The Vampire Diaries: You Made a Choice to Be Good (8x11)

Ohhhhhhh kayyyyy then. Some stuff happened. It's been a few days since I watched the episode and I find myself still processing.

Cons:

Bonnie and Enzo spend the episode happily discussing their wonderful futures together, as they travel to Bonnie's secret cabin where she has moved Elena. Enzo is going to take the cure and become human. So, predictably, he's dead at the end of the episode, courtesy of one Stefan Salvatore.

I'll give the show this much: definitely didn't see it coming. That is, I didn't see it coming until this episode, where Bonnie and Enzo were all full of sunshine and rainbows and bucket lists. It was pretty inevitable he'd die once all that stuff started happening. But I'm annoyed. I'm annoyed because, despite Enzo maybe not being the most interesting character ever, he and Bonnie's relationship was actually good. This is just another example of a secondary character being axed off as we whittle thing down to our finale, which is destined at this point to be all about the Salvatores and nobody else. I just... hasn't Bonnie suffered enough? You reach a point of diminishing returns when you have a character who never, ever gets to have anything go right for her. In fact, that's another problem with the episode. Bonnie talks about how she finally wants to do what's best for her, making it clear that this momentary self-serving attitude is going to end in disaster. I'm theoretically happy for Bonnie standing up for what she wants, but it's some serious bullshit that she was going to give the cure to Enzo without clearing it with Damon first. Come on.

Cade is in Mystic Falls, and our main plot is all about the deals he made with Stefan and Damon. Kill 100 strangers, or kill your brother's girl. Damon spends the episode trying to figure out a way around this. He doesn't want to slaughter a bunch of people, and he doesn't want to kill Caroline, either. He then learns that Stefan got the same offer, and that he's headed straight for Elena, to finally be rid of her. I liked this main plot, but what I don't like is how ineffective Cade is as a villain. We spent a chunk of time here hanging out in the bar, with Caroline trying to get Matt to drink some of her blood in case things went sideways and he was killed. And Dorian is there too, and we take a lot of really meandering minutes to rehash the old debate about humans vs. vampires. We all know where Matt stands on this issue. Is there really anything new to parse out? I guess it's annoying because it doesn't lead anywhere. It's a closed circle of a little plot thread, and in the end we're back to focusing on bigger and more important elements.

Pros:

On principal, I'm annoyed that Enzo is dead. But the execution itself was sort of a thing of beauty. I have this whole theory about Paul Wesley (Stefan) and his performance in this show. You can tell that he basically stopped caring about the plot years ago, and to be fair, the plot of this show is a silly, meandering thing. At any give point, Stefan is either the long-suffering martyr with a heart of gold and just so much angst and pain, or he's the cold-blooded, sarcastic, yet still slightly bitter ripper who rips out Enzo's heart just because the guy happens to be standing in the way, and has every intention of killing Elena because she poses a slight annoyance to him. It's clear that Wesley enjoys playing evil Stefan more, and in some ways I enjoy watching evil Stefan more.

Parallel to humanity-less Stefan is the newly heartfelt and emotional Damon, who goes to great lengths to protect everybody he can. When he hears Elena's life is in danger, he pleads for her over the phone with Stefan. This conversation is so great, because you can tell that Damon is not getting through to Stefan whatsoever. At one point he says "if you hurt her, you're dead to me, Stefan!" and Stefan's reply is that this is what he wants. He's tired of Damon holding him back. Killing Elena will sever their ties for good. What I loved about this conversation is that Damon didn't threaten to kill Stefan at any point. Even when he was getting in his car to try and beat Stefan to Elena, he tells Caroline that she can't come because she'll slow him down if he needs to "hurt" his little brother. And then he says that Stefan will be dead to him, not that he'll kill him. I just liked this attention to detail here. Stefan didn't kill Damon when Damon killed Lexi. Damon wouldn't kill Stefan, even if Stefan killed Elena. Sure, he'd never forgive him, but he still wouldn't kill him.

Enzo's death isn't the only twist of this episode - Bonnie defends herself from an approaching Stefan by using the one weapon at her disposal - a vial full of Elena's blood that she had just extracted to give to Cade (as part of the plan to kill him). She stabs Stefan with it, then runs to the fallen Enzo, grief-stricken. Human Stefan?! Oh man, this is just rife with angst-ridden possibilities. Damon is supposed to take the damn cure once Elena wakes up, but the cure is a one-shot deal. The logic of this sort of escapes me, but okay whatever. Basically, it's like a relay race. I gather that Stefan can pass the cure on to one other person, and then that person can pass it again? Not clear on the details.

But regardless, this means that Stefan is going to grow older, and now that he's been forced back into his humanity, he'll be begging mercy from his friends, right? And then he could give the cure to Caroline, and the two of them could grow old and die, which would mean when Elena wakes up, everybody would be dead or close to dead. Bonnie, Caroline, and Stefan. Leaving Damon. Who could... then take the cure from Caroline? Maybe? I don't know. Regardless, there's no way for this thing to get passed around to everybody who needs it in the proper time so that all persons involved can grow old with all their loved ones around them. Somebody gets the short end of that stick. Probably Damon. God. It sucks. And it's interesting and challenging and I kind of can't wait to see how it plays out.

The third twist is that Bonnie seems to have her power back. As she wails over Enzo's corpse, a surge of energy comes out of her, seeming to reignite her lost witchy powers. Bonnie, this newly confident, newly heartbroken, newly re-powered individual, could end up being the major player in the events to come. Although the whole thing was a bit on the nose, I appreciated how Bonnie complained about always putting people first. She does, and she'll continue to do so, but every time, it costs her dearly. Having lost Enzo, is she going to be able to forgive Stefan? I mean, clearly he wasn't himself when he did that. But as Matt would say, it was still him. Is Bonnie going to still be on Team Salvatore after all of this? Seems a little hard to imagine.

I don't even know what else to talk about with this one. In some ways, it wasn't a very good episode. The bulk of it felt meandering and uninteresting. But the minute Damon starts racing to get to Elena, everything coalesced into a hell of a final few minutes. Only five more episodes left before this show is done for good. Surprisingly, I'm on the edge of my seat!

8/10