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Review of 1x22: "Founder's Day"

6/19/2011 11:59:29 AM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

To commemorate Mystic Falls’ 150th Founder’s Day, the remaining vampires from the tomb plan a massacre. Knowing the exact time and place of their attack through his informant, John ambushes them with the Gilbert invention, which turns out to emit a high-pitched frequency that paralyzes vampires.
Bonnie helps Stefan save Damon from a burning basement below Grayson Gilbert’s office, partly redeeming herself for failing to neutralize the Gilbert invention in the first place. Not so fortunate are numerous vampires who burn to death, plus Anna, whom John stakes, and Papa Lockwood, who’s no vampire but who’s strangely affected by the Gilbert device before a vampire snaps his neck.
Given the not-quite-human look of Tyler’s eyes after the invention knocks him unconscious, the gist seems to be that Tyler and Papa Lockwood are/were werewolves.
Katherine breezes into town, masquerades as Elena and earns herself an invite into the Gilbert home, where she promptly severs John’s fingers from his hand, removes his protection ring and stabs him.
Distraught from the news of Anna’s death and tempted by the prospect of an existence that lets him shut off his emotions, Jeremy drinks a vial of Anna’s blood and overdoses on painkillers, hoping he’ll die and wake up a vampire.
RIP Anna, Papa Lockwood and about a dozen anonymous tomb vampires. Maybe RIP John Gilbert, Caroline (concussive after a car crash and suffering internal bleeding) and Jeremy.

Throughout its first season, The Vampire Diaries has demonstrated a talent for finding drama, irony and subtext in the strangest places. At the end of “Founder’s Day,” a season finale that’s epic in every sense of the word, Bonnie tells Stefan that “things have to change.” The show might be expressing one idea or several depending on how you interpret the line. It might simply be Bonnie’s way of saying that Damon’s killing spree has to stop, but it might also be the show’s way of patting itself on the back for a first season that grew in leaps and bounds, and a way of congratulating itself for a story that consistently challenged the conventions of genre television and serial storytelling. The meaning I find most likely is that this is an acknowledgement of what seems to have become the show’s mantra: to evolve, to expand and – crucially – to change.

No matter which idea the line expresses, it’s a line fraught with drama, dripping with irony and laden with subtext. If one thing is certain at the end of this season, it’s that things have changed profoundly, fundamentally and irreversibly. Elena’s relationship with Jeremy has changed. Damon’s relationship with Stefan, with Elena and with Mystic Falls has changed. Indeed, even the situation within the town – with a population content to ignore the alarming frequency of unexplained deaths and which closes its eyes to the dozen individuals who inexplicably collapse on Founders’ Day – has changed. As cohesive, riveting and visually stunning as the finale might be, its greatest virtue is that it brings overarching storylines to a close while setting new storylines into motion, a subtle reminder that The Vampire Diaries is a show which thrives on its ability to progress, to adapt and to change.

At the center of this flurry of change is Elena, the misunderstood sister who, despite all her lies and deception, wants to make amends with Jeremy; the high-minded girlfriend who, regardless of how Damon feels about her, reassures Stefan that she loves him; the unflappably loyal BFF who, despite Bonnie’s anxiety that Elena would never forgive her, this week barely casts her best friend a reproachful glance. Elena’s arc in this episode is distinct from previous episodes, however, because for once we see her failing. She fails to get through to Jeremy. She fails to set Stefan’s mind at ease. She fails to convince Bonnie to see Damon the way she does. Stefan insists that “Elena is not Katherine,” but at every stage of the episode, from the ethereal opening in which Elena dresses for the parade to the mind-shattering conclusion in which Katherine successfully passes herself off as Elena, the subtext is that history is repeating itself.

What’s tragic about Elena’s isolation is the suggestion that Elena is indeed becoming Katherine. The heroine who previously moved from one story thread to another so effortlessly is all of a sudden oblivious to her brother’s despair, unable to quell her boyfriend’s insecurity and unaware of her best friend’s moral stance against a particular vampire. In each instance, we’re presented with a character who was once everything to everyone, and who suddenly finds herself on the periphery and out of the loop. The impact that will have on Elena’s role in the second season remains to be seen, but there’s something unexpected and inspiring about a show which began with a heroine at its center, and which somehow expanded into an all-compassing narrative about the heroine’s home town and its history.

Elena’s dysfunctional relationship with Jeremy is in many ways the emotional centerpiece of the episode, if only because the repercussions to Jeremy’s overdose have the potential to be the most devastating and the most far-reaching of the story threads left loose for the second season. While the show tiptoes around the implications of teen suicide – perhaps in the hope of avoiding a preachy and sententious stance – it establishes quite gracefully that, even post-lobotomy, Jeremy has been suffering intolerably. “You can’t fix this that easily,” he tells Elena when she attempts a speedy reconciliation with her brother. It’s an oblique reference to the extensive deception that Elena has maintained for most of the season, but in a way it’s also a testament to the writers’ respect for their characters and their story. The season finale resists the urge to neatly resolve its conflicts and wrap up its storylines, realizing that the issues among true-to-life characters shouldn’t be fixed to suit a schedule. Jeremy’s unwillingness to forgive Elena underscores the complexity of a situation in which Elena saw her brother in pain and made a call to alleviate his suffering. “It wasn’t her call to make,” Jeremy tells Stefan, condemning Damon’s compulsion and implying that, in a departure from his perspective in “Miss Mystic Falls,” he would have preferred to keep his memories – even the memory of a deranged and blood-starved Vicki – intact.

What’s curious about this is what it says about Elena’s role in Jeremy’s life. Jeremy berates Elena for allowing Damon to manipulate his memories, and although there’s something compassionate about wanting to lessen his trauma, there’s also something invasive about the decision. It effectively limits Jeremy’s ability to grieve, preventing him from reconciling himself to tragedy and condemning him to a stunted existence in which he’s always Elena’s “in-the-dark little brother.” The context largely exculpates Elena, because despite his young age, Jeremy has witnessed his parents’ death, the transformation of the girl he loved and, after this week, the death of the one person who understood him. In a way, Elena’s decision to wipe Jeremy’s memory feels is the call a parent would make, and since Jenna is (at least at present, and as near as we can tell) ill-qualified to make any decisions relating to vampires, Elena is to all intents and purposes a surrogate parent to Jeremy. Which, in a way, makes her deception seem all the more like a betrayal, because it implies that Elena doesn’t trust Jeremy to absorb the truth and that she thinks he’d be better off living in ignorance.

This, in turn, is what saves Jeremy from looking like an impetuous teenager who thinks he can make a statement by taking his own life. It’s tempting to take a moral stance and judge Jeremy for a decision that could break the hearts of the family he leaves behind, and a decision which, on the surface, seems motivated by adolescent angst and self-involvement. What qualifies Jeremy’s decision isn’t just Michael Suby’s emotive score (a wistful piano that tells us to feel sorry for the character), and it isn’t just Marcos Siega’s intimate direction (complete with close-ups on Steven R. McQueen so tight that we can practically see the pores on the actor’s skin). We could condemn Jeremy for making a choice that was selfish and irresponsible, but what justifies his wish to die – if not making it supportable then at least understandable – is the context: the suffering of a kid who’s been bombarded by tragedy, who has lost everyone who cared about him and who briefly glimpses the ultimate benefit of becoming a vampire when Anna tells him he can turn off his suffering. “Life sucks either way, Jeremy,” Damon tells him in one of the episode’s final scenes, “but at least if you’re a vampire you don’t have to feel bad about it if you don’t want to.” It’s an oddly touching exchange that suggests a newfound solidarity between the characters, but by revealing the ostensible appeal of becoming a vampire, Damon unwittingly pushes Jeremy towards killing himself. It will be interesting to see whether Jeremy indeed becomes a vampire, but also whether Elena will ever forgive Damon when she learns that he was the last one to talk to her brother, and that he inadvertently sold the prospects of becoming a vampire to Jeremy when he was at his most vulnerable.

Forgiveness is one of the predominant themes of the episode, and earning Elena’s enmity is likely to prove a crushing blow to the vampire who began the season wreaking havoc and finishes the season trying valiantly to repent. If there’s one character who personifies the show’s evolution over 22 episodes, it’s surely Damon. “I came to this town wanting to destroy it,” he tells the person he thinks is Elena when they meet on the porch of the Gilbert home. “Tonight, I found myself wanting to protect it.” It’s a moment that captures the immense shift in Damon’s behavior over the course of the season, but also the organic development that has led to it. Damon’s next line – “How does that happen?” – illustrates that while the show’s writers clearly knew from the start where they planned to take the character, Damon’s latent heroism has been as much of a surprise to him as it has to us. The finale encapsulates Damon’s wavering nobility: “I’m here to eat cotton candy and steal your girl,” he jokes to Stefan. We laugh, and even Stefan smiles, but it’s a nervous laugh and a wary smile, and it masks the very real possibility that Damon will prove why Elena chose the wrong Salvatore.

One aspect of Damon’s metamorphosis remains artfully ambiguous. We see him offering a heartfelt thank you to Bonnie for eliminating the threat of the Gilbert invention (a gesture that seems undeserved given that Bonnie duped him); we see him offer to compel Jeremy again, this time giving Jeremy the freedom to choose whether or not he holds on to his memories; we see him apologize to Jeremy for turning Vicki, then revealing to Elena that his visit amounted to “a failed and feeble attempt at doing the right thing.” At every stage of the episode, Damon’s trademark humor and self-deprecation remain intact, but they’re progressively less effective at disguising his humanity. Stefan at one point lectures Damon about good intentions coming from “your desire to do the right thing for nothing in return.” I can’t help feeling sorry for Damon, who’s clearly trying to emulate Stefan, and I can’t help seeing a double-standard in Stefan, who rebukes Damon for his self-serving interests after turning his brother in 1864 to suit his own self-serving interests. But Somerhalder’s performance in this episode conveys such depth of feeling that we’re left in little doubt about Damon’s intention to do the right thing. The character’s motives throughout the season have been driven by love for Katherine and revenge on a town that persecuted vampires, but when he jokes to Stefan that there’s “only one do-gooder hero role available,” there’s almost a hint of envy in his voice; envy that Stefan has earned the admiration of everyone in the town (overshadowing Damon’s false heroism as a member of the Founder’s Council), but more importantly envy that he found the way to Elena’s heart.

Whether this holds true until the end of a second season remains to be seen. When Damon admits to Jeremy that turning Vicki “was wrong,” there’s such sincerity to Somerhalder’s approach – in his flickering eyes, in his broken voice and in his weary posture – that we’d be hard-pushed to doubt that Damon genuinely regrets his atrocities since becoming a vampire. There’s nothing to suggest that the show expects us to forgive him, but perhaps the point is that Damon finally wants us to forgive him. When he opens up to the person on Elena’s porch – believing he’s opening up to Elena while he delivers a speech that’s beautiful, heartfelt and, with hindsight, probably mystifying to Katherine – there’s evidence of an anti-hero who was taken it upon himself to atone. “Somewhere along the way, you decided that I was worth saving,” he tells her, “and I wanted to thank you for that.” It’s difficult to imagine any permanent atonement in a character who disguises his vulnerability with violence and cruelty, but if Damon intends to reform, his hope for salvation is Elena. His intentions and hopes may be wasted on Katherine, but they lose none of their resonance because their sincerity transcends the person who hears them; whether Elena knows it or not, and indeed whether Damon succeeds or not, what’s remarkable about this conclusion to the season is that he genuinely wants to change.

