As he talks in voiceover, Silas opens the huge crate with a crowbar. "2,000 years old, immortal, indestructible. The anchor isn't a thing, it's a person. She never killed Amara." Silas finds her, completely desiccated into stone, with her arms crossed over her chest. She looks like a statue of Mary, really. Silas is completely shocked that she's still alive, and runs over to grab one of the dead Travelers. He cuts the corpse's wrist, and lugs him over to Amara so he can feed it to her. The stone around her starts to crack and soften, and eventually, Amara grabs the Traveler's wrist to continue feeding. Silas softly says, "Amara, it's me," and after a moment, Amara opens her eyes. HOLY SHIT. I knew that Amara was probably going to come back somehow, but this is not at ALL what I expected would happen! OMG.
Silas helps his ~one true love~ out of the warehouse, and she's kind of understandably freaking out. Unlike Tessa, she really didn't get to see how the world changed while she was out of commission, and unlike Silas, she wasn't fed dribbles of blood over the centuries to keep her slightly aware. She keeps muttering, "Go away, go away, leave me alone!" over and over again. Silas assures her that it's him, but she's shocked to see that he's still here, after all this time. She's still a little weak, since one body's worth of blood probably isn't enough to undo 2,000 years of desiccation, so she leans against a dumpster. Silas informs her that he spent all these years believing she was dead, since Qetsiyah/Tessa said she had killed her. Amara reveals that she couldn't kill her, because there was only one cure, and she wanted Silas to take it. Couldn't she have made more? I don't understand that at all.
He confesses that he ended up taking the cure recently, because he wanted to kill himself so he could be reunited with her. She realizes that his blood is now the cure, just as Silas tells her he was going to die for her. She hugs him, so Silas lets his guard down, not noticing that Amara has picked up a piece of broken glass by the dumpster. She tells him she loves him, and apologizes in advance for what she's about to do, which is to STAB HER ~ONE TRUE LOVE~ IN THE NECK. "I have to be cured," she says, before feeding on him frantically. After she's drained him, she pulls away, and he falls to the ground. "I can't live another day." OMG. I will have plenty to say about this at the end, don't you worry.
Wes is still working on his mad-scientist shit in his lab, and continues his blood film analysis with his microscope. He reaches into his pocket for his recorder, but it's not there. When he goes to look around his lab for it, Katherine walks into the lab and joins him. Wes still thinks she's Elena, and when he asks why she came by, she tosses him his recorder. He's a little confused as to how she came to possess it, but she keeps mum. "Mystery. I listened to about half before I nearly blew my brains out from boredom, except for the part about your subject's blood being abnormal. That part was mildly interesting."
He thanks her for bringing it back, but she has one more question about subject 62547: is it the Augustine vampire? (62547 is Jesse, right? So it can't be the Augustine vampire, unless he was somehow a vampire before he was turned? GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING) He clams up, and coldly tells her he thinks she should leave, but she threatens to tell everyone on campus about the Augustine society and all of his crazy vampire experiments. He points out that that sounds a little bit like blackmail, and calls her Elena, again, so she sets the record straight. "Actually, my name is Katherine. Elena is my doppelgänger, and while I let you chew on that, I'll admit there is something that I can't solve on my own." She reaches into her purse and pulls out the tooth she coughed up earlier. He asks her if that is really her tooth, and she admits that it is. "I think I'm dying, and I need you to save my life." OH GOD, KATHERINE CAN'T DIE.
Amara is wandering around outside the warehouse, and is overwhelmed with what seems to be voices and people that she can see and hear that no one else can. This is super interesting to me, though I'll save my thoughts on that for the end, too. She keeps rambling, "Stop talking! It's not up to you! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Please, leave me alone! Leave me alone!" She stumbles around, and eventually runs into Damon, who is stunned to see her. She is startled at the sight of him, and after a minute, she asks, "Are you real?" Damon continues to stare at her, and replies, "Are you?"
(via http://thevampirediaries.co.vu/)
Stefan and Elena have returned to Casa Salvatore, and when they walk into the foyer, he wishes her a good night before turning to head upstairs. Elena stops him, and admits that's surreal how even with no memories, Stefan really is still Stefan, deep down. Stefan gets strangely modest. "Well, Tessa was gonna kill you, and you don't seem like you deserve that, so I was just going on instinct, that's all." That's exactly what Elena means, though-- Stefan's instinct has always been to protect her (except that one time she drowned to death, of course), so she thanks him for being him. He takes his leave and departs for his bedroom, and Elena joins Damon and Jeremy in the parlor, where they're both drinking some bourbon. Man, they really get my Gilbert/Salvatore family feels riled up. Elena, Damon, and Jeremy are the cutest makeshift family ever. The only way it could be better is if Alaric was there, too!
"Stefan Salvatore sleeps in his own bed tonight," Damon mutters bitterly. "Does that mean he stopped hating us, or did the power of the doppelgänger universe push him into the car with you?" Ouch, harsh toke, Damon! Elena admits that he saved her life, so she's going with "not hate," which Damon proclaims to be the one tiny bit of success in the otherwise major failure of their day. He lifts the bottle he's drinking from toward Jeremy, who raises his own glass of booze. Elena gives him a look, but come on! Everyone on this show's blood is mostly composed of grain alcohol at this point, so give the kid a pass. He used to be dead, for Christ's sake! Jeremy agrees, and adds that since they didn't get Bonnie back, he gets a pass. Bonnie appears behind him, and tells him to tell Elena that it's all for the best, but Jeremy mutters, "No, no, I won't, because it's not."
Damon and Elena are like, "Bwuh?" since Jeremy appears to be talking to himself, so he recaps what Bonnie said to him. Shouldn't they be used to Jeremy always talking to dead friends, already? Elena hilariously looks around the room as she tries to guess where Bonnie is standing, and promises her that they're going to keep trying, because they've dealt with way worse than this. Damon's not so optimistic, though. "Well, Silas is MIA and out and about, which is pretty bad. And, Amara's been cured, which is even worse, because now she's easy to kill. So, the fate of the Other Side, where Bonnie currently resides, rests on a living, breathing human being that we now need to protect." Elena is a little confused at the "we" in this scenario, so Damon takes her outside, and opens the trunk of Jeremy's (or Alaric's?) SUV. Inside, Amara lays in the trunk, her hands and feet bound, and with a bandanna gag in her mouth. "Elena,, meet Crazy Pants. Crazy Pants, meet Elena." Elena stares at this third doppelgänger in shock, and Amara looks at her own double and literally SHRIEKS in terror.
(via pethrovafire)
Stefan gets to his room to find Tessa already there. OH SHIT! He asks what she's doing there, and is understandably nervous, after what he just did. "Do you have any idea what it's like, watching history repeat itself?" Honestly, I think that he does. Or, WOULD, if he had his memories. Again, remember the Katherine thing? To his credit, Stefan looks remorseful for hurting her, though Tessa was the one who was about to kill Elena, so he offers to heal her, but she wants to keep her wounds, as a reminder that Stefan isn't the nice guy that she thought. "See, memories are important. I made a mistake when I found you, I eased your pain. You used to have a lot of pain, remember?" She lifts her hand in the air and concentrates on him, and Stefan falls to the ground in pain. "You killed your own father, and then forced your brother to become a vampire." We start to get flashbacks of many of Stefan's painful memories, just so we know she's giving him his memories back.
