The Vampire Diaries: Detoured On Some Random Backwoods Path to Hell (8x06)

Huh. I'm actually having trouble deciding what I thought of this episode. I guess I'll just write my thoughts out and see where they take me.

Cons:

Seline's plan, in kidnapping the twins, is apparently to offer them up to Cade in exchange for her and her sister Sybil. That way, Cade will still have two supernatural beings to be his servants on earth, and the two sirens can go free. Cool idea? I guess? But Seline seems totally incompetent here. She nearly gets caught several times in this episode, and seemed to have no real plan beyond getting the girls and taking off. Did she really think she was going to pull this off? (Hint: she doesn't).

Our heroes are obviously all frantic to find the girls. Alaric and Caroline take off while Matt and Stefan stay behind and... work with the police. Which actually does prove to be effective, as an Amber Alert goes out, and blockades are set up. But then Seline just sings her horribly pitchy siren tune and everybody lets them go by. I guess the annoying part here is that these characters don't generally turn to law enforcement, and it felt sort of awkward to bring people in here who are not in the know, supernaturally speaking.

Stefan plays the martyr again. Oy. Basically, Damon has a plan of his own about Cade. He doesn't want the twins to be handed over to him - instead, he wants to serve Cade in exchange for a get-out-of-Hell free card. He ropes Stefan in to the deal as well, so now the two of them have taken Sybil and Seline's place, instead of Josie and Lizzie. My problem? Well, Caroline was so determined to find her kids, but then Stefan swoops in and handles it on her own, and Caroline just sits there and is a passive and fairly boring character once again. I guess I just get aggravated by how little Caroline has to do on this show sometimes.

Also, and this is a smaller point, Cade isn't all that intimidating as a villain. I get the sense that we're supposed to understand how scary he is. There's a reason that nobody even attempts to fight him here, and that's because there's no way they'd win. But I'm sitting here looking at Seline, who has proven to be a hopelessly ineffective villain in this episode, and I'm thinking that her boss can't be that big of a threat.

Pros:

That's a lot of complaints, but I didn't actually go away from this episode feeling horrible about it. There were a lot of genuinely good elements.

First off, I really liked Sybil this week. I think I finally get the Seline/Sybil dynamic, and it really does mirror Stefan and Damon. See, Seline is the one who made the choice to condemn her sibling to this eternity of misery, just like Stefan did all those years ago. Sybil then becomes Damon, the one who goes off the rails and is far more evil and sadistic than her sister. Sybil was really hamming it up, mocking her sister's stupid plan, lashing out at everybody, and taking cruel pleasure in helping Damon with his plan to serve Cade. She even cuts her sister out of the deal, in a twist so brutal I was actually finding myself feeling sorry for Seline. Basically, Cade agrees that Damon and Stefan will serve him, and that frees the twins from any obligation. Sybil sneaks in some fine print allowing her to keep her powers and avoid Hell, but she doesn't cut Seline in on that sweet deal! Harsh!

Sybil also had an impact on the subplot. I almost put Bonnie and Enzo's subplot material in the "cons" section, because to be frank it doesn't have much to do with the story proper, and felt like a needless detour. That being said, I quite enjoyed it. Basically, Enzo has broken free of Sybil's control, but Sybil pulls him back in just to hurt him. He's trapped in a world of pain, while Bonnie watches helplessly. Stefan goes inside of Enzo's head to try and get to Sybil and figure out where the twins are, and he sees how badly Enzo is hurting. In the end, Enzo is released from Sybil's grasp as part of Stefan's deal agreeing to come meet up with Sybil and Damon, for the plan to serve Cade. Enzo wakes up, and he and Bonnie lovingly reconnect.

So, like I said... perhaps this was a bit of a needless detour, but it worked really wonderfully from a character standpoint. Not only do we get to see the sappy romance stuff that The Vampire Diaries is so good at, we also get to see that Stefan cares for his network of friends and family. Lately, all of his focus has been on Damon, and that makes a lot of sense. But here, we could see how worried he was for Enzo, of all people, and we could also obviously see how far he was wiling to go for Caroline's daughters.