Damon’s kiss with the person he thinks is Elena is an expression of that hope for salvation, if only on his part. For that, it’s a kiss that’s charged with emotion, with hope and, above all, with romance. On Elena’s part, it’s a kiss that leaves us somewhere between appalled and horrified; or rather, it should leave us somewhere between those two reactions, but in fact drops us off someplace in the same neighborhood – somewhere in the vicinity of “Yes, it’s terrible – terrible! – but it’s not as if we didn’t see it coming all season.” Looking back, it’s easy to argue that it wasn’t Elena and doesn’t reflect on Elena. The more relevant argument is surely that we didn’t know it wasn’t Elena at the time, and, even if we could sense that something was out of place, we weren’t entirely surprised by the prospect of Elena locking lips with Damon. Which is perhaps a credit to the success of the moment, and which captures the undeniable chemistry between the characters and the actors, demonstrating why the triangle at the center of the show isn’t contrived so much as unavoidable. But then, it also says a lot about our perception of Elena: that we’re not entirely shocked at her lack of fidelity, that we can quite easily imagine a scenario in which she’d give in to her secret longing for Damon, and, perhaps most significantly, that we regard her as fickle enough to tell one brother she loves him, only to lock lips with the other brother a few scenes later. I consider Elena’s character arc over the season to have been a success – for the most part, at least – but there’s something to be said about our estimation of the heroine when we think we see her cheating on her boyfriend and aren’t remotely bothered by it.

From this standpoint, Katherine’s arrival in Mystic Falls promises to supply an insight into the core characters, but also a liberation for Nina Dobrev, who suddenly gains an opportunity to break out of a role that has so far been limited to saintliness. The episode goes to great lengths to blur the distinction between Elena and Katherine, illustrating in its opening scenes how indistinguishable they are when Elena curls her hair and slips into a corset, curtseys and gives both Salvatores a mischievous smile. And yet, as difficult as it might be to tell which character we’re looking at, Dobrev’s one scene as the present-day Katherine is her most electrifying of the season. It’s memorable for its intensity – revealing the alarming ease with which Katherine posed as Elena, fooled everyone into thinking she was Elena and extracted an invitation from Jenna into her home – but also for the sheer intensity that Dobrev brings to the role, which evokes a seemingly bottomless well of malice. It’s terrifying to consider the influence this character has had all season without once revealing herself – at least not in the present – and it’s awe-inspiring to think about the impact she’s had through Damon, through Isobel and through John. But what helps Katherine to meet the almost insurmountable expectations we had until now – besides her swift and merciless dismemberment of John’s fingers – is Dobrev’s visible delight in playing a character at the opposite end of the spectrum to Elena. Dobrev exchanges Elena’s purity for Katherine’s corruption; wholesome charm for seductive allure; lofty nobility for depraved sadism. Part of the appeal is undoubtedly the novelty of a character whose appearance had been fervently anticipated for more than half the season, but I don’t think I’m alone in hoping that Katherine vies for Elena’s screen time, and in secretly hoping that Katherine wins.

Our enjoyment of Katherine’s wanton havoc is perhaps an indication that the show has lacked a clearcut villain throughout the season. While Damon has had moments of unequivocal villainy, and while Frederick, Isobel and even Stefan have represented threats in their own ways, the show’s preoccupation with moral ambiguity has removed the peril of a straightforward villain we can enjoy being terrified of. The character who has come closest to this is John, whose brutally efficient murder of Pearl two episodes ago is now complemented by his equally brutal and even more efficient extermination of a dozen vampires, one of whom is Anna.

Even here, there’s an argument to be made that John’s villainy is colored with nobility; Jeremy points out that John is “convinced all the tomb vampires want revenge on this town,” and Anna is forced to concede that John was right. But then, even before he fired a stake into Pearl’s heart with a crossbow, John acknowledged that Pearl and Anna bore no ill-will to anyone and were sustaining themselves on blood bags rather than living victims. What’s incomprehensible about John’s actions, and in turn what vilifies him, is that they’re needless. He pours gasoline over the vampires he’s about to set fire to, but takes the time and effort to drive a stake into Anna’s heart. The moment is made all the more harrowing by the way Siega draws it out for much longer than he needed to, capturing Anna’s helplessness and John’s grim satisfaction by filming the scene from multiple perspectives, and illustrating why Damon would be so affected by the scene that he’d want to confide in Jeremy (although it’s interesting to note that Damon doesn’t reveal to Jeremy that his uncle killed Anna).

Veering from his plan to “finish them off” and savoring the opportunity to stake Anna while she’s paralyzed by vervain, we glimpse in John a crusader similar to Alaric, yet one who lacks Alaric’s charm or charisma (despite David Anders’ almost limitless gravitas), and who doesn’t appear to follow any semblance of an ethical code. His cold, clinical and unsettlingly calm method of capture suggests a disturbing amount of planning; his familiarity with the church fire in 1864 suggests an almost nauseating effort to recreate the same circumstances in the present, and his visible delight while watching a group of vampires burn evokes an image of a character who comes closer to embodying villainy than any other character so far. John doesn’t just cull vampires indiscriminately, but actively stakes a vampire he knows is innocent, firmly establishing himself as the villain of the season. “I’m doing what should’ve been done 145 years ago,” he tells Elena, revealing in the same scene that he is indeed the heroine’s biological father, making his obsession with annihilating vampires all the more potent.

Most heartbreakingly, we know Anna wouldn’t hold John’s actions against Jeremy. “You didn’t kill my mother, your uncle did,” she tells him at the start of the episode. It’s a thought-provoking delivery by Malese Jow, whose performance throughout the episode is – as ever – a perfect balance of decades-old wisdom and eerily adolescent petulance. We know that Anna had a window of opportunity in which to confront and kill John, if not to avenge her mother then to protect Jeremy from an uncle who’s clearly unhinged. The fact that Anna chose not to pursue John – and in fact chose the opposite: to leave town altogether – suggests an unspoken grace, courage, and high-mindedness that resemble her mother’s.

It’s saddening that Anna has been written out, and even more saddening that she was so underrated, but at the same time there’s something admirable about the way the character was written and portrayed: with charm, spirit and vitality, but also with maturity, pragmatism and conviction. I’m going to miss the character, far more than Vicki and perhaps even more than Pearl, firstly because she was gorgeous, but secondly because of her significance to Jeremy’s character arc. It was obvious from the moment they met in “Bloodlines” that Anna was in love with Jeremy, and as the season went on, it became apparent that she was the one character who understood Jeremy. “I know you,” she tells him in this episode. “What it’s like for you; being alone, always feeling empty inside, no one to understand.” Her storyline complemented Jeremy’s because they were both isolated and searching for someone they could open up to – even if they didn’t know it – and her backstory remains enticingly (and perhaps maddeningly) unexplored. She spent over a century waiting for an opportunity to free her mother from a tomb, but we know nothing about her father, her life as a vampire or even when she became a vampire; her initiation and experiences as a vampire remain untouched; her loneliness over 145 years, apparently with no friends or family, has been evident in Jow’s portrayal but has never been articulated. Intriguingly, Anna represents a triumph of nurture over nature: a vampire who bears no hostility to the families whose ancestors captured her mother, who has none of the bloodlust or predatory instincts of other vampires, and whose shy, bookish and introspective temperament perfectly echoed Pearl’s. Most tragic of all is the fact that she died because she didn’t leave town when she could, instead returning to find Jeremy and to protect him from the group of vampires that she and her mother failed to restrain after they broke out of the tomb. In effect, Anna dies at the hands of Jeremy’s uncle, a victim of the repercussions of her own choices, trying to protect Jeremy from her own kind while urging him to become the same as her, suffering the consequences of being a vampire while loving the nephew of the man who hates them.

Equally underrated and almost certainly as unexplored are Tyler and his dynamic with his father. It’s regrettable that Richard Lockwood dies before he has a chance to reconcile with his son, and even more regrettable that Tyler’s meek submission to his father’s tyranny was never further developed after “The Turning Point,” when we glimpsed Tyler’s fondness for sketching and saw his father encourage him to resolve his issues with Jeremy by fighting him. Richard Lockwood’s inability to share his true nature with his son is surely the most regrettable part of his death, not least because it seems to have been a secret he kept from Carol, and because it seems to have been something he hid with remarkable success, suggesting that Tyler could have learned everything he needed from his father about how to deal with his emerging aggression.

Tyler and Richard Lockwood’s reaction to a device designed by Emily to stop vampires represents a part of the storyline that doesn’t quite hold up on repeat viewings. On the one hand, unless Emily anticipated a need to paralyze werewolves as well as vampires, it’s not clear why her magic device would affect both of them. On the other hand, everything about the device lacks a solid rationale: why does the device only paralyze vampires for five minutes? Why does it only affect vampires within a five-block radius? Why can it only be used once? The answer, of course, is because it’s magic, but while suspension of disbelief is a staple part of a show populated by vampires, witches and now (presumably) werewolves, the Gilbert invention – and everything about its creation – strains credibility.

The tomb vampires are another weak element. Unestablished, anonymous and impossible to sympathize with, they reunite after previously going their separate ways. Their motive for waiting until now to attack makes sense; it’s the one night when the town’s entire population gathers together, allowing the tomb vampires to cause the most widespread destruction. But then, it’s established in dialogue that the vampires’ targets were the founding families, so wouldn’t a Founders’ Council meeting be the event to target? The logic doesn’t hold up, and more worryingly, it doesn’t bother us because we don’t particularly care. We don’t even care if John tranquilized and set fire to all of them or if a few escaped. The tomb vampires – previously a focal part of the show – now represent a subplot that’s wholly uninteresting and secondary to John activating the Gilbert invention, the Salvatores’ peril, Anna’s death and Caroline’s hospitalization.

Which was likely a conscious choice on the part of the writers, and which suggests that – quite rightly – their focus was always on the core characters. The downside to such a densely packed finale is that numerous core characters are limited to brief and occasionally thankless roles. The plot heavily implies that Tyler’s lack of development throughout the season will be remedied next season with a substantial storyline, and Bonnie’s firm assertion that she “knows who she is now” suggests that at least one person (other than Bonnie herself) has a notion of the character’s identity, even if that person hasn’t deemed it worthwhile to share their notion with the audience. Less fortunate are Jenna – whose role this week consists of doing Elena’s hair and glaring at Damon after he kisses Elena – and Alaric, whose post-compulsion state of mind after the previous episode remains unaddressed, and whose relation to Elena via Isobel remains the single most glaring omission of the season. Alaric’s arc has been reduced from vampire hunting and soul-searching to retrieving vervain darts from his car and escorting Jeremy home, but more lamentable is the fact that, amid the myriad storylines set into motion in this finale, Alaric seems to be fading into the background. His relationship with Jenna has evaporated, his bond with Jeremy has vanished, and his goal to find and eradicate vampires who pose a threat to the population has all but been discarded. Among the dozen ideas the show is considering for its second season, I hope that at least one of them will involve restoring screen time to the character who’s now a glorified chauffeur.

In the show’s defense, Alaric’s absence from the narrative hardly seems like either an intentional or specific attempt to marginalize the character. Matt’s objection to his mom’s parenting skills have quietly been forgotten, and Caroline’s resentment towards her workaholic sheriff of a mom seems like a distant memory (although Caroline’s ominous declaration this week – “I’m fine, I’m fine” – suggests her mom may soon have cause to grieve).

The most criminally overlooked character of all – and the most worrying shortfall on the show’s part – is Stefan. Having recovered from his brief but riveting blood-crazed frenzy, Stefan has been stripped of everything that made him an interesting, flawed and attractively complex character. Stefan now wearily returns to the bland and unremarkable character he’s been for most of the season, making his insecurity over losing Elena to Damon all the more justified. Early on in the episode, Damon jokes that he’s “the better, hotter, superior choice,” and that seems truer now than ever, at the end of a season in which – unlike almost every other character – Stefan hardly seems to have changed at all. His mystique at the start of the season has eroded, his junkie persona has been unwritten so rapidly that it’s disturbing, and unlike Dobrev – who can at least look forward to playing a villainous alter ego – Paul Wesley seems doomed to spend the foreseeable future playing a self-righteous tight-ass whose most noticeable attribute is his fear that his girlfriend’s about to break up with him. So noticeably threatened is Stefan that Elena at one point is forced to say “I love you, Stefan” three times in order to placate him. Wesley demonstrated in the season’s final episodes that he’s capable of working with the most demanding material the writers can throw at him, yet he’s ostensibly drawing the short straw in terms of dramatic opportunities. Where Somerhalder consistently gets to work with rich and dark complexity, and where Dobrev now gets to alternate between saintly and malevolent, Wesley is apparently saddled with another season of playing the same one-note character he played for most of the past season. Hopefully the more exciting aspects of his backstory will be revisited, and hopefully the actor will have a chance to demonstrate that he’s every bit as talented as the rest of the show’s cast.