"And that was just the start of your reign of terror. You hated yourself for a century, but then you found her." Cue flashback to Elena and Stefan meeting in the cemetery, alllll the way back in the pilot. Tessa cracks that their happiness didn't last very long, and Stefan begs her to stop. No dice, Steffy. Sorry, bud. "But the ending's the best part, because you actually felt real pain, physical pain, torture. Remember?" We flash back to last season's finale, when Silas showed Stefan his true face, stabbed him in the gut with a stake, locked him in a safe, and threw him down into the quarry. "You tried to scream, you tried to escape, but all you could do was drown, over and over again. The only thing keeping you sane was that, one day, one of the two people you loved would come rescue you. But they didn't. I did. Always remember that." She leaves Stefan to obsess over his newly reacquired memories. Oh shit, we're going back to horribly depressed, horribly guilty-feeling Stefan now, aren't we? I might actually be okay with that, actually. HOOOOLY SHIT.
Next week: Doppelgängers, doppelgängers, doppelgängers everywhere! Also, Stefan wants to kill Silas. This should totally end well.
[screencaps via KissThemGoodbye]
Click HERE to read my recap of the next episode of The Vampire Diaries!
NOTES/SPECULATION:
-FIRSTLY, I want to talk about Amara. We already know that she's the anchor that binds the Other Side, right? Tessa chose her because 1) she was immortal, and 2) Silas would be unable to kill her, even if he was able to free himself from his tomb and wanted to destroy the Other Side. Judging by the way that Amara was running around, yelling at people who weren't there, pleading with them to leave her alone, I have a sneaking suspicion that she has a connection to the dead supernaturals on the Other Side, like Jeremy, only more intense, because she's actually connected to it. Either way, I am SUPER excited to see how this turns out! God bless Nina Dobrev.
-As for Katherine, I have a feeling that she's interested in turning herself back into a vampire, or maybe even an immortal, like Silas and Amara. I mean, I would assume that the cure is no longer in her veins, right? So, maybe now she could be turned back into a vampire without any negative consequences? I love Katherine as a human, but I would much rather have her as a vampire than have her die. And since she seems to be aging at an exponential rate, thanks to the fact that she's like, 600+ years old now, she'd probably be more than willing to take her chances at being turned again, if she's just going to die anyway, right?
-I hate to say it, but I'm really starting to tire of the Silas/Tessa thing, and I hope that this story line resolves itself soon so we can get into bringing Bonnie back and figuring out what the fuck is happening at Whitmore College re: Augustine and all that shit. That said, I am intrigued by the Travelers, and I really want to know what their deal is! Since we know that Nadia is Katherine's daughter, and Gregor is still chilling in Matt's head, I'm hoping we'll get to learn more about them.
-Now onto Silas and Amara's epic love or whatever. Silas has done nothing but moon about Amara, how strong their love is, and even suggested that the universe was trying to mirror their amazing love story in their doppelgängers, but really, we haven't SEEN anything to really prove that. Amara did seem happy enough to see him, but she was still willing to possibly kill him just to end her own suffering. Granted, that could just mean that she's been miserable all this time, and I can't blame her for that, but it just goes to show that their ~true love~ really doesn't seem to be conquering all, blah blah blah. I guess we'll see what happens next week!
In the words of pretty much everyone in the TVD fandom on Tumblr, THIS EPISODE WAS SO FUCKING WEIRD. But, it was weird in an AWESOME way. Damon was hilarious and heart-breakingly conflicted. Caroline and Katherine made the best and most unexpected team in the history of the show, even more than Elena and Rebekah. Stefan actually wasn't that terrible, Tessa was annoying, but still badass (and even proved to be a huge genius) AND, most importantly, PETROVA DOPPELGANGERS FOR EVERYONE! Seriously, can someone just give Nina Dobrev ALL THE FUCKING AWARDS EVER? Because she fully deserves it. And that's not even getting into Katherine's weirdo Benjamin Button-syndrome, the reality of Silas and Amara's ~true love~, all the crazy, cryptic shit we learned from Wes Maxfield, and fucking Bonnie being the most kind and loyal friend EVER. A ton of crazy shit happened this week, so I'm going to stop flailing in all-caps and get into the actual details. Let's get moving, shall we?
Previously, on the Vampire Diaries: Love brought Stefan to Mystic Falls, and also somehow landed him at the bottom of a quarry for the better part of a summer. Along the way, the Mystic Falls supernatural club has lost nearly everything, including Stefan's memories of his entire life, and the life of the gang's dear friend and witch cohort, Bonnie Bennett. Dr. Wes Maxfield revealed that he's onto Elena and Caroline, as well as the rest of their friends who showed up to Whitmore College for the costume ball last week, and he urged them to leave school before they're outed as vampires. Damon concocted a plan to bring Bonnie back by leveraging Silas' death for her life. Unfortunately, that means they have to team up with Silas, who isn't exactly someone you can count on to do the right thing. Another problem is that Qetsiyah, now going by Tessa, is still pretty pissed at him for standing her up at the altar/cheating on her all those years ago, so she's bound and determined to kill him before he can destroy the Other Side and reunite with his ~one true love~, Amara. Silas needed the cure to be able to die, and since Katherine accidentally took the cure, he ultimately was able to drink her blood, thanks to Damon's help, though he seemed to regret doing it. Also, Katherine didn't die! Woo! And that's where we start this episode...
Our beloved Katerina Petrova is still alive and kicking, THANK GOD, and is now celebrating by buying a dozen plates full of fruit and breakfast items at what appears to be the restaurant where she staked Nadia in front of anyone. That makes no sense, but whatever! The waitress is skeptical that Katherine can eat all of the food she just ordered, being the skinny girl that she is, but never doubt the hunger of a girl who actually has to live life like a regular girl after 500+ years of compelling everyone to do, say, and give her anything she wants.
Katherine vaguely explains that she had a near-death experience, hence the celebratory feast. "It's a good day!" The waitress smiles, and before she leaves, she comments on Katherine's 'do. "Love the hair, by the way. Bold choice!" Katherine gets suspicious and picks up a chrome napkin dispenser to look at her reflection. As she looks at herself at various angles, she finds a thick stripe of hair that is completely gray. Horrified, she pulls the gray strand forward so she can see it with her own eyes, and proceeds to totally freak out. TITLE CARD!
In the parlor of Casa Salvatore, Damon and Elena are super adorable as they cuddle on the couch, while a fire in the fireplace warms them. Elena sighs and talks about how much she loves moments like this, where it's quiet and calm and no one is trying to kill or threaten them/their loved ones. Damon agrees that these moments are awesome, but then turns into a huge buzzkill. "But, it is OUR life, which probably means that somebody's gonna walk through that door and shatter it." Elena groans at Damon for killing the moment, and in response, he cutely starts to count down from ten as she burrows her head in his chest and pouts.
When he gets to five, Elena interrupts him and reminds him, "DAMON, today is the day that we're going to bring Bonnie back! It's a good day!" He keeps counting, so she kisses him to shut him up. She pulls away and puts a finger to his lips when she hears footsteps. Who has come to cockblock them? Silas, of course! He greets them, and Damon is like, "Aaaand, one." Silas: "Good morning, frenemies!" He walks into the parlor and magically pulls open the curtains. "Ah, you know, I'm only a few hours into my old life as a witch, but somehow, the sun feels warmer! Probably because I'm not cursed with having to outlive it anymore." Damon calls him out on just barging into their house, and asks him what is going on. Silas turns to him, and gleefully explains that he is finally going to be killing himself, after two millenia of a miserable life. GOD, I HOPE SO.
