Stefan and Damon finally had broments! Sort of! Yay!
Kai is keeping his mouth shut about how to get himself, Bonnie, and Damon out of the repeated 1994 loop. He says that he wants to hear Damon's story of what he did on that day, and why he thinks of this day as "Hell." Damon, reluctantly, tells the story.
In 1994, Damon came back to Mystic Falls to turn over a new leaf and be with his brother. He, Stefan, and Zach Salvatore are all living in the Salvatore boarding house. Zach has a pregnant girlfriend. At first, things seem to be going well, but then Stefan learns that Damon switched out Zach and his girlfriend's vervaine-laced coffee, and has been feeding on them and compelling them to forget. Stefan takes Damon's daylight ring and locks him away, telling him that he can't be trusted. Stefan was hoping that this time would be different, but it seems that whenever Damon shows up to make amends, he ends up ruining Stefan's life. In grief and anger, Damon manages to get free and kill the people in the boarding house. He gets his ring back from Stefan, and he then kills the pregnant girlfriend. Stefan compels Zach to forget about the girlfriend and the baby, and then he clears out, only to return 15 years later (where the show starts in Season One).
Back in 1994-Hell, Kai reveals that he has a special object that will help them get home, with the help of Bonnie's magic. It all has to do with harnessing the power of the eclipse. Based on a few things that Kai lets slip about his own past, and a newspaper article, Bonnie discovers that Kai has murdered his entire family. He tells them that he's a witch, sort of. He has the ability to suck people's powers away from them. Bonnie doesn't want to do the spell to get them out of there, because it will mean bringing Kai, a psychotic killer, along for the ride. Damon wants to go back anyway, because of course he wants to get back to Elena and Stefan. Kai says he'll take all of the magic out of Bonnie and kill her, unless they help him to get home.
Then, we have our story back in the world of 2014.
The whole gang is still searching for Sarah, who ran off with the knowledge that Elena and Caroline are vampires. Stefan is getting ready to head out of town and start over, but Elena says she wants to come along, to see Stefan's system for starting a new life, so she can believe he'll really be happy. He takes her to a bar and fake-proposes to her. She plays along. Stefan says it's as easy as that - now they're new people! But you have to start over every 30 years or so, or people start to wonder why you never age. As Elena is getting ready to leave, Stefan gets into a fight with a guy at the bar, seeming to revel in getting beat up. Elena chastises him, saying he's not handling his grief properly. Stefan snaps and tells Elena the truth: she loved Damon, and she erased him. Stefan said that neither one of them could stand to live without Damon, but now Elena doesn't have to, and Stefan does, so he'll do it his own way.
As Stefan fixes up a car, his girlfriend Ivy shows up - turns out, Enzo had turned her into a vampire! Elena reads a note from herself back before Damon was erased from her mind, encouraging her not to get her memories of Damon back, so she can have a chance at a fresh start. Jeremy gets super drunk, so Alaric takes him to the hospital to patch him up. While there, he flirts with one of the doctors. A woman named Jo? I think? In any case, she and Alaric seem to hit it off. Later, Alaric and Jeremy spar, and Alaric tells him that even though he's messed up because of Bonnie, he has to keep moving forward. Meanwhile, Matt tries to get closer to Tripp to learn more about his vampire-hating ways. Tripp decides to tell Matt about vampires - he brings him to where he's been keeping Enzo prisoner. Matt has to pretend to be surprised about vampires. Jeremy finds Sarah, who wants to know about a picture she found in the Salvatore mansion - it's a picture of her birth mother! Gail! Zach's pregnant girlfriend, who was killed by Damon! Turns out, Sarah was actually saved by the doctors after her mother was killed. She survived, and now here she is, looking for answers about her family.
I shall start with the complaining.
No Caroline! Nonsense! That's all I have to say about that.
This Tripp guy is getting really ridiculous. He's too smarmy-villain-ish. The thing is, when humans on this show are anti-vampire, they sort of have a point, right? But Tripp isn't sympathetic or complicated at all. He's vindictive and vaguely sociopathic. I need a bit more complication from him.