Which isn’t to imply that the season, or its finale, have in any way failed. If anything, storylines such as Jeremy’s, Pearl’s and Anna’s seem to have taken on a life of their own and become unexpectedly crucial parts of the ongoing narrative. Indeed, despite a densely packed hour, the episode has frequent and often surprising moments of poignancy and introspection. It resists the urge to be eventful simply because it’s a season finale, developing instead into an eventful episode that just happens to be a season finale, providing an appropriate sense of closure to key story threads and elegantly introducing several others. If no one can tell the difference between Elena and Katherine, if Jeremy is about to become a vampire, if Katherine has just killed Elena’s biological father, if Tyler turns out to be a werewolf and if Bonnie is waiting for the earliest opportunity to do away with Damon, the second season seems overflowing with material before it even begins.

Is it a self-congratulatory finale? Certainly, but perhaps deservedly so. It’s an episode that has a celebratory feel to it, with flags, banners, fireworks, and crowds that convey the town’s jubilation. It may be a false sense of jubilation from a town that’s mired in death, but it’s a jubilation which the show’s writers, cast and crew have earned several times over. The finale in particular bears a strange resemblance to the show’s characters: with its swift and at times brutally efficient style of storytelling, its approach evokes Damon, Pearl or John; with its propulsive and inexorable momentum, it resembles the deliberate, strategic planning we’ve come to expect from Katherine; and with its heartfelt and at times almost unbearable poignancy, it captures the unshakeable spirit and compassion of its heroine.

There are numerous remarkable performances in the episode. Steven R. McQueen’s performance as the teenager broken by persistent tragedy and desperate to shut off his despair is gut-wrenching. Ian Somerhalder is as much of a pleasure to watch as ever, perfectly capturing the vampire who spent all season burying his empathy, and whose capacity for good intentions – whatever his motives might be – finally becomes evident in this episode.

If there’s a star of the episode, however, it’s Nina Dobrev, who to all intents and purposes owns the episode from two distinct vantage points. As Elena, Dobrev conveys the predicament of a teenager trying to make her way in the world, surrounded by a reality she can’t explain and confronted with insurmountable adversity. As the present-day Katherine, Dobrev portrays a kind of viciousness that’s in turns terrifying, seductive and entirely irresistible, and it’s only upon rewatching that the brilliance of her final scenes becomes apparent: the cautiousness Katherine displays when she arrives outside the Gilbert home; her carefully measured and suitably ambivalent responses to Damon; the way she studies Damon and seizes Jenna’s invitation into the house; and her decision to arrange the kitchen knives in their rack – plaintively, with deliberate, free and yet perfectly precise elegance – which conveys the horror about to ensue.

Given the enormous wealth of material the show was juggling even before Katherine arrived, perhaps the show risks overloading itself with storylines and characters. But then, Katherine signifies the start of an enormous and calamitous shift in tone, and if The Vampire Diaries has proven anything, it’s that things change, and, perhaps more importantly, sometimes they have to change.

A remarkable conclusion to a remarkable first season.

5 out of 5

Review of 1x21: "Isobel"

6/19/2011 11:52:04 AM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Isobel arranges a meeting with Elena, chides her daughter for choosing Stefan instead of Damon, then threatens to go on a murderous rampage if Elena doesn’t hand over Jonathan Gilbert’s invention.
After Isobel threatens to kill Jeremy and causes an accident that breaks Matt’s arm, Elena persuades Damon to give up the invention.
Turns out the invention is designed to cause widespread damage to the vampire community, although exactly what kind of damage remains unclear.
Bonnie pretends to cast a spell to neutralize the invention’s power, but apparently she hates vampires so much that she’s willing to leave the invention intact, so there’s havoc of some description about to be inflicted on vampires everywhere.
Papa Gilbert knew everything there was to know about vampires before he died, which is how John has such an extensive knowledge about the history of Mystic Falls.
Jeremy reveals to Elena that he knows about vampires, that he knows Damon removed his memory of Vicki, and that he’s furious with his sister for keeping the truth from him.
Isobel concludes her visit to Mystic Falls by telling Elena that Damon’s in love with her, and by compelling Alaric to accept that she’s gone and to move on with his life.
Damon figures out that John must be Elena’s father.
That’s… that’s about it for mind-blowing twists and revelations this week.

Isobel is described in several ways over the course of this episode. “Cold,” “detached” and “far gone,” and at one point, by an understandably venomous Alaric, as a “selfish bitch.” In spite of the less-than-flattering adjectives ascribed to her, Isobel spends much of the season’s riveting penultimate episode smiling.

Sometimes it’s impossible to grasp why she smiles. She smiles when she sees the stunned expression from her daughter, who can’t fathom how her mother can threaten a killing spree if Elena doesn’t agree to hand over Jonathan Gilbert’s invention. She smiles when she compels her husband into leaving her behind. She even smiles when she admits that human life means nothing to her.

Isobel’s smiles owe their incongruity to ill timing, but also to their nuance. They reveal happiness and relief, but also wistful longing. They capture Isobel’s hardwired malevolence, but also her profound sense of regret. That a character’s smiles can convey such a broad range of feelings is part of what makes “Isobel” such a mesmerizing episode. In turns violent and sensitive, emotionless and temperamental, goal-oriented and full of regret, Isobel’s complexity is rivaled only by Damon’s, and where Ian Somerhalder has spent a full season crafting each layer of his character, Mia Kirshner somehow achieves an equally formidable presence in one episode. For all of the cast’s superb performances, it’s in Kirshner’s sublime portrayal of Elena’s biological mother that the merits of the episode – its versatility, its ambiguity and its charm – are most apparent.

A substantial portion of Isobel’s ambiguity owes itself to the episode’s intricate script from Caroline Dries and Brian Young. Building on the flashbacks in “Bloodlines” and “A Few Good Men,” Dries and Young craft a character who defies all definition: a character whose sadistic delight for violence is matched only by her surprising display of sensitivity, and whose volatile temperament is peppered with sudden and quite contradictory expressions of tenderness. “I wanted this, I needed this,” she insists to Alaric, searching for a way to explain her choice to abandon him and become a vampire, only to compel her distraught husband with a bittersweet goodbye and to reveal that she’s “going to regret it forever.” “It was nice meeting you, Elena,” she tells her daughter as she leaves their table at the Mystic Grill, not even looking back as she walks away, yet revealing a sense of obligation to Elena with a phone call to John at the end of the episode. From start to finish, Isobel is at once inscrutable, unpredictable, terrifying and irresistible; a liar and a manipulator, yet somehow also a victim: of Katherine’s machinations, and of Elena’s expectations of finding a shred of her human mother left inside Isobel.

The unsettling family dynamic – that of an ancestor recruiting and manipulating her descendant, who in turn coerces and manipulates her daughter – is perhaps what contributes most to the cold and barren tone of Elena’s first meeting with Isobel. Despite quirks and proclivities that include the compulsion of obscenely attractive jazz singers and muscular gay cowboys, Isobel’s motive for returning to Mystic Falls never seems to divert from Katherine’s instruction to retrieve the invention and give it to John. “I’m just doing what I’m told,” Isobel tells Damon in the midst of their reunion, a scene that’s charged with distrust, deception and inescapable sexual energy.

And yet despite Isobel’s singular goal to retrieve a device that can harm every vampire within Mystic Falls, she seems to strive to make herself as contemptible as possible. “You hate me – good,” she says to Alaric, taking her one opportunity to confide that she loved him and that it hurts to think about the life she left behind, only to compel him to forget everything she’s told him seconds later. “Don’t look for any redeeming qualities in me, I don’t have any,” she tells Elena, validating her response by injuring Matt, abducting Jeremy and compelling her entourage to beat John into submission. While all of these instances serve her goal, our perception of Isobel is that of a wife, a mother and a lost love who desperately wants to alienate the people who care about her.

Isobel’s complexity would surely require a season of exploration to unpack. We glimpse a character driven by deference to Katherine, yet who also delights in her twisted hedonism; a character who revels in her swift brutality as a vampire, yet who also recognizes her maternal instincts to Elena and confronts her buried sadness for the way she left Alaric. All the while, the character’s fragmented personality is brought to life with almost poetic rhythm by Kirshner. Damon at one point concocts an image Isobel: a heartless vampire with “no guilt, no shame, no regret.” Kirshner’s eyes – soulful, full of pain and at times a window to the character’s aching vulnerability – tell a different story. The actress’ delicate features transfix the camera, creating a character who doesn’t steal scenes so much as hijack them and rent them out. In direct contrast to Isobel’s tough-as-nails exterior, Kirshner brings an almost involuntarily sympathetic screen presence, betraying the spark of humanity within a woman who chose to sever every tie to her human life once she became a vampire.

Isobel’s resignation to being an object of contempt is left intentionally vague, hopefully for the purpose of development at a later point in the show. When Elena asks whether her decision to compel a human into taking his own life was evidence of her disregard to human life, Isobel’s response is, “It means nothing to me, it’s just part of being what I am.” Kirshner’s delivery is almost an answer in itself: a statement punctuated by pauses that seem to last a lifetime, hammering home Isobel’s self-awareness that her nature has made her a monster. What never becomes clear is why the once-human Isobel actively chose to become a monster. The character leaves Mystic Falls with a persona that’s enticingly cryptic rather than exasperating, but it’s a pitfall of the episode’s densely packed plot that we’re left with a dozen questions that may never be answered: if Isobel realized she was sacrificing so much – not least her husband and any potential relationship with her daughter – why was she so intent on becoming a vampire? The possibility that Isobel might care about Elena seems absurd given her volatile nature and her cold-hearted manipulation, but if her phone call to John at the end of the episode is any indication – a call in which she plaintively tells the father of their child, “She’s our daughter, John, we owe this to her” – Isobel’s love for Elena remains buried somewhere beneath her monstrousness. The only explanation we’re left with for her distance – from Mystic Falls and from Elena – is a strange and perhaps pitiful expression of love; an absence intended to prevent old wounds from having to be reopened; to leave Elena wondering what could have been rather than facing the horrific reality of what is; to give Alaric a chance to rebuild his life rather than saddling him with the knowledge that his wife will spend eternity regretting her decision to leave him and become a vampire.

Indeed, Alaric reaches the end of the episode as perhaps the show’s most tragic character: a loving husband crippled by grief, desperate for closure and unable to move on with the handful of answers he’s been given. “You were supposed to mourn me and move on,” Isobel tells him when they meet at the start of the episode. “You’re my wife, I loved you, how could I not search for you?” Alaric replies. While his romance with Jenna was a key element of his character arc when he was introduced, Alaric’s defining trait in the season’s final episodes is his loneliness. Matt Davis’ scenes invariably involve his character working in his classroom, hunting vampires or drinking at the Mystic Grill. That his only tie to his stepdaughter is their united stand against vampires is heartbreaking; that Alaric’s ally in overcoming that threat is frequently Damon – the vampire who slept with, killed and turned Isobel into a vampire in the first place – is in turns ironic, appalling and morbidly amusing. The camaraderie between the actors is palpable, and Davis and Somerhalder’s acerbic banter is never anything less than hilarious, but there’s something tragic about Alaric’s predicament when he finds himself venting his frustration to the vampire who made Isobel’s transformation possible.