(via britneypsears)
Meanwhile, Stefan is passed out on the couch in Tessa's cabin, in front of a table full of liquor bottles. Tessa approaches him and wakes him up in a suspiciously nice and friendly way. When he's understandably unnerved by waking up at her home, she's all, "You're confused. Is that the amnesia, or the tequila?" Stefan correctly assumes that it is both, and continues to try to piece the night back together. She helpfully informs him that they got drunk on body shots and whined about their misery together, and now as a result, they're less miserable. She offers him a basket full of blueberries to eat, and Stefan suspicion at her kindess continues to grow, so he comments on how nice she's being. Tessa explains that she's in such a fantastic mood because last night, after he passed out, she saw a text on his phone from Damon that said that Silas had taken the cure. She's totally thrilled that he is now mortal, and thus, killable. "Get up, gorgeous, your doppelgänger dies today."
The next scene cuts back and forth between Casa Salvatore with Damon/Elena/Silas, and Tessa's cabin with Tessa/Stefan. Silas recaps what we've already learned, for Elena's benefit; once Silas fucked Tessa over, she became super obsessed with getting revenge for her heartbreak, which is why she killed Amara. Today, Silas will reunite with Amara after 2,000 years, which is why he's also so sunshine-y this morning. Damon wants him to quit mooning over his long-lost love and get to the goods. "Look, my girl here is just trying to have a good day, and there are promises that she's expecting you to keep." Aw, Damon! Silas is a little offended that Elena doesn't trust him to keep his word, so Elena reminds him of their deal: Silas said, once he was a witch again, that he would resurrect Bonnie before he destroyed the Other Side. Silas agrees that he did say that, and that he CAN do that.
Elena continues by reminding him that since their part of the deal was that Damon would help him, which he did, they really need him to hold up his end of the bargain. Silas himself even takes no offense at the fact that she called him evil, which does nothing to help the fact that she just doesn't know how she can trust that Silas won't renege on their deal. It's not like she doesn't have a lot of proof as ammo that he's untrustworthy: Silas killed her brother, traumatized her best friends (both Bonnie AND Caroline), staked all of them in the gut at least once over a span of several episodes, almost killed Caroline's mom, ACTUALLY killed Bonnie's dad, locked Stefan in a box at the bottom of a lake all summer. Need I continue? No? Okay.
Anyway, Silas kind-of-hilariously cracks, "Did you want me to pinky swear?" Seriously, Paul Wesley's delivery was perfect this week, I actually enjoyed both Stefan and Silas, for the most part, in this episode. Damon's getting a little antsy, so he asks Silas to just give them a rundown of what's going to happen today, to ease their mind. "I want to destroy the Other Side, so I don't get stuck in that pit of a purgatory when I finally do kill myself. Before I do that, I'll bring Bonnie back. And, being the amazing, and incredible, and all-powerful witch I am, I can totally do both things. I just have to find the anchor, first, and destroy it." Elena hasn't been filled in on the anchor part, so she's understandably confused.
Tessa picks up where Silas left off, and explains the anchor to Stefan, who is still sleepy and lost. "Silas is looking for the anchor. It's the object I used to bind the spell when I created the Other Side. Destroy it--the spell is broken. No more supernatural limbo. AND, Silas can die and find peace. I would rather that his lying, cheating ass not have that." Yeah, we get it, lady. Stefan, who is still pretty pissed at Silas for all of the bullshit he's put him through, is 100% cool with her plan to kill Silas before he's able to destroy the Other Side. He asks her where the anchor is, but before she can answer, we hop back over to...
...Casa Salvatore, where Damon has just learned the anchor's location. "New Jersey? The supernatural other-world is bound by an object in Snooki's backyard?" Silas, though pretty hip to the modern times, must not know about Jersey Shore, because he just ignores him and informs them that the anchor is in a stockyard there, and is about to be shipped out. He's about to instruct them all to hop to it so they can find it before it's moved, but he's distracted by Jeremy, who has just approached them with a crossbow that is aimed at him. "Hello, Hunter. Banner day for you, huh? Didn't you and the Bennett witch used to...[*suggestive tongue-clicking/whistling/eyebrow waggling*]" Elena is really into hearing about her bestie's sex life with her brother, so she tells Silas to shut up before turning to assure Jer that everyone is on the same side today. Damon puts it more bluntly. "AKA, put the damn crossbow down, Pocahontas!"
Jeremy still isn't really convinced that they should be putting all of their trust in him to do something nice for them, and for good reason. SILAS KILLED YOUR BROTHER, ELENA.. He's literally the reason you burnt your house to the ground and ran around with no humanity for like, months. Silas doesn't even really blame him. "Well, I hope not. I mean, I am kind of a monster." Jeremy re-aims the crossbow at his chest, which doesn't please Silas. He claims that he feels like he's being dogpiled by them, and hints that if he loses his temper, something bad could happen. Of course, he demonstrates his seriousness by using magic to shoot flames from his fingers. Everyone instinctively backs away from him, and Silas chuckles at himself. "Man, I really love being a witch again! I feel like I'm constantly reinventing myself. I'm like a supernatural Madonna, don't you think?" Oh, hardly, bro.
(via bestprankever)
Tessa and Stefan continue to exposition about the anchor to the Other Side. Stefan asks what she's going to do now, since Silas read her mind at the party and figured out where the anchor is. "You know that old, ancient story I told you about the Travelers? Oh, wait, you don't, I fried your brain and took your memories. Sorry." Did she take his memories on purpose? At first, I thought it was just a side-effect of having his brain fried like an egg, but now I'm wondering if she did it because she thought it would make it easier on him, especially after what she does at the end of the episode. Anyway, Tessa continues her story. "Well, the Travelers...You know how Silas wants to destroy the Other Side, so he can be at peace with that slut, Amara, that he calls his ~one true love~? The Travelers don't want that."
When Stefan asks her why they don't want that to happen, she dodges the question by saying that though it's an important part of the story, it's not something she's going to share with us, at least not yet. Stefan is already annoyed with this exposition, and starts drinking again to try to make it a more pleasant experience. (I suggest you do the same!) Tessa goes on to say that the Travelers have possessed the anchor since they killed Tessa, and they have been keeping it safe by constantly moving it to different locations so that the wrong people don't end up getting their hands on it. She is sure that the Travelers won't allow Silas to get anywhere close to it, but ideally, she'd like to kill Silas before he can even attempt to find it. Stefan is like, "What if the Travelers suck as bad as the hunters and fail?" but Tessa isn't worried; all she'll say about is that even if Silas can find the anchor, he won't be able to destroy it. Of course, we get no other details, because suspense and drama.
Back at Casa Salvatore, the gang is getting ready to take off as Silas barks out orders. He tells Jeremy to grab as many crowbars as he can find, and then tells Elena that she's staying home. Elena is SO not cool with that plan whatsoever, and both she and Damon think that Silas is just joking, but he isn't. "Actually, I'm 100% serious. She's a freaky carbon-copy of my ~one true love~, Amara. You can understand why I don't want to stare at her imposter face all day." Rude, dude! The only reason why she exists in the first place was because you and Amara wanted to live forever together, so I'd say that's your bad, dude.
Damon agrees with me, but Silas argues that he would make more sense if Damon had ever been in love with somebody who looked just like her. UH, HELLO SILAS, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Damon was in love with Katherine for 145 years, remember? Silas is just petty and stupid. Elena proclaims this to be ridiculous, and demands that she be allowed to go, so Silas uses his magic to cause Jeremy's crossbow, which is laying on a nearby table, to shoot an arrow into Elena's leg. Elena falls to her knees, and Damon, who is PISSED, now, runs over to help her pull it out. Silas cares not, and states, "The next one goes in the heart. Now, hurry up! I only have until sundown before Tessa tries to stop me." OH LORD THIS IS GOING TO BE SO MESSY.