This is a nitpick... is killing Gail really the worst thing Damon ever did? Bar none? I know it's horrifying that he killed a pregnant woman, but he's killed a lot of people before. Potentially, he's killed women who were in the early stages of pregnancy, actually. It just felt like after Damon's century and a half of bad behavior, it's odd to definitively say that this was the very worst thing he ever did. Speaking of that century and a half, there were a few awkward script moments where Damon and Stefan recapped all the other flashback episodes we've seen. It could have been a touch more subtle, in my opinion.
But enough of that! Onto the good stuff!
Kai. I know I was complaining about Tripp being a one-note villain, but with Kai, it works so much better. The actor is really milking it, and he's just so... despicable. But in this really delicious way. It's appalling, and it's a good way to remind us that even though Damon has been pretty damn evil sometimes, at least he has a conscience of some sort.
Although I don't ship Damon/Bonnie in particular, I must say, there was a lot of really adorable material here. Especially when Kai threatened Bonnie, and Damon rushed forward and defended her. Even though Bonnie and Damon fight a lot, they seem to be fiercely loyal to one another.
Then there's Damon. There's something so horrific about how much I like a character who could behave in the sort of despicable way that Damon has behaved in the past. The scariest part of this episode for me was what Stefan said to him in the 1994 flashback. Damon has tried to change so many times in the past. Why should Stefan believe this time is any different? And, by extension, even if Damon gets out of the 1994 Hell and he and Elena reunite, what's going to stop Damon from going off the deep end again at some point in the future?
Jeremy and Alaric had a wonderful scene together. They have that pseudo-father-son thing going on, which is nice. I liked how Alaric listed his grievances for us, in case we had forgotten what a terrible life he's had thus far. Jeremy has every right to grieve, but if he still wants to be a part of his community and be with his friends, he has to try to carry on.
I loved the fake proposal scene with Elena and Stefan. These scenes gave me hope that when Damon is back and the three of them have worked out their inevitable angst, maybe Elena and Stefan can be friends like this. Also, I love the fact that Stefan acts like he's mostly okay around Elena, but then he just lets the darkness take him the second she's gone. He's messed up because Damon is gone, and he's being self-destructive. There was this really telling line in the episode where Elena says it must be hard to start over every 30 years with nothing consistent to ground you. And that's what Stefan has lost - his consistency. No matter what else happened in his whole crazy messed up life, he still had Damon.
At first, I was the tiniest bit miffed that the Elena-doesn't-know-she-loves-Damon plot was ending so quickly, But in some ways, this makes it all even more deliciously angst-y. Now, Elena knows that she did love Damon, and that she chose to forget it. It's a much more conscious choice to turn away from her old life and from her friends, in a certain way. I was complaining last week about Elena, because she didn't seem to have much compassion, but here I sort of like it. She still cares about her friends, as she proves by worrying about Stefan. But the one horrible, selfish thing she did was ultimately what saved her life, and the lives of her friends, too, in a weird way. I'm sort of curious to see what happens next.
DAMON AND STEFAN. "I missed my brother." "I have to get back, not just for Elena, but for my brother." I love how Damon calls Stefan "my brother" a lot of the time. It's so cute. And possessive. But in a cute way. And Stefan says "I loved Damon," which was sort of implied, but it's nice to hear him say it. When Stefan shut Damon out for feeding on the boarding house people, it triggered a lot of rage in Damon, making Stefan feel like part of the whole thing was his fault - he's the one who invited Damon back into his life, and by extension the lives of those around him. And yet you can just see how much Stefan wants Damon to have changed. He wants things to be better, he wants his brother back. It's why he keeps opening the door, and it's why things keep getting messed up. It's a complicated cycle, but I love it. My goodness I can't wait for the reunion. I just can't.
Okay! I think that's enough for one review. This was, over all, a pretty good episode. I'm seriously impressed that they're dragging out Damon and Bonnie being gone for this long. Will they return soon? I'm so excited!
8/10
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