Even more tragic is the realization that Alaric’s role as a teacher was essentially a cover story for his relocation to Mystic Falls, and that Isobel has now compelled him into abandoning his real reason for relocating to Mystic Falls. Alaric now faces the prospect of forcibly putting his vampire-hunting crusade behind him and shaping a new life for himself, unknowingly making his charade as a high-school history teacher his new substitute reality. A curious and perhaps admirable choice on Davis’ part, though, is that he resists playing the character as tragic. He plays Alaric’s scenes with Isobel with the kind of raw despair that’s almost impossible to watch, but there’s an undeniable resilience in Davis’ performance; an indication that Alaric is enough of a survivor that, even in the absence of his tireless quest to avenge Isobel and to wipe out vampires in Mystic Falls, he’ll discover a new sense of purpose.

Also discovering a newfound sense of purpose is Damon, whose lighthearted banter with Elena brightens an episode fraught with tension. After Isobel applies an outsider’s perspective and observes that Damon’s in love with Elena, however, their flourishing bond grinds to an awkward halt. Somerhalder’s photogenic torment when Damon’s secret is revealed, coupled with Stefan’s restrained assertion that “history will not be repeating itself where Elena is concerned,” suggest that the cataclysmic tangle of emotions in 1864 is indeed about to be revisited. An intriguing part of Damon’s arc, however, and possibly the most brilliant aspect of the writers’ trajectory for the character over the course of the season, is the difference between his response to Katherine and his response to Elena. Where Katherine brought out Damon’s bitterness and corruption, Elena brings out his nobility. Where Katherine exploited his darkest urges, Elena taps into his capacity to atone for his atrocities.

While there’s something deeply disturbing about Damon’s involvement with several generations of Elena’s family – sleeping with Katherine and Isobel, and now falling in love with Elena – there’s something heartfelt and almost uplifting about his bond with Elena. “I think that you underestimate how much Damon cares about you,” Isobel speculates when coercing Elena into obtaining the invention from Damon. She’s vindicated a few scenes later when Damon proves his trust in Elena and gives her the invention that could kill him. Moments like this demonstrate Damon’s fondness for Elena; they reveal an unshakeable loyalty and a steadfast refusal to let her down. Other moments hint at Damon’s fierce protective spirit towards Elena, most notably a scene in which Damon visits Isobel’s mansion and locks lips with his creation, only to pin her to the ground and begin throttling her a moment later. “You leave her alone, or I will rip you to bits,” Damon threatens, reminding us that while he remains every bit as unpredictable as ever, his passion for Elena has given him an unswerving sense of purpose that now dictates all of his actions.

This development in Damon represents the most surprising leap forward for the show this season. Stefan’s self-described reaction as “the jealous boyfriend” suggests his insecurity over losing Elena to Damon’s undeniable charm and wit, but there’s something sincere and oddly wholesome about Damon’s fondness for Elena. His conversation with Elena at the start of the episode evokes his good-natured humor, with Damon lamenting with mock-devastation that Stefan has been “cured … of anything that was interesting about his personality.” There’s a hint of weary resignation in the way the show acknowledges that one of its three main characters has been reduced to the dullest, but also a hint of playful mischief from the former serial killer. The season began with Damon’s humor going hand in hand with his malice, and although traces of his villainy remain, they’re always tinged with an element of self-awareness. “Have fun with the Mystic Queen – I know I did,” Damon jokes to Elena. We know we shouldn’t laugh, given that Caroline’s experience with Damon left her traumatized, emotionally scarred and drained of blood. And yet we smile, if only because there’s now no trace of viciousness within Damon. When he jokes that Isobel’s threatened killing spree might not be “OK” with everyone, the show is quietly pointing out that Damon has gone from the one who previously went on his own killing spree to the reluctant hero who averts killing sprees. “You do not come into my town and threaten people I care about,” Damon growls to Isobel. Somerhalder delivers the line with the conviction of a vampire who believes he owns the town, but also with a hint of pride in his town, and perhaps a sense of protectiveness towards the people Isobel puts in danger. Damon at one point mocks Stefan’s longing to “have the whole human experience,” but there’s no denying that his brother’s humanity has exposed Damon to his own compassion. Regardless of whether Damon was even aware of how he felt about Elena, there’s something heartwarming in the idea that Elena, and to some extent Stefan, have tapped into Damon’s humanity. Amid the frequently bleak messages the show sends – about human corruption, treachery and innate darkness – there’s an uplifting message to be found in the idea that even the most monstrous of creatures can be redeemed by friends and family.

Elena is of course a crucial half of Damon’s transformation, and although I’m loathe to concede that there’s anything likeable about a character who’s been unreservedly adored by the show’s writers throughout the season, I can’t deny that I found myself sympathizing with Elena at the end of this episode. Her arc over the course of the hour is understated yet profound, suggesting a character who strives to do the right thing, and whose stoicism is evidence of her innate strength in the face of adversity. Our perception of the character is suddenly that of a rejected child, orphaned by a teenager who didn’t know how to be a father and abandoned by a mother who preferred to immerse herself in vampire myth instead of being a parent. “I just wanted to take away your pain, I’m sorry,” she tells Jeremy after he denounces her dishonesty and her arrogance. “You lie – you lie about everything,” he tells her. I’m hard-pressed to disagree with Jeremy, even if we know that Elena’s intentions were fundamentally good. And yet I can’t help feeling the tiniest bit of compassion for a character whose pain has continued unabated, whose friends have been stalked, exploited, brainwashed, violated, assaulted, injured and killed by vampires, and whose spirit and optimism have remained unshakeable.

That her friendship with Bonnie is compromised by her relationship with Stefan is a testament to her belief that vampires are deserving of a second chance, and yet there’s an underlying tragedy to Elena’s predicament. She’s the archetypal heroine, sometimes to a fault, but she applies intelligence and resourcefulness to the myriad crises in her life. She’s been faced with impossible choices this season, which have left her – like her mother – torn in different directions. Perhaps drawing inspiration from Kirshner, Nina Dobrev’s performance this week is one of her finest. We see Elena struggling to cope with the overwhelming range of emotions she’s bombarded with after meeting Isobel; we see her reeling from the discovery that Jeremy knows the truth about vampires, suddenly contending with the prospect of a brother who despises her for lying, and with the realization that her efforts to protect him by keeping him in the dark have failed.

The most impossible predicament Elena finds herself in, however, and possibly the most tragic, is the one that signifies a subtle nod to Stephenie Meyer’s contribution to vampire lore. When the question of Elena’s potential turn to vampirism is presented, all Elena can do is shake her head at her mother. “That was your first lie,” Isobel observes, tacitly acknowledging that she’s raised a question that has hung over Elena since the start of the show. It’s a point that’s never pushed as far as it could go and never explored as adequately as it should be, but the fact that it’s addressed even tangentially is a hopeful sign that the show’s writers are very much aware of the dilemma. By depicting a heroine who expresses no interest in the prospect of an undead eternity with her boyfriend, The Vampire Diaries distinguishes itself from Twilight. The show places at its center a teenage heroine who is figuring out what she wants, but who, unlike the heroine of the counterpart movie franchise, is smart enough to avoid the impetuous recklessness that Bella demonstrates by choosing an eternity with Edward through death. Elena is more naïve, but it’s a sensible naivety; a willingness to withhold making an irreversible choice until she’s certain how she feels. Irrespective of her often questionable choice and reprehensible behavior, this is a part of her character arc that the show’s writers have crafted with infinite and admirable care.

Which makes Isobel, if only indirectly, even more deserving of praise. She elicits buried feelings and ignored sentiments from almost all of the characters, in a way that could so easily have been contrived but which instead feels graceful and organic. That this kind of detailed character exploration comes in an episode that’s so highly charged with frenetic energy makes “Isobel” even more of an accomplishment. It’s an episode that defines itself by its characters’ reconciliation, but also by the intensity of the characters’ growing conflicts; an episode made memorable by its dramatic revelations, but also by its characters’ capacity for self-discovery. Elena at one point describes her mother as a “monumental disappointment,” and from the perspective of a dismayed daughter, it’s easy to see what she means. But from the perspective of a viewer, Isobel is one of the most enthralling characters the show has created, stealing scenes in an episode that’s in every respect a high point of the season. I hope this won’t be Kirshner’s only performance, because she was a joy to watch, and in many respects a conduit for the show’s central characters, resulting in some of the finest drama all season. This is an episode that thrives on its sense of urgency, with a flawless pace and a swift, economical script, but also an episode that’s often delightfully amusing, breaking up its overwrought drama with strip poker, compelled gay cowboys and Jenna’s reflexive nausea when John offers to talk to Jeremy about his love life.

Most remarkable of all, however, is the show’s ongoing ethos to undermine every perception and to challenge every preconception. It offsets its characters’ heartlessness with pathos. It undercuts scenes’ sentimentality with biting wit. It gives us just enough backstory to form an opinion of a character, only to point out how much remains open to speculation. The show is never far from Elena’s side, but it hedges. John mocks Pearl, stakes her and leaves her daughter an orphan, yet the show this week makes a rather admirable effort to portray him as a concerned father. Isobel’s opening scenes with Alaric are a potent display of her manipulation and brutality, yet her closing scene suggests a mother who wants what’s best for her daughter, even if it means killing the people she cares about.

The highest praise I can issue the show is to commend it for its ambition, which by all accounts reaches its apex during this penultimate episode of the season. “Isobel” perfectly positions its characters for a slew of upcoming storylines: if John indeed succeeds in unleashing a disaster on Mystic Falls, the repercussions on his already dysfunctional relationship with Elena and Jeremy will be significant. If Elena discovers that Bonnie’s spell was an elaborate deception that indirectly harmed Stefan and Damon, their already fragile friendship will be ruined. The expansive backstory also seems richer than ever: with history about to repeat itself in the form of a vampire culling, with the Salvatores ostensibly descending into their 145-year-old struggle to win the same woman’s heart, with a ruthless Gilbert hunting down vampires and with a Bennett witch underhandedly trying to do the right thing.

We’re also presented with the tantalizing prospect of unexplored material. The most obvious question is why John, who hates vampires with a passion and who’s been labeled a “hater” twice over the course of two episodes, would guide the mother of his child to a vampire and help her become one. The most delicious hints continue to pertain to Katherine, who remains both the most elusive and the most enticing prospect of an as-yet-unexplored story, and whose impact on the narrative throughout the season has already been immense. Her “genetic curiosity” about Isobel, her likelihood of being “fascinated” by Elena and her dedication to wiping out the vampire population in Mystic Falls all heavily imply that her arrival is imminent. Beyond that, however, there’s the prospect of Grayson Gilbert’s intense familiarity with vampires before he died, indicating that the show has a vast reservoir of material that remains untouched. Did Grayson know that Elena and Isobel were descended from Katherine? Did he know that the Salvatores had become vampires and that they were still in Mystic Falls? Was Miranda Gilbert also aware of the family’s history?

That such an enormous wealth of potential story material remains untapped – even after a season that has powered through material at such a staggering rate – is evidence of the near-limitless talent among the show’s writers and creators.