Stefan cracks that there is one upside to not having his memories, which is that he has no memories of how he got caught up in such a fucked-up, supernatural life. Tessa just laughs, and brags, "Rest easy, sweet pea. Don't you worry about the details. Silas IS going to die today, and he will spend an eternity on the Other Side, as far away from Amara, and peace, as possible." Yeah, that kind of cockiness is what ruins EVERY SINGLE PLAN in this universe. She walks to the door to leave, and adds, "I have it all covered. You don't scheme as long as I have without considering every possibility." Yeah, famous last words, sister. She tries to leave the cabin, but she gets stuck at the threshold, no matter how much she tries to push through it. Furious and annoyed, she pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs. Stefan asks what the deal is, so she huffs that Silas put a spell on the cabin that is trapping them inside it until the sun sets. She knows this because apparently, she was the one who taught him the spell in the first place. Oh, wonderful.
Katherine somehow managed to get to Whitmore College and into Caroline and Elena's dorm room, where she has taken a shower and dyed her hair back to it's original dark brown hue. She stands and stares at herself in the mirror, and is startled when Caroline walks in and immediately starts rambling. "I don't want to know if Tyler called, so don't even tell me. So, do you want to do small appliances, or toiletries?" Katherine tries to maintain cover as best as she can, and just stares at Caroline as she starts packing up herself. Luckily for her, Caroline is too distracted by packing and worrying, so she just continues to pack and babble about how she considered compelling a cute boy to pack for them, but she's kind of done with cute boys for a while, due to her breakup with Tyler and the fact that Jesse has been ignoring her calls since she brought him to Mystic Falls.
Kat to innocuously ask about Caroline and Elena moving out without arousing her suspicions, and for a moment, Caroline continues to be oblivious--she just recaps about how Dr. Maxfield knows that they're vampires somehow, and threatened to expose them if they didn't leave Whitmore. She immediately gets suspicious when Katherine's only response is, "That suuuucks;" it takes less than a second for her to zoop over and throttle Katherine against the wall. She demands to know why she's pretending to be Elena, but Katherine rasps that she just needed a place to crash. Caroline is understandably not cool with this. "What? I loathe you!" Katherine: "I'm desperate, okay? Damon kicked me out, Stefan doesn't remember me, and I just spent my last twenty dollars on a meal that I didn't even get to enjoy!"
As you can imagine, Caroline doesn't really feel that bad for her, especially considering that Katherine is the one who killed her, which turned her into a vampire. Katherine brings up the fact that Caroline obviously needs her, since she's running away and giving up, which are not very Caroline-like qualities. She decides to offer up her services to make Caroline more likely to help her out. "In exchange for a place to stay--and Elena's meal card--I will help you deal with Dr. Whoever." Caroline explains that it's Maxfield, and that he's a bio professor at this school. Katherine is pretty amused by the fact that Caroline is running scared from a puny little teacher, and offers to show her how to be the villain, for once. "What do you say, roomie?" Wait, has Katherine ever even been to school in her life? Can we get a spin-off that is just flashbacks of her life over the last 500+ years? GIVE IT TO ME NOW.
At the cabin, Stefan's phone starts to ring as Elena calls him from Casa Salvatore. (Hey, I thought there was no cell service there? Tessa is a liar!) He seems to be in the shower, or sleeping, or something, because she ends up picking up the phone and answering it. Elena, naturally, wants to know who the fuck is answering Stefan's phone, and Tessa's like, "Uncanny. Your doppelgänger voice is exactly like Amara's. So whiny." Elena quickly figures out who she's talking to, and asks her what she did with Stefan. Tessa is enjoying messing with Elena's slight jealousy issues, and lies that Stefan is off in the shower after a couple rounds in the sack with her. She asks if she can leave a message, and Elena's like, "Yeah, remind him that you're a crazy bitch!" Not to be outdone, Tessa retorts, "I would, but I think that's maybe his type." BURN!
Elena hangs up the phone and immediately calls Damon up to tell him what just happened. She informs him that Stefan is with Tessa, and wants to know why he keeps going back to her. Damon tries to write this off as New-Stefan being fickle and annoying, but Silas asks, "Wait, you didn't tell Elena what we did to Stefan?" And, of course, Elena hears it and demands that he tell her what happened. "Silas needed his psychic juju to get into Tessa's head, and the only way to temporarily reactivate his abilities was to break Stefan's neck..." After a moment, he adds, "...a couple times." Elena is PISSED, because even though they're not together anymore, she doesn't want him to hate them, and he already has enough ammo against them as it is.
(via marystuart)
Sidebar: Why would Silas help manipulate Elena into going over to look for Stefan at Tessa's cabin? He had to have known she'd get trapped inside, and since Tessa now knows that Damon is working with Silas, it wouldn't be hard to guess that she'd use Elena for leverage to get Damon to kill him for her. Like it or not, he DOES need Damon's help, so it just doesn't seem wise to for Silas to contribute to something that could possibly result in his death, or at the very least, Damon's help, you know? That just kind of bugged me.
Time to check in with the bad doctor Wes Maxfield, who is looking at some samples in a microscope and is talking into his audio recorder. He starts with, "Subject 62547, blood film analysis," but cuts himself off when he hears a noise. He looks around a bit, and when he sees nothing of note, he gets back to his experiments. "Cellular growth rate is phenomenal, as expected--" We hear another soft *whoosh*, so he sets his recorder down and gets up to investigate. When he comes back, the recorder is gone. That's when Caroline approaches him. He asks her wtf she's doing here, but he doesn't get an answer. What he DOES get is an injection of some kind of drug, right in the neck, courtesy of Katherine Pierce. Once he's passed out, Katherine smiles smugly at Caroline, who returns it with a genuine smile of her own. BEST TEAM EVER. I hope the fact that they'll be living together means we'll get more team-ups, because seriously, they are awesome and get so much shit done when they join forces.
Tessa opens the door of the cabin to find Elena on her doorstep, and doesn't even try to not mince her words. "Well, if it isn't Stefan's fated love? [...] Come on in, who am I to stand in the way of destiny?" She smiles fakely at her, and though Elena seems a bit suspicious, she still ends up walking in the cabin. As soon as Stefan sees her, he tells her she shouldn't have come, but Elena figures that he means he doesn't want to see her. She explains that she wouldn't have let Damon do what he did if she'd known. Stefan disagrees, and says she has an "annoying tendency" to do whatever Damon says. Ummm, first of all, HOW WOULD HE KNOW? He has no memories. Secondly, Elena pretty much always disagrees with Damon's methods, except during that blasted sire-bond story line, in which case it wasn't even her fault, so EW, Stefan, cut it out.
Not wanting to miss out on an opportunity to pick on Elena in some weirdo attempt to deal with her Amara issues, Tessa chirps, "I'm no shrink, but I think it's called 'codependence.'" Elena is pretty much done with these games, so she admits that while he has plenty of reasons to be pissed at them, sleeping with Tessa isn't going to change anything. Stefan's like, "Um, when did I sleep with Tessa?" It takes them a moment to realize that Tess totally lied to her, but Tessa admits that she did exaggerate for effect. Elena, now knowing that Stefan is more-or-less safe, goes to take her leave, but finds out the hard way that she can't, thanks to Silas' spell. "Yeah, you really shouldn't have come inside," Stefan replies.
