The Vampire Diaries: Hell Is Other People (7x10)

This episode was super filled with Damon & Stefan brotherly moments, which as you all know is my main reason for watching this show. So... I'm happy. Like, really happy. And surprisingly, that's not the only thing that made this episode awesome. All in all, it was a real winner, with only a few small things to complain about.

Cons:

Julian had a brief appearance this week, in one of the many Hell-loops that Damon was repeating again and again. This small scene just re-emphasized to me how little he works as a character. His love for Lily kept things interesting, but now with Lily's death I'm left without much of a stake in his character. We'll have to see where it goes.

This is a small thing, but I must mention it... this show has never been big on historical accuracy, and its attempts to put the characters back in their original historical context has always been charmingly off-the-mark, to say the least. The one thing that always bothers me, though, is when they talk without using contractions in order to make themselves sound old-timey. It just doesn't make any sense and it's very distracting.

The last con is more of a personal preference thing - so, the plot of this episode is basically following Damon through his Phoenix Stone Hell. The entire episode takes place inside his head, even when you're briefly tricked into thinking that perhaps Bonnie has gotten him out. That's excellent, except for the fact that there's one short scene that's clearly supposed to take place outside his head, and it's got Stefan, Caroline, Matt and Bonnie all surrounding Damon's body and trying to figure out how to unite his soul with his body once more. This scene establishes the shocker of an ending, when Damon apparently really wakes up, and proceeds to attack everybody in sight, trying to "reset" once more and go back so he can see his mother. In my opinion, this would have been a lot more effective if we were left in the dark as to whether or not the ending was real, or yet another loop in Damon's head. As it was, the numerous fake-outs didn't have a very good payout at the end.

Pros:

The main plot of this episode was quite strong. Like I said above, the entire thing takes place in Damon's head, for the most part. The Phoenix Stone takes us back to when he was a confederate soldier. He gets a letter from Stefan that worries him, since his brother seems very depressed over Lily's death, and Valerie not coming back, among other things. Damon is desperate to get to Stefan, so he agrees to help hunt down some deserters in exchange for two weeks' leave. Things go wrong when he and his friend Henry try and find the deserters, and end up killing them and the three women living in the house where they were hiding. Damon continually relives this same cycle, but no matter what he does, the men end up dead, or the women end up dead, or the women end up killing him and Henry. He cannot escape from the cycle. This isn't a particularly original plot device, but this episode mixed it up enough to keep me on my toes throughout the whole thing.

The first fake-out was excellent. Damon wakes up and Bonnie is relieved to see that she's succeeded in saving him from the Phoenix Stone. She tells him it's been three months. Then things turn really bad - it turns out that Stefan hasn't been released from the Phoenix Stone yet, and Julian has stolen Stefan's body! Damon goes to get Stefan back, but Julian says he didn't experience Hell properly. He didn't let the pain really get to him. To teach him a lesson about pain, he sets Stefan's body on fire. Damon tries to get to him, but Lily then appears. Damon realizes that he's still trapped in the Phoenix Stone.

I don't want to go on about the plot too much - it's a clever setup, and there are lots of cool things that come out of exploring Damon's Hellscape. In the end, it turns out that the whole thing is about Damon's feelings of guilt about Lily. As he continually fails to retrieve the deserters and bring them back to camp, he is forced to relive the moment where he first got innocent blood on his hands again and again. Damon thinks the trick to breaking free is to get to his brother, but when he finally sees Stefan, he can't free himself yet. Stefan forces him to admit that in that moment, when he first spilt innocent blood, it wasn't Stefan that he wanted. It was Lily, his recently deceased (or so he believed) mother.

Just as Damon is saying sorry to his dying mother from within the Phoenix Stone, Bonnie succeeds in waking him up - for real this time. The end of this episode could have been a bit more impactful if we didn't know for sure whether it was real or another loop in Damon's mind, but in any case, mad props to Ian Somerhalder's performance here. He was killing it all episode, vacillating between his ordinary snarky self and a quieter, softer Damon of the past. In this final scene, he's desperate and sad and he just wants his mother, and nothing anybody can say will calm him down. He hurts Stefan, and from the brief moments we get at the end of that episode it looks like he actually kills Matt, Caroline, and Bonnie. Now, I'm doubting they will go that far, and in fact I see that Caroline remains alive and well from next week's promo. But still - what an intense way to end things!

One detail I really liked in the first fake-out was that Bonnie and Caroline had decided that Damon needed to get out of the stone first, before Stefan, because the longer you're in there the more devoid of humanity you become. While Stefan is certainly dangerous sans-humanity, he's more chaotic evil than anything else. Damon, on the other hand, might go straight for the jugular and kill Bonnie in order to get Elena back. That was some nice logic, and it worked well as an excuse for why Caroline would allow Bonnie to save Damon first.

We got a new character this week named Henry. He was Damon's soldier friend back in the day, and he accompanies Damon on all his many loops in the Phoenix Stone. I really liked him - he was a simple guy, optimistic and friendly, and clearly he and Damon were good friends. I see that he'll continue to play some sort of a role in the story. I'm excited to see what they do with him.

And let us end with a discussion of Damon and Stefan. Because... oh my God. The entire drive of Damon's character was focused on Stefan from pretty much start to finish. In the end, obviously, Damon's journey through Hell was about coming to terms with his mother's death, but who forces the truth out of him? Stefan. Who does Damon want to see during the whole episode? Stefan. What's the first thing Damon asks about when he thinks he's woken from the Phoenix Stone? Stefan. When the Phoenix Stone needs to up the pain and get Damon to succumb to true agony, what does it do? Makes Damon think Stefan is burning to death. I could go on and on, but I'll try and limit myself to a few of my favorite moments:

Damon sitting there with Julian as his gasoline-soaked brother lays on the table next to him. He was just radiating tension in this whole scene, and when Julian throws the match, Damon is devastated and frantic to save Stefan. That's what it's all about, folks!

Then there's the second fake-out, where Stefan is already out of the Phoenix Stone safely when Damon wakes up. Stefan asks Damon not to hold it against Caroline for pulling him out first. Damon replies "never even occurred to me." In fact, in the first fake-out, he was holding it against Bonnie for pulling him out first, instead of his brother. Damon would never, ever put himself before Stefan.

There's also the fact that when Damon is in Hell, reliving this horrible moment again and again, he's so sure that Stefan is the way to safety. He just needs to get to his brother, and everything will be okay again. This constant mantra repeats itself through the episode, as Damon struggles to achieve that one goal. In the end, when he really does wake up, Stefan tries to comfort him, saying "it's me! It's me!" I cannot get over how much I love their relationship.

I'll stop there. Seriously though. Damon and Stefan break my heart in the best possible way. I'll eagerly await next week's installment. Hopefully we get another stellar performance from Somerhalder!

8.5/10