5 out of 5

Review of 1x20: "Blood Brothers"

6/19/2011 11:49:45 AM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Locked up and delirious from blood deprivation, Stefan has flashes of his death and transformation into a vampire in 1864.
Turns out Papa Salvatore put bullets in both of his sons after learning they were vampire sympathizers, and that Stefan’s first meal after entering the transitional phase was Papa Salvatore.
Damon was happy to die during the transitional phase in the absence of a then-presumed-dead Katherine. Stefan didn’t want to lose him, so he force-fed Damon his first meal in order to turn him into a vampire.
As Stefan himself says, he totally sucks.
He doesn’t use the words “totally” or “sucks,” but that’s the gist.
In the present, Stefan escapes the captivity of his basement and returns to the quarry on the outskirts of town where he and Damon began their transitional phase. His plan to immolate himself at sunrise without the protection of his day ring is nixed by an impassioned speech from Elena, who convinces him that he still has a purpose and needs to continue fighting his thirst for blood.
As Elena herself says, she’s totally amazing.
She doesn’t use the words “totally” or “amazing,” or actually say anything like that, but that’s what the show wants you to think.
Damon and Alaric follow a lead to a random apartment, hoping to find Isobel but instead finding an especially nerdy vampire from the tomb, whom John is exploiting to gather information about the whereabouts and activity of other vampires from the tomb.
John offers to help Pearl maintain her anonymity in Mystic Falls in exchange for Jonathan Gilbert’s invention, then taunts her with memories of Jonathan Gilbert, and finally stakes her at the door to her home, leaving a distraught Anna to weep over her mother’s body.
John doesn’t say it, but he totally sucks.
A despondent Alaric, putting his questions about Isobel behind him and drowning his sorrow at the Mystic Grill, gets a visit from his wife.

Taking “Lost Girls” and “Children of the Damned” as their starting points, showrunners Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec craft their third installment of flashbacks to 1864, an episode that’s equal in epic stature to their previous flashback episodes and in some ways superior. With its combination of spectacular sets, dazzling costumes and riveting performances, “Blood Brothers” is a leaner episode than its predecessors, unfettered by the need for introductions to new characters and free to bypass exposition about events leading up to the Salvatore brothers’ transformation. The result, delicately directed by Liz Friedlander and portrayed with admirable nuance by Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder, is a worthy and incisive follow-up. The episode’s period-intensive portions this time around are more tightly focused, chronicling Stefan and Damon’s experiences as they overcome their bewilderment and confusion and take their first steps to become vampires. In contrast to “Children of the Damned,” “Blood Brothers” is also complemented by a weighty present-day storyline, elegantly intercut with the flashbacks and hinting at the direction the story is headed in the run-up to the finale.

The flashbacks in this episode have a noticeably more logical rationale, with Stefan’s confrontation of his inner demons driving the story and the audience’s edification feeling like a fortuitous /by-product. Along with a level of confidence that was missing in previous flashback episodes, “Blood Brothers” narrows its period scenes to a limited number of sets and characters, trading visual spectacle for character study. The flashbacks consist almost entirely of one or both of the Salvatore brothers, providing an immersive experience that depicts the dilemma which Stefan and Damon shared after they learned that Katherine was dead and that their motive for turning into vampires was gone.

A central part of Stefan’s dilemma is his sense of familial obligation. The revelation that Stefan’s first kill was his father imbues the narrative with mythological undertones, but it’s the first cornerstone of the episode that suggests the enormous guilt that Stefan carries. Regardless of Giuseppe’s belligerent charge towards Stefan when his son appears at the door to his study, the image of Stefan examining the blood on his hands as he kneels over his dying father is potent for its symbolism: Stefan doesn’t just look at the blood on his hands before tasting it – he studies its texture, he savors the richness of it, taking baby steps into a new existence as his father’s life flows out of him. Friedlander and director of photography Paul M. Sommers display an almost uncanny attention to detail, capturing the full symbolic horror of Stefan confusedly morphing into a vampire for the first time but also zeroing in on details that make the moment so profound: at one point, Giuseppe’s wavering hand comes inches from Stefan’s now-blood-soaked hand, illustrating how a father is passing his life’s blood onto his son. There’s something sickly about the spectacle, yet also something cyclical about this perverse pattern of life.

What’s tragic and heartbreaking about Giuseppe’s death, however, is the context: the fact that Stefan returned to the Salvatore mansion with no intention of hurting his father, but rather to “say goodbye” and to make amends before allowing himself to deteriorate. There’s an element of stoicism to the eternal son who can never obtain his father’s approval or forgiveness, and although Damon displays none of this guilt, the implication by the end of the episode is that both sons have struggled with 145 years of unhealed psychological scars.

None of these psychological scars is more surprising than the revelation that Stefan forced Damon to become a vampire. There are revelations in the episode that shock us, particularly Stefan’s inadvertent first kill turning out to be his father, but Stefan’s role in initiating Damon against his will not only adds to our perspective of the brothers’ dynamic: it effectively rewrites it. Damon remains the monster who slaughtered Mr. Tanner, who murdered Vicki, who staked Lexi and who snapped Miss Gibbons’ and John Gilbert’s necks without hesitating, but it now emerges that the origins to his villainy are inextricably tied to Stefan. At the end of the episode, Damon rejects Stefan’s attempt to shoulder a part of his guilt. “My actions, what I do – that’s not your fault,” he tells his brother. Damon is right, insofar as he’s the one biting into throats and snapping necks. The counterargument – and the one which this episode so powerfully conveys – is that Stefan made that throat-biting and neck-snapping possible. He isn’t just complicit in Damon’s actions: he’s directly responsible for making them a reality.

What’s worse is Stefan’s motive for turning Damon into a vampire: ostensibly some vague sense of brotherly duty, but more obviously a fear of spending eternity without any loved ones to share his experiences with. “I won’t let you die!” insists Stefan for a brief moment, only to spend several much longer moments extolling the virtues of becoming a vampire. There’s a part of Stefan’s decision to force-feed Damon that denotes loyalty, but Stefan makes a conscious choice to turn Damon into a killer, ignoring Damon’s plea to let him die, instead damning his brother and condemning the two of them to an endless variation on the rivalry that existed when they were alive. Stefan’s single-mindedness doesn’t make him pitiful or reckless so much as selfish and callous – disregarding his brother’s wishes and casting aside the repercussions his choice will have on the life of every individual that Damon now takes, and on the lives of the families and loved ones who’ll mourn them. The dynamic between the Salvatore brothers has been rewritten in such a way that it feels consistent, deliberate and entirely intentional, but to such a remarkable extent that we’re now inclined to view Damon as equal parts villain and victim.

Even more remarkable is the potential this episode offers for Stefan. Where previously we assumed that Stefan’s entire stint as a vampire consisted of moping, brooding and attending the occasional Bon Jovi concert, the implication at the end of this episode is that Stefan began as a much more voracious vampire than Damon. “From the moment Stefan had his first taste of human blood, he was a different person,” reveals Damon. While we glimpsed his reaction to human blood in both “Let the Right One In” and “Miss Mystic Falls,” the extent of Stefan’s atrocities remains ripe for development. This episode leaves plenty for speculation: how vicious was Stefan? How long did his frenzy for human blood last before he realized the full horror of his actions? What changed to make him see that – as Emily predicted – his heart was “pure”? If nothing else, the open-endedness to this episode hints at the tantalizing possibility for future flashback episodes. But crucially, they’re the source of the episode’s epic tone. “After what I’ve done, it has to end,” Stefan intones with even deeper solemnity than usual. The show doesn’t appear to expect us to read into the line, but perhaps we should: perhaps “what I’ve done” doesn’t refer to Stefan’s vicious attack on Amber so much as a century-and-a-half of vicious attacks, few of which would have ended with a stalwart Damon and a mystically charged Bonnie impeding his thirst for blood.

Damon’s complexity this week takes on another shade of ever-expanding ambiguity, with his erstwhile villainy and recent nobility now tinged with tragedy and hopeless romanticism. “No compulsion was necessary, he drank from her willingly,” reveals Emily to a visibly flummoxed Stefan, reeling from the discovery that both he and his brother had traces of Katherine’s blood in their system before being shot. It’s a significant disclosure, not only because it establishes that Damon’s conviction to spend eternity with Katherine was stronger (at least insofar as he had enough conviction to overcome his nausea and to drink from Katherine), but also that, by Damon’s reckoning, his devotion to Katherine was more deserving. Where Stefan required compulsion and memory erasure to enter the transitional phase to vampirism, Damon’s commitment was such that he overcame all hurdles without help along the way. When he tells Stefan he hates him for the fact that Katherine turned them both, there’s a part of us that shares his indignation: watching the brothers experience their aversion to sunlight and their longing for blood, it’s as if they’ve been assigned a bizarre element of equality – the notion that Katherine granted them equal shares of her love before she supposedly went up in flames. From Damon’s perspective, this robs him of his reward for the effort he demonstrated, an effort that surely entitled him to a greater share of Katherine’s love than Stefan.

What makes him look even more hard done by is the revelation that, unlike Stefan, Damon had no interest in the perks of becoming a vampire. “This was all to be with Katherine,” he laments after they enter the transitional phase. “She’s gone – I want it over.” It’s possible that Damon hasn’t even considered how thrilling it might be to be stronger, faster and immortal, but it’s also possible that Damon genuinely didn’t see the appeal of these benefits without the love of his life to share them with; which, in its own twisted way, makes Damon less of an eternally disgruntled bachelor and more of an eternally frustrated romantic. When he promises Stefan that he’ll make his brother’s immortal life “an eternity of misery,” there are traces of bitterness and jealousy, but also an element of retribution for being with an eternity of loneliness. Stefan has put his perverse love triangle with Katherine and Damon behind him and discovered happiness with Elena, but Damon’s attachment to Elena only assuages the heartache he clearly still feels over losing Katherine. That Stefan’s heartache faded so much more effortlessly than Damon’s must only add to Damon’s resentment, because while Stefan has managed to move on, Damon’s loyalty to Katherine has remained unswerving and tragically inescapable.

Damon’s attachment to Elena overflows from “Miss Mystic Falls” and into “Blood Brothers,” with his gentlemanly willingness to fill in for Stefan at the Founders’ Court now extending to an ongoing watch over his brother and, perhaps more importantly, to a perpetual banter with Elena. “You are a complete nuisance,” he jokes when she asks if he minds her constant overnight visits. “Stefan likes puppy blood – little Golden Retriever puppies with cute and floppy ears,” he tells her when she’s brave enough to ask if Stefan prefers a particular type of animal blood. What’s entertaining about their banter is partly the playful, mocking tone of their verbal sparring, and partly the fact that they’re sparring at all. Between the grim prospect of Stefan trying to starve himself and Elena’s recent discovery that Damon turned her biological mother into a vampire, Elena has no reason to joke with Damon and every reason to despise him. That Williamson and Plec make these scenes feel like an organic and lighthearted component of the episode is a credit to their masterful script, but also to their ongoing success in defying our expectations. Where two characters previously loathed one another, their loathing has given way to uneasy tolerance of one another, and finally to an odd form of acceptance. “Your joking doesn’t help,” she chides. “It helps me,” he replies, perhaps voicing the unspoken reply from both the audience and Elena, because in an episode punctuated by force-feeding on people, patricide and a daughter weeping over her murdered mother, the bizarre jokes of a serial killer bring a much-needed humor that’s unexpected yet strangely reliable.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest accomplishment of this episode is Williamson and Plec’s ability to again thwart our expectations, not only by overturning our perception of the Salvatore brothers’ backstory, but also by returning to Alaric’s until now woefully overlooked character arc. It’s a testament to the show’s skilful writing and the actors’ convincing portrayal that we can buy into often implausible developments, and perhaps nothing is more skilful or more implausible than Alaric: a character who started out as an ostensible vampire, who revealed himself to be a devastated widower, who turned out to be a vengeful vampire hunter, who discovered he was the unexpected stepfather to the heroine, and who now drinks beer with the vampire who slept with his wife and fulfilled her wish of becoming a vampire. That we can buy into such a demanding – and frankly absurd – character arc is a feat in itself. That the actor at the center of it succeeds in making the character both likeable and believable is an even greater feat. But the fact that we can embrace the absurdity and share the humor when it’s acknowledged (“You tried to kill me!” “Yeah? Well, you did kill me!” “You drive. Pick me up in an hour.”) is the ultimate feat. It’s evidence that anything is possible on this show, provided it’s well written and well executed, which has been the case on a consistent basis throughout the season.