Silas, Damon and Jeremy have finally arrived at the warehouse in New Jersey, where this hilarious and awesome exchange happened:
SILAS: "How do you do it, Damon? How can you stand being here, while your girlfriend sits and home, worrying about her doppelgänger soulmate?"
DAMON: "It's called being secure. I'm assuming you know a little about that, by the way you wear your hair. Please don't tell me you believe in this doppelgänger prophecy crap."
SILAS: "Crap? What do you mean, 'crap?' Do you not notice the universe trying to mirror my love for Amara by bringing our doppelgängers together?"
DAMON: "You do realize that by destroying the Other Side, that you are personally moving Heaven and Earth to be together? That's not fate, you idiot, that's you being a crazy person."
Get it, Damon! Like I've said before, Silas gets off on screwing with people's heads, even without his telepathic abilities, so the fact that Damon is not letting that guy get to him, for once, just makes me so fucking happy and proud of him. After Damon breaks the lock on the door handle, they enter the warehouse, where Jeremy asks where the anchor is. Silas admits he has no idea, and when Damon is like, "The fuck you say?" Silas replies that it's still impressive that he managed to dig through her mind and get the warehouse location. When Jeremy asks what the anchor is/looks like, we learn that Silas has no idea about that, either, since Tessa created the Other Side AFTER he was entombed on Nova Scotia's random ass island. Damon is understandably annoyed at the news that Silas doesn't know what the anchor is, nor what it looks like, but Silas retorts, "It binds a spell to a supernatural Hell-dimension, it's not going to look like a freaking IKEA sink!" LOL FOREVER.
Back at the MaxLab, the Dream Team is waiting for Wes to wake up. Caroline asks Kat what the fuck she injected him with, but Kat has no idea. "I don't know, it just said 'avoid contact with eyes'...and 'do not ingest.' Oops!" Bahahaha. Wes starts to wake up, and notices the bottle in Katherine's hand. He groggily informs them that it's etorphine, but Katherine just shrugs. Wes is still a little confused, because he assumes that Katherine is Elena. Caroline informs him that they're planning to drain the vervain out of his system so they can compel him to forget that she and Elena are vampires. Wes is not game for this plan, because he's convinced that they will end up killing him, but Caroline shushes him so she can calculate. "I'm just--I'm trying to do some math, okay? So, if the average male has five liters of blood in his system...then...carry the one..." Kat advises her to round up, so Caro exclaims, "Perfect! 4.7 pints. Should I use the right arm, or the left arm?"
Wes is terrified now, and begs the girls to untie him so that he can find the vein himself. "You WILL kill me!" LOL, that's what he's worried about? I don't know, sticking IVs into a healthy, well-hydrated dude is really not that difficult. It's not like it's a 90 year old woman with tiny, hard veins or something. Plus, Caroline's a vampire, so I think she'd know her way around a circulatory system. Katherine reminds them that she knows also knows what to do, having been a torturer for the better part of five centuries, and deftly inserts the needle into his arm. After Caroline provides her with some IV tubing and some tape, Katherine drops the end of the tube in a large beaker, which begins to fill with blood. Katherine grabs a scalpel and presses it to Wes' neck as she asks him how many more people know about them. He tells them they should have left when he told them to, because apparently people are onto them, now.
Caroline is like, "Who's THEY? The people you want to expose us to? That secret society thingy that you belong to?" Agh, so many sentences ending in prepositions. *shudders* Wes reveals that there is a gathering at Whitmore House that day, and that it's a cover for the society to get some ideas of new recruits. He adds that they had planned to invite Elena, but then they started suspecting that she's a vampire. Katherine smugs, "So, all I have to do is convince them that Elena Gilbert isn't a vampire? Done." YES! Wes still thinks she's Elena, and insists that they will never invite her in, which suggests that it's owned by a member so that no vampires can enter. Unfortunately for him, Katherine Pierce is totally a human, and can make it in without an invite anyway. YESSSS. The girls smile at each other once again, and revel in how much shit they get done when they actually work together.
Silas, Damon, and Jeremy are searching through various crates at the warehouse. Jeremy seems to be taking out his frustrations on the crate, and Bonnie appears beside him. "What did that crate do to you?" Jeremy is surprised to see her, so she jokes that she didn't want to miss any of the excitement of the day. Jeremy is afraid she's going to jinx it, but she admits that she just hasn't really gotten her hopes up that she'll actually be brought back to life. "I'm not jinxing it, I'm being realistic. It's not a dime-store spell, Jer. When I brought you back, it killed me, remember? [beat] What I meant was it's just--it's not something I'm going to count on, okay?" Jeremy wants her to have some faith, and spouts some Peter Pan-y, "clap your hands if you believe in fairies!"-type stuff to insist that if they believe it will work, it will work. She repeats, "It'll work," which seems to satisfy Jeremy for now, though she does add that she would happily die a hundred times if it meant he was alive. Jer goes to brush her cheek with his finger, and reminds her that by the end of the day, they'll be able to touch, for reals. OMG STOP IT, YOU TWO.
A few feet away, Silas and Damon are still looking for the anchor. Silas whines at Damon to hurry it up, since he figures the Travelers will eventually show up to move it. Damon doesn't quite understand why the Travelers are so obsessed with the anchor in the first place, so Silas breaks it down for him. "They hate me for creating the immortality spell, and they know the anchor's the only thing standing between me and my soul mate. Every love story needs to have one thing that keeps getting in the way. [beat] Kind of like you, Damon!" Meowwww. Damon reminds him that though he may be an "all-powerful witch," but Damon is still happy to kill him if he keeps pushing that particular button. Silas knows he won't, though, because he's determined to bring Elena's best friend back.
This sass-fest is interrupted by Damon's phone ringing. The caller ID says it's Stefan, but unfortunately, it isn't. Tessa informs him that since she's currently indisposed, Damon is going to have to kill Silas for her. Damon's like, "Happily, lady," but adds that Silas, being the control freak that he is, wants to kill himself, rather than allowing someone else to do it. "You mean, after he destroys the Other Side? Yeah, that's not gonna happen, plus, I want him dead before he has the pleasure of finding the anchor." Damon still doesn't know wtf she's talking about, but she's still not giving details--she simply orders him to kill him, STAT. In the background, Elena pleads for Damon, which Damon hears so Tessa adds insult to injury by quipping, "Did I mention I lured your girlfriend here to me? I used the oldest trick in the book--jealousy, of Stefan! Thought you should know!"
Elena is pissed, and goes to walk away from all the negativity wafting off of Tessa, but Tessa lifts a hand to give her a witchy migraine, which brings her to her knees. Surprisingly, this seems to piss Stefan off, too, and he yells at her to stop. Damon pleads the same, and admits that he needs Silas to do something for him before he dies. "Is that something more important than Elena? Because Silas put a spell on this house and bound it to the sun, which means we're trapped here until sundown, which means you have until then to kill Silas, or I kill Elena. [beat] With a face like Amara's, it might be cathartic. Bye now!" She hangs up before Damon can say anything more, so he smashes a bunch of boxes in anger and frustration. Man, Tessa, I can get on board with your brand of crazy, but if you harm a hair on Elena's head, I S2G...
Katherine-as-Elena is dressed up in her church-y best, in a cute sundress and wavy hair. Diane Freeman, the campus police chief, answers the door and is shocked to see Elena at the doorstep. She greets her by name, and Katherine is, like, "You know me?" Diane reminds her that they met the night that Megan died, so Katherine immediately covers for herself, and blames her forgetfulness on the craziness of that evening. Diane tells her she didn't know that she was coming, and Katherine chirps, "Did I forget to RSVP? Sorry, I've just been so busy, with my studies." Diane smiles and tells her they just started the tea as she gestures for Katherine to enter the house. She very noticeably avoids giving her a verbal invitation, I should add. When Katherine easily crosses the threshold, Diane looks pretty stunned.
