Sigh.... there's never any peace for our dear heroes, is there? I'm not surprised that we ended the season on another angst-ridden cliffhanger that's going to cause everybody more pain to come. I am surprised that I rather enjoyed this season finale!
Cons:
This episode wrapped up a lot of the season's plot threads, and while I actually thought a lot of the scenes were emotionally poignant and felt real, I can't ignore the fact that the plot threads being wrapped up were not exactly stellar. This season has been a real mess at times, and the finale was definitely not good enough to completely cover up the rough patches.
In plot news, things are streamlined and simple - Bonnie has the Huntress's urge to kill all her friends. Damon and the others manage to get into the Armory using the twins to syphon Bonnie's magic away from the door. Damon goes in, kills the Everlasting, and Bonnie is freed from the Huntress curse. Just as everybody is ready to celebrate, Damon is lured by the mysterious evil thing in the Armory, and is turned evil. Enzo tries to follow him, and is turned also. The two disappear, leaving everybody else anxiously trying to find them.
Throughout this plot, we have to wrap up Matt's nonsensical arc this season. He ends up in a car crash caused by swerving Bonnie off of the road to stop her from killing Stefan and Caroline. While injured, he has a hallucination of Penny, who tells him it's not time for him to die yet, and that he needs to put the supernatural world behind him and start over. It looks like Matt is leaving, folks. That part I don't so much, although I will miss him. What's annoying is the Penny thing, since her presence on the show never really gained traction.
The same can be said about Caroline and Alaric's relationship, which mercifully comes to an end tonight so that Caroline and Stefan can have their big reconciliation. Again, this isn't a problem so much with this episode, as I thought the conversation between Caroline and Ric was about as good as I could expect. They talked about how they will always be family, and Ric said that Caroline deserved to be happy. The problem is that the idea of them being romantically connected never worked in the first place. It was a cheap ploy to keep Candice out of the show for a while due to her pregnancy, and to create Stefan/Caroline drama so we could have a sweet reunion.
Finally, there's the issue of the unnamed evil hiding in the Armory. I don't mind turning Damon and Enzo evil to start up the conflict for next season, despite the fact that it's nothing new. What I mind is the utter nonsense and undefined nature of the evil thing that turned them in the first place. Because we still don't know what the damn thing is, we're destined for more exposition-heavy scenes with Armory lore being pulled in, and I am so done with that. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm sort of longing for the good ol' days of Season One, where the drama and conflict was all built around the relationships between the characters, and there wasn't any nonsensical Big Bad force marching around.
Pros:
The problems in this finale were pretty much entirely due to the choppiness of the season as a whole. When you look at this episode on its own merits, it shines pretty bright.
First of all, I love the way they decided to portray Bonnie as the antagonist here. She chases Stefan and Caroline down in her car, intent on catching and killing them, but she calls Caroline and warns her that she's catching up. She finds Enzo, and apologizes to him over and over, demanding that he fight her off, even as she does everything in her power to kill him. I'm fascinated by the idea of Bonnie keeping her rational mind and knowing, intellectually, that she doesn't want to kill these people, even as her instincts are taking over and forcing her to act. I also loved how brave Matt was, promising to stick with Bonnie and stop her from hurting anyone. Of course, he's only human, so Bonnie ends up getting away fairly easily.
There were a lot of emotionally poignant relationships being explored in this episode. I complained that the Matt/Penny moment fell flat, and that Alaric/Caroline never worked to begin with. But the other relationships that we saw here were quite lovely.
Caroline and Stefan have never had the red-hot chemistry that most of the other relationships on this show are known for, but in a lot of ways that's rather refreshing. Caroline's arc in this season has been truncated because of the actress's maternity leave, and I've already talked about how little I approve of the detour with Ric. That being said, Caroline's journey within this episode was quite lovely. She decides to bring her kids in off the bench and use them to syphon Bonnie's magic. These kids are just three years old, but already they are a part of this dangerous world. Caroline has learned that she can't hide from who she is, and that includes hiding in her "perfect family" with Ric. I'm glad to see her put aside her hurt feelings and embrace Stefan the way she's wanted to this whole time.
Enzo and Bonnie. I'm pretty sure that 99% of this relationship's poignancy is coming from the excellent acting and not from the script or the story itself. But hey, for whatever reason, it's actually working for me now. The scene where Bonnie is about to kill Enzo, and he tells her that he lived a miserable life and he's so happy that he got three years of love and happiness with her... wow. That actually got me a bit choked up. I honestly didn't look up anything about contracts with actors for the next season, so I wasn't sure if Enzo was going to die or not. Suffice it to say, I was actually pretty upset when it looked like he might really bite it!
Bonnie has been the one consistently shining spot in a season riddled with inconsistencies, and in this episode she is saved from herself, but she also loses the two people in the world closest to her. Just before the episode ends, she has everything just the way she wants it. Damon is forgiven, Enzo is alive... and then, bam. They're both gone. Caroline emphasizes in her letter to Elena that she's worried about Bonnie because she's lost her two closest people. This gives me hope that Bonnie will continue to be a focus next season. She's a grounding force in the show nowadays, and that's the way I like it.
I've saved the brotherly bond between Stefan and Damon for last, because it is of course my favorite thing about this show. This week, we got an interesting discussion about Damon's philosophy on love vs. Stefan's ideas on free will. Stefan tells Damon that his manipulation of others, his continual practice of saving people from their own bad decisions, is born out of fear of losing the people around him. Stefan would rather let people make their own choices. He doesn't want to be like Damon. This all comes to a head when they enter the Armory together, and Damon tells Stefan that he wants to go into the vault by himself to find the Everlasting. He needs to make the right choice for once in his life - he needs to do the selfless thing and stop putting others at risk to fix his mistakes. Damon and Stefan share a hug, and Stefan goes outside to wait for Damon, placing his trust in his older brother to succeed and save them all.
This plot thread, like everything else in the episode, does suffer a bit in that it's trying to wrap up a plot that has had a lot of problems throughout the season. But I actually liked this conclusion - Damon makes people's decisions for them out of love, but really it's just selfish fear. So as his final act of the season, he makes sure that Stefan doesn't make that very same mistake. He makes Stefan let him go. The hug was awesome, too, by the way. At the end of the episode, when we learn that Damon and Enzo have both been taken over by the unnamed evil whatever thing, we get voiceovers from various characters as they read out the letters they're writing to Elena. Caroline remarks that she's worried about Bonnie, and also says that Stefan didn't sleep for days after Damon and Enzo went into the vault. We see Stefan slam himself up against the vault door, desperate to get in, and... it just breaks my heart. The connection between these two brothers has been tumultuous over the years, but they keep finding their way back to each other. I hope that next season can focus more on them than ever before.
Humor moment of the week: Stefan figures out that Damon is planning on flying to fetch the twins before Caroline has given her permission. He calls and cancels the private jet, to Damon's annoyance. He calls Stefan, knowing that his plan has been interfered with, and Stefan answers with: "Salvatore airlines, how may I help you?" Ha! I also loved the fact that Stefan figured out Damon's plan with nothing but a bit of brotherly intuition. Even when they're not on the best of terms, they still really get each other.
I guess that's all I have to say about the episode and the season. For the most part I feel like things were satisfactorily wrapped up. It's just that the things that needed wrapping up had a lot of problems, so this episode couldn't soar as high as I might have wanted it to. Still... I enjoyed the watching experience, and I'll definitely be tuning in this fall for more.
8/10
No comments:
Post a Comment
I'd really appreciate hearing what you think!