The downside is that Alaric remains one of the most underdeveloped characters of the season. Alaric’s assertion that he’s “done with all of this” is undermined by Isobel’s arrival at the end of the episode. It would be fascinating to see whether a non-supernatural character like Alaric can even attempt to reintegrate himself into an everyday life and ignore the underworld he’s aware of, but the suggestion that his role in the story is about to become much more prominent is enticing and well deserved.

Perhaps the character deserved a larger portion of screen time much sooner, however. Damon tells Elena that he witnessed “the teacher having an existential crisis,” and it doesn’t elicit so much as a look of surprise from her. It’s regrettable that Matt Davis hasn’t been given more screen time this season, particularly given the actor’s talent for playing such a multifaceted character and the writers’ talent for devising such intriguing material for him. More regrettable, however, is that five episodes after we learned that Alaric was Elena’s stepfather, they’ve yet to discuss Isobel, and indeed to discuss the fact that they’re related at all. After a promising start to his arc – one that included numerous flashbacks and a heartfelt romance with Jenna – Alaric’s storyline has petered out and been overshadowed by half a dozen other storylines, relegating the character to a supporting role in spite of the character’s immediate relevance to Elena. Hopefully this will change in the season’s final two episodes, undoing what appears to have been one of the wasted opportunities of the season.

Less of a wasted opportunity and more of an artfully inscrutable mystery is John Gilbert, whose possible good intentions when it comes to protecting the population of Mystic Falls are this week overshadowed by his taunting and murder of Pearl. David Anders thrives as the suave, confident and near-invincible human who dares to play mind games with the vampire who previously gouged Damon’s eyes out, and although there are signs that John might have been unfairly maligned for defending the town against an immediate threat from vampire activity, his unprovoked viciousness towards Pearl and his eventual stake to her heart are so unjustified that they paint John as one of the villains of the series. While Giuseppe Salvatore attacks his sons from (apparent) ignorance that there are different degrees of malevolence among vampires, John’s familiarity with vampires is clear, and his awareness that Pearl wants to “live [her] life, complete with a picket fence” is clear, making his decision to target her all the more monstrous. It was established that Pearl and Anna limited their diet to blood bags, and unlike Stefan’s reaction to human blood, Pearl’s revival by Elena’s blood and Anna’s taste of Jeremy’s blood left neither character with any out-of-control cravings. If there’s such a thing as a model vampire citizen, Pearl and Anna have represented the ideal to perfection.

John’s villainy for mocking Pearl’s “emotional” reaction to the memory of Jonathan Gilbert is compounded with the image of Anna returning home to find her desiccated mother on the ground with a stake through her heart. It’s a scene that’s almost unbearably moving for the feeble wail that Anna lets out when she realizes what’s happened, falling to her knees, clutching Pearl’s hand and sobbing for her mother to wake up. We’re prompted to wonder what kind of an individual can inflict emotional pain on someone by dredging up memories of lost love and betrayal, only to kill them later the same evening; moreover, we’re prompted to consider whether there’s any humanity in an individual who robs a vampire of the mother she spent 145 years trying to free from incarceration, leaving her mother’s body on the ground for her to find. As harrowing as the flashbacks are, I found the gut-wrenching portion of this episode – and the human element of the episode – to be the present-day scenes between Anna and Pearl. Part of this can be attributed to Malese Jow’s terrific performance, which conveys both her sense of sacrifice after quietly kissing Jeremy goodbye and her enormous sense of loss over losing her mother.

The other part of this can be attributed to Kelly Hu’s performance, which was stellar from the moment Pearl was introduced seven episodes ago, and which has been instrumental in making this character a memorable one. Like Davis, Hu never got as much screen time as she deserved, and she made every second of her screen time count. She demonstrated a staggering ability to work with diverse material, making Pearl terrifying one moment and endearing the next, playing a leader of unquestionable authority in one scene and a vulnerable parent in the next. I’m eager to see where this development takes Anna’s storyline, but at the same time I feel the kind of loss that I know I should have felt – and didn’t – when Vicki was killed. This, to me, represents real tragedy on the show; the end of a richly captivating character, one who in my opinion embodied the ideal of female empowerment above and beyond Elena or Bonnie, and whose contribution to the story was significant and which remains full of possibilities. Pearl’s death vilifies John to an almost unrecoverable degree, and although the same was true for many after Damon killed Isobel, I’m reluctant to think we’ll see John sharing a beer with Anna anytime soon.

Like each of the show’s highlights so far, “Blood Brothers” is remarkable for its ability to suggest new perspectives and to resolve unanswered questions, at the same time challenging previous perspectives and posing new questions. This third installment to the season’s flashbacks to 1864 completes our understanding of the dynamic between the Salvatores, but it also goes some distance to explaining the animosity that persisted between them over 15 decades. We’re left with a dozen questions: did Giuseppe’s fierce hatred towards vampires predate 1864, and did the death of his wife – and Stefan and Damon’s mother – have anything to do with his disownment of his sons the moment he learned they had harbored one? Will Anna immediately make the connection between her mother’s death and John, “the hater,” and will Pearl’s murder mean the end of her relationship with Jeremy? And perhaps most importantly, does the arrival of one of the show’s most influential yet elusive women suggest the impending arrival of the other? If Isobel has come to Mystic Falls, can Katherine be far behind?

Credit is due to Williamson and Plec, whose script feels cohesive and streamlined to a degree that’s rare even on a show as well crafted as this. As ever, the genius in their writing is in the subtext, with the episode’s richness and complexity emerging out of the details. There’s a symmetry to the Gilbert disposition towards vampires – with Jonathan and John devoting their lives to annihilating them while Elena and Jeremy grow increasingly fond of them – that’s somehow both structured and poetic. There’s an emotional tether between the three main characters at the episode’s outset – with Stefan dying, Damon dead and Katherine undead – that’s somehow surreal and macabre, beautiful and unsettling. Even the image of the Salvatore brothers rinsing their blood-stained shirts at the side of a riverbank comes loaded with subtext, with Sommers’ exquisite photography of the glittering water suggesting something akin to a baptism ahead of the brothers’ blood-fuelled frenzy at nightfall. There are details that enrich the show’s internal mythology, such as the day rings finally being associated to Emily, but it’s the details buried in the show’s intense visual style and the symbolism in its story that make it such a rewarding experience to review.

The show has rarely looked better and rarely been more ambitious in scope, moving from the dark, claustrophobic moodiness of the Salvatore basement to the spectacular location of the Mystic Falls quarry. The narrative takes place almost exclusively by night, and while there’s an air of oppressive despair that seems woven into the episode’s fabric, perhaps there’s also an occasional strand of hope. Despite the pervasive mood of inevitability that suggests history is doomed to repeat itself, Stefan finds a renewed sense of purpose with Elena, and Anna finds trust and intimacy with Jeremy. Amid tragedy and gloom, characters overcome the baggage that accompanies their heritage, defying the expectations of everyone around them just as the episode defies the expectations of its audience. Perhaps the underlying message, buried beneath the misery and death and deep inside the show’s narrative, is that courage and good can triumph over malevolence and corruption, and that trust and love can emerge out of treachery and manipulation.

For the second week in a row, one of the show’s strongest offerings.

5 out of 5

Review of 1x19: "Miss Mystic Falls"

6/19/2011 11:46:48 AM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

An unusually upbeat Stefan returns to school, attends classes and offers to escort Elena to the Miss Mystic Falls pageant, all the while gorging on blood bags stashed in the trunk of his car and in a fridge hidden in his cellar.
Stefan makes it to the pageant, but goes into meltdown when Damon reveals his addiction to human blood to Elena. Caroline wins the pageant, Damon dances with Elena in Stefan’s place, and Stefan finally succumbs to his darkest urges and feeds on an unsuspecting pageant contestant named Amber.
A noticeably withdrawn Bonnie returns to Mystic Falls, blaming the Salvatore brothers for the death of her grandmother and only involving herself in the vampire drama long enough to give Stefan a killer migraine and to rescue Amber.
Elena stabs Stefan with a vervain dart at an opportune moment, and she and Damon lock him up in the basement.
John Gilbert reveals to Damon that his motive for returning to Mystic Falls is to retrieve one of Jonathan Gilbert’s inventions in 1864 – another compass-sized device of unknown properties which Pearl stole before she was trapped in the tomb. Hoping to prevent John from finding it, Pearl gives it to Damon.

There are few things more portentous – and perhaps few things more amusing – than to hear a character deliver the fateful words “I’m fine.” “I’m fine,” practiced Elena while writing in her journal at the start of the pilot episode, trying to sound like she meant it. “I’m fine,” claimed Sheila Bennett, shortly before she died from the strain of the spell she cast to open the vampire tomb. “I’m fine,” insisted Jeremy after reading that his memory of the ex-girlfriend-turned-vampire who tried to kill him had been erased by Damon and hidden from him by Elena. The phrase has almost become a recurring joke over the course of the season: intended to reassure, but usually signaling the onset of despair, an imminent act of reckless stupidity or the tacit acknowledgement that the speaker is about to die.

So it is that we come to “Miss Mystic Falls,” an episode that skillfully navigates from moments of majestic beauty to moments of blood-curdling horror, and an episode in which Stefan is fine, fine, fine. “I’m fine, OK? I’m fine,” he protests when Damon discovers his stockpile of blood bags in the basement to their home. “I’m fine,” he tells Alaric at the high-school parking lot after fighting back a frenzy over a jock’s grazed knee and nearly throttling his history teacher. “I’m telling you, I’m fine – I’m fine,” he insists to Elena at the Founders’ Court dressing room, unaware that he’s about to sink his teeth into one of Elena’s rivals for the Miss Mystic Falls title.

As we glean in the course of the episode, Stefan is anything but fine, affording Paul Wesley the chance to capture his character’s steep descent into blood-crazed derangement with a performance that’s both terrifying and heartbreaking. Wesley’s attention to detail when capturing the nuances of Stefan’s transformation would be admirable irrespective of the script’s quality, but Bryan Oh and Caroline Dries craft an exquisite arc for Stefan that convincingly charts his well-meaning denial, his fight against his instincts and his dismay over the monster he’s become.

The pathos in Stefan’s losing battle against his nature stems from a steadfast refusal to give up. In the opening scene, we see Stefan driving to school, a subtle nod to the show’s earliest episodes, with uplifting sunshine, an upbeat soundtrack and the same sunglasses and leather jacket we saw Stefan wearing when we met him in the pilot. In retrospect, the fact that Stefan is hiding a dozen bags of human blood in the trunk undermines the cheeriness of the moment, but perhaps there remains something uplifting about the attempt itself; the idea that, even if he knows he’s gradually slipping, Stefan obstinately tries to overcome the painful reality and tries to maintain the pretense of normality, if only to keep Elena from worrying.

“You seem to be in a good mood,” Elena notices while she and Stefan practice the waltz that she eventually performs with Damon with such mesmerizing grace and beauty. “That a bad thing?” Stefan wonders. “Would you prefer me to be brooding and tortured?” The answer from the audience, scrawled in our own blood across the pristine marble surfaces of the Founders’ Court, is an emphatic “NO.” When Elena insists she’s “not complaining” about the change in Stefan’s behavior, she’s unintentionally acknowledging that this new, volatile, off-the-rails, blood-bingeing maniac of a vampire is infinitely more entertaining than the tortured and self-righteous one we’ve come to know over the course of the season. There’s something about this acknowledgement that borders on self-parody, but also something hopeful, because it amounts to an admission that the writers need to give the character – and the actor – more substantial material to work with.