Our fair Katerina makes a bee-line for the table full of party food, and hilariously wastes no time in stuffing her face (and purse) with sandwiches and snacks. After a few moments, she notices Aaron standing beside her, staring at her as she shamelessly pilfers whatever she can reach. She gives him a look, and deadpans, "What? Are you the sandwich police?" LOL, I love Katherine so fucking much this season, I didn't think it was possible. Aaron admits that he isn't, he's just wondering why Wes told him to stay away from her. Of course, Katherine has no idea who he is, and asks if she knows him. He reintroduces himself as Aaron, and adds that they met the previous day, on campus and at the costume ball. She comically says, "Aaron, duh! Hi! So, what are you doing here? Are you a part of [lowers voice to a stage-whisper] the secret society?"
Aaron's pretty puzzled at this question, and asks her wtf she's talking about, so she whispers, "You know, the SOCIETY." He still isn't following, so Katherine proclaims him to be either genuinely clueless, or a very good liar. Her attempts at gathering intel are interrupted, however, when she begins to cough. She gets a very horrified look on her face and quickly turns her back to Aaron as she spits a molar into her hand. SHE COUGHED UP A TOOTH. That is so gross and terrifying, I'm going to have nightmares forever, now. Aaron didn't miss this new development, either, and asks her if that's actually a tooth in her hand. Katherine starts to panic. "No. What is happening to me?" She quickly dashes away before more of this crazy, reverse-Benjamin Button syndrome's symptoms start to present themselves.
Tessa is flipping through a foodie magazine and marveling over all of the delicious concoctions that have been created since she was alive back in Ancient Greece, like pineapple on pizza. Elena sulks in the corner, which doesn't go unnoticed by the ancient witch. She cracks, "So sad. Let me guess, gluten-free?" More like the "eat for your blood type" diet, am I right?What Elena really wants to know is how Tessa is alive, after being dead and on the Other Side for two millenia. Tessa is vague, as usual, which makes me suspicious. "Ahh, yeah, that. You can blame your friend Bonnie for that. She opened the door and distracted herself when she brought your little brother back, SO, I just walked right through when she died."
Honestly, I'm not buying it. I know that Jeremy said that the only reason why he is alive is because Bonnie died to maintain the balance of nature, but I still have a sneaking suspicion that she either managed to kill Bonnie, or profited from her death somehow in order to bring her back to life. Her cagey-ness just really pings my hinkiness radar, I guess. Elena, still angry, snaps, "Well, today, Silas was going to bring her back to life after he got the anchor, but you told my boyfriend-who has never put anyone's life before mine, including his own--to kill Silas before he could do that. So, no, I'm not sad about the pizza." YOU TELL HER, GIRL. Tessa just smirks at her, taking pleasure in her pain, and goes back to drooling over magazine recipes. Stefan tells her to forget about pizza, because he's going to cook instead. Didn't he lose his memories of cooking stuff? Sigh. Tessa suggests roasted duck, so Stefan is like, "Wait, do you have a duck?" She admits that she doesn't, but she figures since she managed to lure Elena into the cabin, catching a duck the same way can't be more difficult than that. They both giggle, and Elena continues to pout in the corner. Pobrecita!
Outside the warehouse, Damon and Jeremy are discussing their current predicament, and Jeremy is furious. "We can't kill Silas, Silas is the only one who can bring Bonnie back, and he's not going to bring her back until right before he destroys the Other Side." Damon reminds him that Tessa wants him to do it now, so he doesn't really have a choice, but Jeremy argues that he promised Elena that they would bring Bonnie back. Damon is more than a little frustrated and stressed right now, too. "You don't think I'm aware of that? But, if Tessa kills Elena, guess who's not going to make it to Bonnie's "Welcome Home!" party? [beat] The plan's off, Jeremy. Bonnie's not coming back. Sorry." Both boys are super bummed, and Damon reluctantly returns back to the warehouse to finish the job.
Bonnie joins Jeremy outside the warehouse, and his face as he explains what happened is so fucking heartbreaking. She assures him that it's okay. "Jeremy Gilbert, do you not know me at all? Is there a part of you that thinks for one minute that I'd let one of my friends die, just so I could come back to life?" Bonnie Bennett really is the best friend ever, seriously. She reminds Jer that she's dead, and that this whole plan failing is just more proof that she's supposed to accept the reality of her death. Jeremy is just so upset at how close they were to bringing her back for good, and Bonnie concedes that he's right. "Now, go help him kill Silas." Bonnie Bennett is a beautiful soul.
Damon, who has returned to wandering around the warehouse, turns into a new aisle where he's approached by a random male Traveler. The manwitch starts to chant, "Sul opraem chele kuzlo." Damon: "I've met a lot of witches in my day, never quite heard that one before." Being the language nerd that I am, I'm really interested in the various languages that witches use in their spells. Esther, Bonnie, and Sheila seem to use a vaguely Latin-esque language, but the Travelers we've seen thus far have spoken Czech. Tessa's spells aren't in either of those languages, but I haven't heard enough to be able to identify what it is. I figure it's probably either Ancient Greek, or maybe Aramaic, like the spell that entombed Silas? Any other fellow language nerds have any better guesses?
ANYWAY, another male Traveler comes up behind Damon, and they continue to chant, "Sul opraem chele kuzlo," over and over again. Damon correctly identifies them as Travelers, but they ignore him and keep chanting, which eventually causes his daylight ring to stop working. His arm starts to burn in the sunlight, so he backs up into the shadows and yells, "Why do you witches always go for the daylight ring?" It's true, really; that and witchy migraines are the witches' first line of defense against vampires. He runs over to the second Traveler and plunges his hand into his chest as he informs them that he was about to do them a favor by killing Silas for them. How do the Travelers already know that he's cured, anyway? Did someone have a prophetic vision or something? The first Traveler reveals that they don't want him dead just yet, but since this goes against Damon's current plans, he grabs a knife from the second Traveler, throws it into the first Traveler's chest, and then rips out the heart of the second. Badass! Also, I'm almost positive that the knife he threw looked JUST like Gregor's knife that Matt is currently guarding, which Damon might have noticed if anyone on this show gave a fuck whatsoever about Matt Donovan. So, now I'm even more curious about wtf that knife is about.
Wes is still being bled of the vervain, while Caroline sits and zones out nearby. He's a little unnerved by how calm she his, which is starting to freak him out. I'm wondering if he's surprised at Caroline's ability to keep herself in control, despite the beaker full of blood that is right in front of her. All of the vampires on this show were pretty easily triggered when humans were bleeding around them, near the beginning of the series. Even Stefan and Damon had difficulties at first. So, I'm wondering if maybe their recently-gained level of control is unusual in the vampire community or something? Anyway, Caroline apologizes for spacing out, but Wes is still pissy, because he claims that he could have died from bleeding to death had he not spoken up. She blames her spaciness on her broken heart, and basically tells him to cut her some slack before she turns on the compulsion eyes and mind-whammies him into answering her questions truthfully.
