Well okay, then. I asked for some Stefan/Damon broments, and I got them. Unfortunately even that isn't enough for me to give the show a free pass... luckily, the rest of this episode held up pretty well!
Enzo, on the hunt for his missing Maggie (the girl he fell in love with while held captive by Augustine) discovers that Maggie was killed in the '60s. Because of the way she was murdered, Enzo deduces that Stefan is the party responsible, from his ripper days. Enzo kidnaps Luke to force Liv to help him, and the two of them capture Stefan and Elena, who had been studying together in a coffee shop.
Meanwhile, Matt and Jeremy make the unfortunate discovery that the Traveler knife is missing. Apparently too idiotic to figure out what this means, the two of them scratch their heads, clueless, until Damon comes along and points out that this probably means that Tyler has been possessed by the Travelers. Sure enough, this seems to be the case.
Damon gets a call from Enzo, asking him about Stefan's whereabouts in the '60s. Damon figures out that Enzo has his brother and Elena held captive, and he tries to talk him down, insisting that Stefan wasn't even a Ripper in the '60s. He rushes down to the coffee house to stop Enzo from killing Stefan. He's too late to prevent a little torture, though.
Bonnie, who is in the coffee shop too, is mad at Liv because she figures she'd be helping Enzo anyway - if the Doppelgangers die, then the Travelers won't be able to do whatever it is they're trying to do with Stefan and Elena's blood, and the witches will win. Liv seems insulted by this assumption, but we can't really blame Bonnie for her bad mood: since the Other Side is collapsing, Bonnie figures her own death is eminent, since she's the bridge. Liv confirms that this is true, and that she knows no spell to stop Bonnie from dying.
Damon tries to talk Enzo off the ledge, and he makes a startling confession: he was the one to kill Maggie in the '60s. He didn't know who she was, though... Maggie actually tracked him down and was trying to study him, he being a vampire and all. Damon, who was spending these years tracking down Augustine affiliates, was thrilled to have one show up looking for him. He killed her, and made it look like Stefan's work. Why? Well, he was a bit angry (read: hurt) that Stefan hadn't even noticed Damon was missing, when he'd spend his years in captivity holding on to Stefan as the only thing to keep him sane.
Enzo is devastated. Now that Maggie is dead, his friendship with Damon is really the only thing keeping him grounded. Now that Damon is the one who killed Maggie, what is he supposed to do? He decides to turn off his humanity, despite Damon's protests. Damon, who had slipped a shard of glass into Stefan's hands to help him escape, tries to stop Enzo, but Enzo takes Elena and runs.
Both Salvatore brothers rush after them. Damon finds Elena unconscious on campus and brings her home to make sure she's safe. Stefan, meanwhile, gets cornered by Enzo, and it looks like Enzo means to kill him. Instead, at the last second, Enzo basically forces Stefan to pull out his (Enzo's) heart, to make it seem that Stefan did the deed, instead of it being suicide. Stefan doesn't know how to tell his brother that he killed his best friend, so he tells Elena that they have to keep it a secret from Damon.
The Travelers, while all of this has been going on, have been testing their great new plan. One of the Travelers drinks from the captive Tyler's blood, and then has her throat slit. She reawakens as a vampire. Then, she drinks up some Doppelganger blood. And? It turns out it's a cure for vampirism! Only trick is, she reverts back into the human she was right before she changed, meaning she dies of her gaping neck wound. Ew. Well, that's a twist. The trouble is, Elena and Stefan are now in serious danger, as the Travelers want to drain them of all their blood.
Damon tells Stefan that he's going to do whatever he can to help Enzo, because Enzo was there for him in the worst moments of his life. Apparently, whenever Damon started to despair and started to hate Stefan for not rescuing him from Augustine, Enzo talked Damon down and helped Damon not to hate his own brother. Damon tells Stefan that they both owe Enzo for that. Awkward...
So, problems?
Firstly, did anyone notice how totally useless Elena was in this episode? She was literally there to sit next to Stefan as a captive and be worried about stuff. She was never in real danger. Stefan was always the one that Enzo was after. Honestly, she could have been absent from this episode entirely and it still would have worked.
Also, I'm confused about the Travelers. Can someone help explain this to me? Because it's possible I missed something. We now know that Doppelganger blood will cure vampirism, but how does that help the Travelers? They aren't vampires, right? How does the blood help them with their perpetual involuntary nomadic state?
Also, are Matt and Jeremy really that stupid? Why wouldn't they suspect that Tyler was in trouble when they couldn't find the knife? And why did they just stay in the house waiting for other people to help with the problem? Why the hell is nobody out there looking for Tyler? The excuse they gave was that Damon threatened to hurt them if they left the house. Really? For real - you guys are buying that crap? Tyler is a captive of the Travelers and nobody seems to give a crap! For God's sake, Caroline wasn't even in this episode. Damon tried calling her once, is that all we're gonna get?
Bonnie's dying. Again. Okay, good. I kinda hope it sticks this time so that we can give that poor actress a chance to escape and do something better with her career. Bonnie has been a useless character for a long time now, and it makes me so angry that they're not giving her anything to do but sit there as a passive object. Is she really going to die this time? I sort of doubt it, but at the same time I'm not sure what else they can do at this point.
But let's switch over to the good stuff, because I actually think this was one of the better episodes we've had in a while.
Firstly, even though I don't get what the Travelers are up to, I still think it's an awesome idea to have Doppelganger blood be the cure for vampirism. Good twist.
And then mainly, the actual focus on Enzo, Damon, and Stefan was fantastic. The fact that Enzo is a character that we only just started to get to know made me skeptical that I would care about his tragedy. But I did. I really felt for him when he discovered Maggie was dead, and then when he figured out that his best and only friend was the one who killed her. Ouch. I mean, I felt a bit less in the way of sympathy when he was torturing Stefan, but still.
And how dark is it that Enzo would kill himself using Stefan as the tool? That was a really intense scene. The part of me that feeds on Salvatore bromance really wanted Damon to turn up and see Stefan about to be killed by Enzo so that Damon could freak out about it... actually I was a little miffed that Damon took Elena home and didn't spare a thought for Stefan or Enzo in that moment. But actually, I'm really intrigued by where this is going. Enzo's death is bound to cause a rift in the newly repaired Salvatore brother relationship, but I can't help but wonder if Stefan is making things ten times worse by hiding the truth at this point. Stefan could tell Damon that Enzo went truly off the deep end and killed himself... it's possible that Damon would believe him.
That scene at the end with the two of them was perfect. Damon admitted that he's glad he has Stefan as a brother, essentially. He also said that it's all thanks to Enzo that he didn't totally lose his marbles when being held captive. What a delicious tension.
So, yeah. I'll stop there. Enzo's story was the focus, and I thought it was great. All this stuff about the Travelers and the Other Side and Tyler and Bonnie and Liv and whatever... it was fine. Not as annoying as it has been in the past. I'm still just waiting to see how the climactic end to this season is going to pan out. I'm cautiously optimistic, though, that we can move away from love triangle drama and focus on some good old fashioned familial angst. My favorite.
8/10
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