This episode takes significant steps in the right direction. Stefan’s dungeon-based fridge of blood bags leans a little too far towards macabre theatricality, but his villainy becomes apparent after he compels Amber into leaving the Founders’ Court with him. Amber’s involuntary docility robs her of any chance to defend herself, but also of the chance to react with the rational response when a vampire bares its fangs – which is to say mortal terror. Stefan’s protracted description of the best way for a vampire to puncture the carotid artery is in turns nauseating and fascinating – largely because it implies that Stefan has had a lot of practice feeding on humans. The sight of him fighting temptation and failing is nothing short of mortifying, but in a morbid way, the spectacle of Amber reassuring a suddenly repentant Stefan that “it doesn’t hurt that much” and urging him to bite less ferociously “next time” is amusing. There’s a tragicomic tone to the junkie vampire whose only confidante is his brainwashed snack of a victim, who’s so chirpily eager to indulge his urges that she doesn’t look like she’d mind if he sucked her dry. It creates a neat symmetry with Damon’s puppeteering antics with Caroline in the show’s earliest episodes, and it demonstrates that Stefan is capable of the same exploitative brutality as his brother.

The tragic half of the tragicomedy is that Stefan always seems aware of his villainy. When Stefan smashes the mirror in the Founders’ Court restroom, he’s not just finding an outlet for his aggression; he’s destroying a reflection of himself – an reflection he’s come to hate. “I’ve been drinking the human stuff and it’s really screwing with my head,” he explains to the girl he’s about to feed on. It doesn’t make Stefan any more sympathetic, but it makes him more pitiful: a self-aware killer who, unlike Damon, doesn’t kill of his own volition, and who fights his instincts until every ounce of his conviction has been drained. Stefan becomes a tragic figure when we realize that he’s essentially a victim of his own good intentions – resisting human blood to the point where his pent-up craving is strong enough to overwhelm him. “He’s spent all of this time fighting it, when he should’ve been learning how to control it,” Damon tells Elena, perhaps hinting that Stefan’s salvation in the aftermath of this episode will involve compromising his high-mindedness and drinking human blood in moderation.

At what point Damon became the poster child for “moderation” is unclear. It seems to have started after he staked Lexi in “162 Candles,” rescuing Elena from her car wreck in “Bloodlines” and helping to hunt down her vampire stalker in “Unpleasantville.” It’s possible, however, that whatever attempt the show has made towards rehabilitating Damon – if indeed that’s even the writers’ intention – only began in earnestness after “Fool Me Once,” when he learned that Katherine wasn’t trapped in the tomb along with the other vampires. Since then, Damon has become noticeably less vicious (his murder of Miss Gibbons in “Let the Right One In” notwithstanding) and less treacherous, to the point where Stefan and Elena’s deception of him at the end of “Children of the Damned” seemed to take him by surprise and actually hurt him. In any case, the result is a character who this week bears no resemblance to the character that previously earned descriptions such as “contemptible,” “monstrous” and “irredeemable.” He tries to disguise his heroism with self-interest by claiming he’s only concerned about Stefan’s addiction to human blood because it can “inconvenience” him. Given his nobility throughout this episode, though, we’re left in little doubt of the Salvatores’ role reversal. Damon immediately confronts Stefan about his “new and improved” attitude, and although his pretext is the exposure that stolen blood bags threaten to bring the vampire community, Ian Somerhalder’s performance tells a different story. Damon’s concern for his brother is palpable, and his protective stance towards Elena is apparent by the fact that he remains with her throughout the Miss Mystic Falls pageant, long beyond the point when he could have left.

Indeed, looking past the sublime romantic magic of the dance between Elena and Damon – a sequence so beautifully rendered by its costumes, hair, choreography and direction that it almost transcends criticism – it’s noticeable that Damon has no self-serving reason to take Stefan’s place at the Founders’ Court. It could be that he dances with Elena to annoy Stefan, or to make Elena feel bad for previously choosing the Salvatore who would have given a much less enchanting dance than Damon. But between Damon’s honesty when he tells her about Stefan’s addiction and the way he positions himself in front of Elena when they find a blood-stained and near-rabid Stefan with Amber in the woods, Damon’s nobility is hard to ignore. Whether it’s motivated by affection for Elena or guilt over Stefan’s addiction, Damon’s disposition in the final episodes of the season is a testament to the distance the character has covered, and to the dedication that Somerhalder has shown in portraying such a complex character. His villainy, which has varied from grotesque to hilarious, has given way to reluctant benevolence, to a point where Damon threatens to kill every member of the Founders’ Council and we absorb the threat with something akin to nonchalance. We don’t doubt for a second that Damon is capable of such viciousness, but the question when he delivers this threat to John is whether we now know Damon better than this. When Damon told Sheriff Forbes in last week’s episode that he liked his life in Mystic Falls, there was a shred of sincerity to the way Somerhalder delivered the line. Whatever the explanation may be, from contentment with the status quo to a deep-rooted attachment to Elena, the character’s choices hint at a monster that has reformed.

Now equally reformed but infinitely less appealing is Bonnie, who returns to Mystic Falls after a lengthy and largely unexplained absence to demonstrate that she has gone from an amateur feather-floater to a fully-fledged mistress of witchcraft. In the course of the episode, she manages to blame the Salvatores for events that weren’t their fault, inflicts a migraine on Stefan at the height of his blood-fuelled frenzy without actually neutralizing him, and then, having served her purpose in the plot, promptly vanishes. On the upside, she manages to belittle Elena by revealing that she’s been in touch with Caroline on a regular basis while she was away, demonstrating that for once Elena is not the center of the universe.

Bonnie’s metamorphosis extends to every department within The Vampire Diaries: her wardrobe has been overhauled to make her look more bohemian (perhaps to make her look more bewitching); her hair looks more disheveled (perhaps to give her a more eccentric and less inhibited style); her temperament is part dour, part cryptic and part obnoxious (perhaps to suggest Grave Emotional Issues). The result is a puzzling and altogether impenetrable exterior that should be intriguing but somehow struggles to be anything other than off-putting. I spent this episode trying to pinpoint why I felt so little sympathy for the character. I was glad to see Bonnie again, insofar as I was glad to see that Katerina Graham hadn’t been summarily written out and that no wayward vampire from the tomb had stumbled upon the character and decided to thank her for letting it out. And yet for several reasons, I realized when Bonnie returned to the show that I’d never actually missed her – either Bonnie herself or her role within the story. “Everyone here really missed you,” Elena tells her with genuine warmth – “everyone” unfortunately excluding myself, who in the course of this episode concluded that I couldn’t miss a character I knew nothing about. After nearly a full season, the extent of our knowledge of Bonnie is limited to (1) she’s female, (2) she does magic spells. Beyond that, everything we thought we knew about the character is open to debate. Where previously she was charming and well-intentioned, now she appears indifferent and closed-off. Where previously she was defined by her love for her grandmother and her loyalty to Elena, circumstances now are such that we can’t even ascribe these attributes to her. She’s a bizarre non-entity. Her ties to other characters have been taken out of the equation, her parents seem nonexistent, her attendance and grades at school are unestablished, and her interests and priorities beyond witchcraft have been worryingly overlooked for the entirety of the show’s run. For whatever reason, this is a character whom the writers never got around to developing into an actual character.

Which isn’t to say she doesn’t support the writers’ vision of other characters. Indeed, she provides requisite expositional dialogue by revealing that Elena’s motive for entering the Miss Mystic Falls is solely to fulfill the wishes of her mother, followed by what’s possibly the most offensive retcon of the entire season – the implication that opening the tomb containing 26 vampires was somehow the fault of the Salvatore brothers. No blame is apportioned to Elena in spite of the fact that she broached the absurd idea of opening the tomb in the first place, no reference is made to Sheila Bennett’s original intention to trap Damon inside the tomb with Katherine, and no mention is made of Stefan’s self-sacrifice when he dove into the tomb to rescue Elena. While I’m loathe to find fault with an otherwise flawless script from Oh and Dries, this was a detail that grated with me. It’s consistent with the writers’ unwavering adoration of Elena – a character apparently so far above reproach that the backstory can be rewritten so as not to taint her perfection – but it contradicts what we’ve seen on-screen, and it suggests a version of events that wildly differs from what we know to be true. The opening of the tomb was not the Salvatores’ fault. Sheila’s attempt to trap Damon inside the tomb was not their fault. The fact that two dozen vampires have now dispersed across the country and are probably rampantly feeding on humans isn’t their fault. As underwhelming as the revelation that Katherine wasn’t in the tomb might have been, the conclusion to the storyline has been even more underwhelming, and the show’s attempt to now rewrite the circumstances that led up to it is still more underwhelming. The result is an attitude from Bonnie that’s not only off-putting: at best it’s flimsy, and at worst it’s irrational. “Please just leave me alone,” she asks Elena at the episode’s conclusion. For all our sakes, I find myself hoping that Elena respects that request.

Much more likeable is Caroline, who this week competes for a title of Miss Mystic Falls and wants it badly enough to win. Regardless of whether the Lockwoods and the panel of judges awarded the title for anything besides ravishing beauty and unabashed favoritism, I was delighted when Caroline won. Part of this was because it meant she beat Elena, but more importantly it was because (unlike Elena) she wanted to win for her own sake, and because (again, unlike Elena) she had no one to support her. “This was important to my mother,” explains Elena to the panel, apparently hoping her justification will placate the judges into posthumously honoring Miranda Sommers and awarding the Miss Mystic Falls title to her precocious brat of a daughter. “I’d be enjoying it a whole lot more if she was here,” laments Elena after Alaric gives her a lift to the event and while Jenna fawns over her hair. You know what the writers intended, and Nina Dobrev plays the moment with appropriate sadness, but there’s something insensitive, ungrateful and wholly undeserving about her role in the contest. In stark contrast, we see Caroline, who does her own hair and make-up at her dressing table, whose boyfriend doesn’t even turn up to watch her dance (“They wouldn’t let him out of work,” Caroline mentions, a generic excuse if ever there was one), and whose mother is too busy inspecting a broken mirror in the restroom to watch her daughter win what’s clearly the most important award of her life.

It almost goes without saying that Caroline’s track record to support her win – a track record which implies that Caroline is a humanitarian of epic proportions – sounds like a hoax. It’s possible she was involved in the Beautification Committee. It’s possible she helped at the soup kitchen. It’s possible she was part of the Green Campaign and the Recycling Program and the policeman raffle. All of this is possible in theory, but it’s also possible that Caroline started out the season looking like a superficial man-eater, was then rewritten as a bitchy cheerleading captain with self-esteem issues, and was then supplied with a storyline that’s been predicated on the fact that she’s lonely and neglected and craves love, that she desperately wants to belong, and that her relationship with Matt is the single most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to her. The list of achievements she reels off to the panel of judges doesn’t sound like possible peripheral activity so much as an entirely implausible full-time job.

But then, it means she beats Elena, which easily justifies some mild exaggeration of the truth. In any case, there’s something both heartbreaking and understated – or perhaps heartbreaking because it’s understated – about the notion of a teenager who pursues her dream without anyone to even encourage her. Next to Elena, who’s surrounded by people supporting her (including the specter of a dead parent spurring her on), Caroline is the underdog who deserves to win.

A surprising joy of the episode is Anna, who emerges as part underdog and part unexpected siren. Malese Jow has played the character with increasing elegance as the season goes on, and although Anna’s initial depiction as a shy and awkward misfit suggests a pretense rather than an inconsistency in character, Jow’s portrayal in this episode – both at the Salvatore house and at the Founders’ Court – conveys a character unrecognizable from the inept vampire we saw in “Fool Me Once.” Whether it’s the sense of reassurance she gains from her mother or the realization that she can now drop her pretense with Jeremy, Anna suddenly seems like a character with purpose: graceful, single-minded and independent. She makes up for her mother’s willful pride and apologizes to Damon; she attends the Miss Mystic Falls pageant, allowing herself a moment of sentimentality but never straying into self-pity; and she forgives Jeremy, acknowledging that she exploited him in her effort to free her mother from the tomb and that her feelings for Jeremy outweigh her resentment. At every step of her role in the episode, Anna conveys a quiet strength and confidence that’s never overstated but entirely endearing. We glimpse an actress who doesn’t get as much screen time as she deserves, and whose poise and composure imbue Anna with the allure and mystique that presumably were intended for Bonnie.