Her first question is, what is the secret society? He explains that it's called Augustine, and to be a member, you usually have to be a legacy. (which explains why Elena would have been asked to be a member, since it's pretty obvious her dad was involved somehow) But some members, like him, are offered admission for particular talents, like having a vampire science lab. "Not to mention that you're willing to lie on autopsy reports, like my roommate's! You knew she was killed by a vampire. Is that why you covered up her death?" Wes confesses that he had to cover up her death because she wasn't just killed by your regular, run-of-the-mill vampires, she was killed by the Augustine vampire! Oh god, is the Augustine vampire going to be Grayson Gilbert? I can't decide if that would be super stupid or super brilliant.
Unfortunately, we don't get the chance to find out who the Augustine vampire is, because someone knocks on the lab's door. After a moment, a voice calls out, "Wes, are you in there? It's Diane Freeman." Caroline hurries up and compels him to forget that she and Elena are vampires, and that they drained him of blood. The excuse for his light-headedness is because he donated blood. Diane walks in and asks if he's there. Caroline has disappeared, thankfully, and Wes is like, "Duh, I'm here." She reminds him of the Whitmore party, which he totally missed. He's a little puzzled as to why he can't remember the last few hours, and tells her that the time must have gotten away from him while he was working. "That's not all you missed," Diane explains. "Guess who I watched strut right in the front door? Elena Gilbert. Clearly not a vampire. What made you so convinced she was?" Wes is understandably spacey from the blood loss, and now super confused from the compulsion, so he admits he must have been mistaken or something. She looks a little suspicious of his behavior, but I doubt she'd think he had been confronted by vampires and compelled, since they all must ingest/wear vervain religiously.
At the cabin, Stefan is cooking for Tessa, and asks her to sample whatever it is that he's prepared. She tastes a spoonful and coos at him about how good it is, and they continue to act all shmoopy to really get under Elena's skin. Elena may be jealous, but she's not an idiot, so she calls them out on their pettiness. She reminds Stefan that while he may not remember who he is, she does, and insists that Tessa isn't the kind of person he would like. Tessa feigns offense at this comment. "That's not very nice, especially considering I've allowed you to remain alive until sundown." She looks out the window and realizes the sun is beginning to set, so she adds, "Ahh, almost sundown!" Tessa skips away to grab Stefan's phone to call Damon, and Stefan pretends to keep cooking as he whispers so quietly that only Elena can hear him. "Elena, don't say a word. I've got this. I know you think I hate you, but I don't. I won't let her hurt you, I promise."
Tessa, on the phone, waits for Damon to pick up. When he finally does, she asks if he's dead yet. Damon runs into Jeremy and mutters, "Man up, we're under attack." He then returns to Tessa, and admits that no, he's not dead, because he got held up by "some of her inbred Traveler cousins." He asks her why the fuck the Travelers wouldn't want to kill Silas right away, and Tessa figures they probably want his blood. My mind immediately went to Silas' gravestone, which contained Tessa's calcified blood, that everyone wanted to use as a power source. Sadly, that's not it-- The Travelers want Silas' blood, because, just like Katherine's blood became the cure after she ingested it, Silas' blood is now the cure because he drank Katherine's cured blood. That's one crazy potion, jfc!
Damon reminds Tessa that the Travelers aren't immortal, since they hate immortality, so they have no reason to need it. "Think about it, Damon. The Travelers aren't fans of immortality. I had to bind the Other Side to something, something that would last forever, something that Silas couldn't destroy." OH SHIT OH SHIT. At the warehouse, Silas starts to open a huge crate.
Damon is totally lost, so Tessa continues to encourage him to fill in the blanks. "Something a little closer to his heart. 2,000 years old, immortal, indestructible. You're a quick boy, Damon. Figure it out." OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD. Tessa hangs up the phone. Stefan sees that the sun has finally set, so he grabs a kitchen knife and stabs Tessa with it before throwing her up against the wall. He orders Elena to run, and the two dash away. Tessa may be super-injured, but she's also LIVID, as you'd imagine.
At the warehouse, Damon has finally figured it out. When he mutters, "No way..." Jeremy approaches him and asks him wtf is happening. As he talks in voiceover, Silas opens the huge crate with a crowbar. "2,000 years old, immortal, indestructible. The anchor isn't a thing, it's a person. She never killed Amara." Silas finds her, completely desiccated into stone, with her arms crossed over her chest. She looks like a statue of Mary, really. Silas is completely shocked that she's still alive, and runs over to grab one of the dead Travelers. He cuts the corpse's wrist, and lugs him over to Amara so he can feed it to her. The stone around her starts to crack and soften, and eventually, Amara grabs the Traveler's wrist to continue feeding. Silas softly says, "Amara, it's me," and after a moment, Amara opens her eyes. HOLY SHIT. I knew that Amara was probably going to come back somehow, but this is not at ALL what I expected would happen! OMG.
Silas helps his ~one true love~ out of the warehouse, and she's kind of understandably freaking out. Unlike Tessa, she really didn't get to see how the world changed while she was out of commission, and unlike Silas, she wasn't fed dribbles of blood over the centuries to keep her slightly aware. She keeps muttering, "Go away, go away, leave me alone!" over and over again. Silas assures her that it's him, but she's shocked to see that he's still here, after all this time. She's still a little weak, since one body's worth of blood probably isn't enough to undo 2,000 years of desiccation, so she leans against a dumpster. Silas informs her that he spent all these years believing she was dead, since Qetsiyah/Tessa said she had killed her. Amara reveals that she couldn't kill her, because there was only one cure, and she wanted Silas to take it. Couldn't she have made more? I don't understand that at all.
He confesses that he ended up taking the cure recently, because he wanted to kill himself so he could be reunited with her. She realizes that his blood is now the cure, just as Silas tells her he was going to die for her. She hugs him, so Silas lets his guard down, not noticing that Amara has picked up a piece of broken glass by the dumpster. She tells him she loves him, and apologizes in advance for what she's about to do, which is to STAB HER ~ONE TRUE LOVE~ IN THE NECK. "I have to be cured," she says, before feeding on him frantically. After she's drained him, she pulls away, and he falls to the ground. "I can't live another day." OMG. I will have plenty to say about this at the end, don't you worry.
Wes is still working on his mad-scientist shit in his lab, and continues his blood film analysis with his microscope. He reaches into his pocket for his recorder, but it's not there. When he goes to look around his lab for it, Katherine walks into the lab and joins him. Wes still thinks she's Elena, and when he asks why she came by, she tosses him his recorder. He's a little confused as to how she came to possess it, but she keeps mum. "Mystery. I listened to about half before I nearly blew my brains out from boredom, except for the part about your subject's blood being abnormal. That part was mildly interesting."
He thanks her for bringing it back, but she has one more question about subject 62547: is it the Augustine vampire? (62547 is Jesse, right? So it can't be the Augustine vampire, unless he was somehow a vampire before he was turned? GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING) He clams up, and coldly tells her he thinks she should leave, but she threatens to tell everyone on campus about the Augustine society and all of his crazy vampire experiments. He points out that that sounds a little bit like blackmail, and calls her Elena, again, so she sets the record straight. "Actually, my name is Katherine. Elena is my doppelgänger, and while I let you chew on that, I'll admit there is something that I can't solve on my own." She reaches into her purse and pulls out the tooth she coughed up earlier. He asks her if that is really her tooth, and she admits that it is. "I think I'm dying, and I need you to save my life." OH GOD, KATHERINE CAN'T DIE.
Amara is wandering around outside the warehouse, and is overwhelmed with what seems to be voices and people that she can see and hear that no one else can. This is super interesting to me, though I'll save my thoughts on that for the end, too. She keeps rambling, "Stop talking! It's not up to you! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Please, leave me alone! Leave me alone!" She stumbles around, and eventually runs into Damon, who is stunned to see her. She is startled at the sight of him, and after a minute, she asks, "Are you real?" Damon continues to stare at her, and replies, "Are you?"