Speaking of Caroline's daughters... how brutal was that scene with Ric and Caroline? Yikes. At one point, Alaric, who is just out of his mind with worry, talks about how he wants to take the kids far away once they get them back. Why? Because vampires are trouble. They draw darkness to them. That includes Caroline. Ric even goes so far as to say that the girls are his and Jo's, and that Caroline is not their real mom. This was brutal, but it makes sense. Much like Matt, Ric is trying to grapple with being a non-supernatural being in the midst of all this craziness. After everything he's been through, it makes sense that he'd be more than a little on edge. Later, he apologizes to Caroline, and Caroline tells Ric that she absolutely is Lizzie and Josie's mother. However, she also admits that Ric is right. She is smack-dab in the middle of a really dangerous situation right now. Ric needs to take the girls away from her for the time being. Seeing Caroline make that sacrifice was even more heartbreaking in light of the fact that Stefan tells her about his deal with Cade immediately afterwards. In one fell swoop, Caroline has lost her kids and her fiance. 

Let's talk a bit about Damon, because I found him very compelling in this episode. He continues to passively follow Sybil around, and seems totally willing to do whatever it takes to escape Hell. He does agree to serve the Devil, after all. But interestingly, he actually had quite a bit of agency in this episode. He's the one who came up with the plan to flip the script on Seline, using Sybil to help him get in with Cade instead of the other way around. He was also very determined that Stefan accept the deal, too. I mean, I guess Cade needs two people to serve him for some reason... and it's implied that maybe they need to be siblings. But I can't help but wonder at Damon's motivations. He seemed less than thrilled at the idea of sacrificing the twins to the devil, perhaps suggesting that he has a conscience after all. And he clearly wants Stefan to be on his side in this thing, even if the decision he's making is morally bankrupt. In Damon's mind, what he's doing is saving himself from an eternity in Hell. Perhaps he thinks he's saving Stefan as well? I'm just saying, there's a lot of complicated stuff brewing beneath the surface here.

This episode ends with another element that I almost put under the "cons." Matt and Alaric, finally having enough with all of this bullshit, decide to kill Damon. And... they do. As the episode ends, Damon's face does that whole dead-vampire-desiccation thing, and we cut to the title card. The reason this is stupid should be obvious: literally thirty seconds later, you see the promo for next week's episode, and there's Damon, alive as can be. However, ultimately I thought this was an awesome scene. Of course Matt would want to take out Damon, but Ric? It was intense to see how far he was willing to go for his kids, and now even after he has them back safely, his rage and desperation fuel him into killing a man who was once his best friend. That's good television, folks. He even dedicates the kill to Tyler, as Matt watches approvingly.

Even though Damon is clearly going to come back just fine, (I'm guessing as a consequence of his servitude of Cade) Ric's decision is bound to have consequences. If Stefan finds out that Ric has killed his brother, albeit temporarily, he's probably not going to be happy. And then there's the fact that Caroline might actually approve of that decision, all things considered. Damon's been more trouble than he's worth to most everybody on this show. Only Stefan seems to still love him. All of these other characters (with the exception of Caroline) used to be Damon's best friends, and now Ric, Enzo, and even Bonnie have written him off.

I suppose we should briefly mention Caroline and Stefan, too. Although their relationship hasn't been the most compelling one this show has ever had, I really loved how it played out in this episode. Caroline gives her ring back to Stefan, saying that as long as her kids are missing, they can't be an "us." Why? Because if Damon gets in between Caroline and her daughters, she will kill him, no questions asked. Great acting from Paul Wesly in that moment. You can tell that if it came down to it, he'd do what it takes to save Lizzie and Josie, but he'd also do everything in his power to avoid killing Damon. It puts Caroline and Stefan at odds, and Caroline needs her children to be a priority. Of course, by the episode's end, Caroline is ready to be planning her future with Stefan again, and he's the one who has to tell her they can't be together. He's got 24 hours left before he has to turn himself over to Cade. As contrived as this situation is, I must admit it makes for good drama.

That's where I'll leave off. Honestly, I'm still not all that sure how to rank this episode. There were elements of it that didn't do much for me, but I was intrigued by a lot of the character work, all the same. Can't wait to see where all this takes us!

7/10