(via http://thevampirediaries.co.vu/)
Stefan and Elena have returned to Casa Salvatore, and when they walk into the foyer, he wishes her a good night before turning to head upstairs. Elena stops him, and admits that's surreal how even with no memories, Stefan really is still Stefan, deep down. Stefan gets strangely modest. "Well, Tessa was gonna kill you, and you don't seem like you deserve that, so I was just going on instinct, that's all." That's exactly what Elena means, though-- Stefan's instinct has always been to protect her (except that one time she drowned to death, of course), so she thanks him for being him. He takes his leave and departs for his bedroom, and Elena joins Damon and Jeremy in the parlor, where they're both drinking some bourbon. Man, they really get my Gilbert/Salvatore family feels riled up. Elena, Damon, and Jeremy are the cutest makeshift family ever. The only way it could be better is if Alaric was there, too!
"Stefan Salvatore sleeps in his own bed tonight," Damon mutters bitterly. "Does that mean he stopped hating us, or did the power of the doppelgänger universe push him into the car with you?" Ouch, harsh toke, Damon! Elena admits that he saved her life, so she's going with "not hate," which Damon proclaims to be the one tiny bit of success in the otherwise major failure of their day. He lifts the bottle he's drinking from toward Jeremy, who raises his own glass of booze. Elena gives him a look, but come on! Everyone on this show's blood is mostly composed of grain alcohol at this point, so give the kid a pass. He used to be dead, for Christ's sake! Jeremy agrees, and adds that since they didn't get Bonnie back, he gets a pass. Bonnie appears behind him, and tells him to tell Elena that it's all for the best, but Jeremy mutters, "No, no, I won't, because it's not."
Damon and Elena are like, "Bwuh?" since Jeremy appears to be talking to himself, so he recaps what Bonnie said to him. Shouldn't they be used to Jeremy always talking to dead friends, already? Elena hilariously looks around the room as she tries to guess where Bonnie is standing, and promises her that they're going to keep trying, because they've dealt with way worse than this. Damon's not so optimistic, though. "Well, Silas is MIA and out and about, which is pretty bad. And, Amara's been cured, which is even worse, because now she's easy to kill. So, the fate of the Other Side, where Bonnie currently resides, rests on a living, breathing human being that we now need to protect." Elena is a little confused at the "we" in this scenario, so Damon takes her outside, and opens the trunk of Jeremy's (or Alaric's?) SUV. Inside, Amara lays in the trunk, her hands and feet bound, and with a bandanna gag in her mouth. "Elena,, meet Crazy Pants. Crazy Pants, meet Elena." Elena stares at this third doppelgänger in shock, and Amara looks at her own double and literally SHRIEKS in terror.
(via pethrovafire)
Stefan gets to his room to find Tessa already there. OH SHIT! He asks what she's doing there, and is understandably nervous, after what he just did. "Do you have any idea what it's like, watching history repeat itself?" Honestly, I think that he does. Or, WOULD, if he had his memories. Again, remember the Katherine thing? To his credit, Stefan looks remorseful for hurting her, though Tessa was the one who was about to kill Elena, so he offers to heal her, but she wants to keep her wounds, as a reminder that Stefan isn't the nice guy that she thought. "See, memories are important. I made a mistake when I found you, I eased your pain. You used to have a lot of pain, remember?" She lifts her hand in the air and concentrates on him, and Stefan falls to the ground in pain. "You killed your own father, and then forced your brother to become a vampire." We start to get flashbacks of many of Stefan's painful memories, just so we know she's giving him his memories back.
"And that was just the start of your reign of terror. You hated yourself for a century, but then you found her." Cue flashback to Elena and Stefan meeting in the cemetery, alllll the way back in the pilot. Tessa cracks that their happiness didn't last very long, and Stefan begs her to stop. No dice, Steffy. Sorry, bud. "But the ending's the best part, because you actually felt real pain, physical pain, torture. Remember?" We flash back to last season's finale, when Silas showed Stefan his true face, stabbed him in the gut with a stake, locked him in a safe, and threw him down into the quarry. "You tried to scream, you tried to escape, but all you could do was drown, over and over again. The only thing keeping you sane was that, one day, one of the two people you loved would come rescue you. But they didn't. I did. Always remember that." She leaves Stefan to obsess over his newly reacquired memories. Oh shit, we're going back to horribly depressed, horribly guilty-feeling Stefan now, aren't we? I might actually be okay with that, actually. HOOOOLY SHIT.
Next week: Doppelgängers, doppelgängers, doppelgängers everywhere! Also, Stefan wants to kill Silas. This should totally end well.
[screencaps via KissThemGoodbye]
Click HERE to read my recap of the next episode of The Vampire Diaries!
NOTES/SPECULATION:
-FIRSTLY, I want to talk about Amara. We already know that she's the anchor that binds the Other Side, right? Tessa chose her because 1) she was immortal, and 2) Silas would be unable to kill her, even if he was able to free himself from his tomb and wanted to destroy the Other Side. Judging by the way that Amara was running around, yelling at people who weren't there, pleading with them to leave her alone, I have a sneaking suspicion that she has a connection to the dead supernaturals on the Other Side, like Jeremy, only more intense, because she's actually connected to it. Either way, I am SUPER excited to see how this turns out! God bless Nina Dobrev.
-As for Katherine, I have a feeling that she's interested in turning herself back into a vampire, or maybe even an immortal, like Silas and Amara. I mean, I would assume that the cure is no longer in her veins, right? So, maybe now she could be turned back into a vampire without any negative consequences? I love Katherine as a human, but I would much rather have her as a vampire than have her die. And since she seems to be aging at an exponential rate, thanks to the fact that she's like, 600+ years old now, she'd probably be more than willing to take her chances at being turned again, if she's just going to die anyway, right?
-I hate to say it, but I'm really starting to tire of the Silas/Tessa thing, and I hope that this story line resolves itself soon so we can get into bringing Bonnie back and figuring out what the fuck is happening at Whitmore College re: Augustine and all that shit. That said, I am intrigued by the Travelers, and I really want to know what their deal is! Since we know that Nadia is Katherine's daughter, and Gregor is still chilling in Matt's head, I'm hoping we'll get to learn more about them.
-Now onto Silas and Amara's epic love or whatever. Silas has done nothing but moon about Amara, how strong their love is, and even suggested that the universe was trying to mirror their amazing love story in their doppelgängers, but really, we haven't SEEN anything to really prove that. Amara did seem happy enough to see him, but she was still willing to possibly kill him just to end her own suffering. Granted, that could just mean that she's been miserable all this time, and I can't blame her for that, but it just goes to show that their ~true love~ really doesn't seem to be conquering all, blah blah blah. I guess we'll see what happens next week!
Great review as always!!! I totally agree. I have to say though Elena is pissing me off this season. It seems like her acting took a cliff dive. Anyway totally did not see all the surprises at the ending. Loving Jeremy as well this season, so great that he is becoming quite kick butt this season. Matt is becoming more and more the voice of reason which is awesome. I love how Stefan is a lot more open about his desires to kill people but that he still is trying to be the best person he can be! As always great review and can't wait to read your take on this weeks episode!
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@Sobuj, thank you so much! :) I totally agree about Jeremy and Matt, and you're right, the fact that Stefan is a lot more open about his urges rather than trying to play the hero all the time is definitely refreshing. Thank you so much for reading, I REALLY appreciate your support and kind words!
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