It would be impossible to single out one outstanding performance from so many in this episode. Paul Wesley delivers a stunning portrayal as a junkie who wants to believe he doesn’t have a problem, and whose sly smile and neurotic mannerisms capture Stefan’s transition from the amicable character we knew to the bloodthirsty animal we see in the woods at the conclusion. The rest of the cast are on top form, with Steven R. McQueen turning Jeremy’s deception of Elena into an empathetic and understandable choice, and with Malese Jow supporting the show’s preoccupation with female empowerment by playing Anna with proactive confidence and disarming vulnerability. My nomination for the show’s most consistently impressive performance continues to go to Ian Somerhalder, who not only learns to waltz with Nina Dobrev, but who embraces the challenge his character presents: a psychotic serial killer who has gradually and almost imperceptibly morphed into a mock-parent and a well-meaning guardian, retaining his trademark wit and charm but gaining a newfound responsibility and concern. Somerhalder plays a fiendishly complex role every week, but his challenge becomes all the more daunting now that he’s being asked to lace Damon’s villainy with unexpected heroism, feigning indifference yet stumbling onto nobility while he unexpectedly becomes Elena’s white knight.

Beyond its near-flawless script and the caliber of its actors, this episode is a feat of technical genius. The production value is mind-boggling, with Jennifer Bryan preparing countless costumes for the Miss Mystic Falls dance and Karen Bruck designing a set for the Founders’ Court that’s magnificent in its spacious, airy perfection. It’s an episode of contrasts, with Michael Suby’s emotive score complemented by music that ranges from Boccherini to Within Temptation, and with Paul M. Sommers’ photography flitting from the decadent to the incandescent. One scene that stands out for its sheer aesthetic brilliance involves a phone call between Elena and Stefan, illustrating the chasm between them when Elena enters her brightly lit kitchen and takes a bottle of water from her fridge, unaware that her boyfriend at the other end is sitting in his sparsely lit room with an emptied bag of blood in his hand. The image tells a story of its own, underscoring the way these characters have somehow found themselves worlds apart.

A universal rule of television is that conflict and calamity beget drama, and The Vampire Diaries seems to derive an almost perverse pleasure from making its characters suffer. In an episode with ramifications likely to reverberate throughout the remainder of the season and into the next, the show’s writers depict one of their three central characters suffering a crisis – not just of identity, but of nature. Stefan’s idealism – the prospect of fighting against his instincts as a vampire for the rest of eternity – is ultimately what leads to his transformation into a monster. But it’s also what leads to the episode’s broader exploration of what it means to be a monster. When Jeremy tells Anna that he’s relieved he can’t remember Vicki’s transformation into a vampire, she assumes he means he doesn’t want to remember Vicki “as a monster.” This episode holds a mirror to a society that organizes fundraising events and celebrates social awareness, but which is driven by conspiracy, subterfuge and collusion. By the end of the episode, we see Stefan losing the battle against his instincts, but we also see Damon waltzing with Elena for no reason other than to spare her humiliation, and we see Pearl and Anna humbly apologizing to Damon, handing over their only piece of leverage in order to preserve their coexistence with humans. In comparison, the Lockwoods’ hypocrisy over social stature, their condescension and their obsession with the veneer of normality make them infinitely more reprehensible. We’ve seen the Lockwoods ignore the very real threat of vampire activity in the town in favor of hosting a glorified beauty contest; we’ve seen them denounce the Donovans as “trash” and then offer condolences for Vicki’s death, and we’ve seen them react to Tyler’s brutal beating of Matt by urging everyone to “have a good time.” “Miss Mystic Falls” defines itself by its focus on a decorum that masks deep-rooted darkness, and next to the humility, compassion and kindness we see vampires display in this episode, the human half of the town’s population suddenly seems every bit as monstrous as Stefan or Damon at their worst.

It’s a testament to Bryan Oh and Caroline Dries’ exquisitely crafted script that we’re left with a dozen questions – about the developments that have taken place, about the impact they’ll have on the characters, and about our shifting perception of the characters. With Stefan and Damon’s paths headed in opposite directions, and with Stefan now effectively taking the place in the basement cell occupied by Damon in the first quarter of the season, the trajectory of the characters’ arcs is in turns unexpected, symmetrical and strangely poetic. “If I do this, there’s no going back,” Stefan pauses to consider before he gives in to his thirst for blood and feeds on Amber. It’s a quiet acknowledgement of the show’s bold ambitions for an ever-expanding narrative, but also a challenge which the show poses to itself: the challenge to surprise, to change and to evolve. In that moment, the show takes its characters and its story to a place it will be hard to backtrack from. Which, given the show’s propensity for rapid plot developments, richly detailed character arcs and inexorable momentum, can only be a good thing.

For its scale, its scope, its outstanding performances and its sheer awe-inspiring spectacle, this is indeed one of the show’s finest hours.

5 out of 5

Review of 1x18: "Under Control"

5/28/2011 12:26:41 PM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Elena and Jeremy’s uncle, John Gilbert, shows up in Mystic Falls and warns the Founders’ Council of a resurgence in vampire activity.
From what we can tell, John knows about everything that’s happened, both in the past and in the present.
Damon kills John, but it turns out John has a ring just like Alaric’s, and that both rings were handed down by the Gilberts.
Papa Lockwood hosts the 150^th Founders’ Day pre-party, and nearly everyone gets very drunk, especially Stefan, who’s now trying to dull his craving for human blood by drinking lots of alcohol.
Mama Donovan and Tyler make out (!), Matt punches Tyler for making out with his mom (!!), and Tyler beats his friend to a bloody pulp (!!!), upon which Matt decides he’s better off without a parent and kicks his mom out of the house.
Jeremy realizes that Elena’s lying to him, uncovers her journal and finds out how Vicki died.

Like the broken and decadent society it depicts, “Under Control” disguises itself in civility and sophistication, hoping to conceal the fact that, at heart, it’s a violent, treacherous and irrational animal. It’s an episode with lofty aspirations, hoping to make a profound statement – about broken familial ties, about broken friendship and about broken trust – and very nearly succeeding, despite being disjointed and suffering from a lack of cohesion that occasionally leaves it feeling aimless and meandering.

To be fair, this in itself may be part of the episode’s statement: the idea that, no matter how close these characters might feel to the people around them, they’re isolated. And in fairness to the episode, it succeeds in capturing a dark and unsettling tone – one that distinguishes itself from “Let the Right One In” by trading rain-soaked for champagne-soaked, and which hints at the imminent darkness emerging from all of the characters.

It’s a bleak and discomfiting message, and, in spite of the episode’s flaws, it’s very nearly a profound one. The extravagance of the Founders’ Day kickoff party is realized with remarkable luscious clarity and precision, and Director of Photography Paul M. Sommers and Production Designer Garreth Stover help to envision a community content to enjoy its veneer of normality while ignoring its gradual erosion by secrets and subterfuge. To issue praise to one part of the episode would almost be to overlook others, and it goes without saying that, irrespective of the episode’s narrative issues, it’s a thoroughly astonishing spectacle and leaves numerous images to haunt the audience’s mind: Stefan scrutinizing Damon’s glass of blood with longing and apprehension at the start of the episode, and finally gulping it down with delight and fulfillment at the end; a bruised and bewildered Matt telling his bleeding and tear-stricken mother to get out of her own home; Jeremy asking Elena if there’s something she’s not telling him, knowing that the answer she gives him is a lie and wondering why she can’t look him in the eye.

These are, to be sure, some of the most visually enthralling moments in a season filled with potent and unsettling images, and which explore the darkest recesses of the characters’ arcs with wit and sensitivity. If there’s a downside to the episode, it’s precisely that its highlights feel like moments: fragmented, unrelated instances that flow from one to the next in the space of an hour, lacking flow or momentum, resulting in an episode that has no clear beginning, middle or end, and ultimately no aim other than to reposition the characters for the final leg of the season.

At the center of the episode is Stefan, whose downward spiral allows Paul Wesley to deliver a tremendous performance, but whose most promising material is only ever obliquely hinted at. “I’d love to hear this story,” taunts Damon when Stefan insists he has his “reasons” for starving himself of human blood. The implication from his near-unrecognizable persona while high on Elena’s blood last week is that Stefan’s animalistic half is released, and that his human half – the part containing all social and rational awareness – submerges. Disappointingly, all we’re left with are hints and implications; the suggestion that Stefan’s past as a vampire comprises phases of brutal violence, driven by an insatiable hunger for blood and unfettered by guilt or remorse. Where this might be intended to entice viewers with the prospect of an as-yet-unexplored backstory, the impact on this episode is a distinct sense of apathy; the sense that everything real and raw and worth watching happened off-screen a very long time before Stefan visited the Founders’ Hall and introduced himself to Elena as her “alcoholic vampire boyfriend.” What we’re watching is anticlimactic by comparison, though undeniably thought-provoking for its social dimension, as we’re presented with a vampire – a craving-afflicted entity by nature – battling his thirst for blood with the thing his thirst so often represents. It’s intriguing to watch the show’s writers subvert their conventions yet again, taking Lexi’s brief mention of how alcohol “helps curb the craving” and using one destructive influence to bludgeon another.

The result is at once pitiful, entertaining and startling. Wesley portrays a victim of his own nature, desperately wanting to overcome his addiction and fighting to retain a sense of propriety. The show taps into what little dark humor the situation contains at the Founders’ Hall, playing up the distinction between Stefan’s self-described “sober me” and “drunk me” and suggesting that Drunk Stefan is the more open and less uptight counterpart to Sober Stefan. It’s played for darkly comic laughs, with Stefan wanting to dance, compelling the DJ and demanding that a less-than-agreeable stranger apologize to Elena after he tells her to get off the dance floor for being clumsy.

It’s also saddening and oddly insightful to watch Stefan admit to Elena that he’s losing the battle against his craving, and that he’s worried about what he’s capable of when he’s with her. Wesley visibly relishes the opportunity to play a character who’s been liberated in every sense of the word, capturing the full horror and pathos of the situation with versatility and flair. Perhaps a relevant question – and one that suggests why the episode feels so one-sided – is whether Wesley has until now been playing a constrictive role. “Have I entered an alternative universe where Stefan is fun?” Damon asks Elena when he sees his brother dancing (with style and without the slightest inhibition, it should be noted). The unspoken acknowledgement is that Stefan has until now been the opposite of fun. Damon describes him as “good-behavior Stefan, rein-it-in Stefan, fight-against-his-nature-to-an-annoyingly-obsessive-level Stefan.” It’s sharp dialogue, delivered as ever with smooth panache by Ian Somerhalder, but it’s also surprisingly apt, even for Stefan’s most smitten fan. Wesley’s upward struggle throughout the season has been to match Somerhalder’s gravitas and charisma, but he’s been limited by his character’s unadventurous material; next to Somerhalder’s quick-witted and ethically challenged persona, Wesley is saddled with playing the somber, contemplative and restrictively restrained counterpart, whose attraction for Elena and for viewers alike is undeniable, but whose appeal when compared with Damon – to the actor as well as to the viewers – is such that there’s often a visible imbalance. Somerhalder gets to play the fun and outlandish brother while Wesley is limited to playing the stiff-assed killjoy.

This episode effectively tries to correct that imbalance, giving Wesley a chance to immerse himself in that “alternate universe where Stefan is fun.” It’s a pleasure to watch, partly because we can see that Wesley is having as much fun playing Drunk Stefan as Stefan is having being Drunk Stefan, and partly because – as has so often been the case with Damon – Stefan’s brief encounter with “fun” is tinged with unsettling undertones; the prospect that he might lose control, the prospect that such a loss of self-control would reveal his true nature, and the prospect that Stefan has until now been burying his true nature beneath a façade.

While the emergence of Stefan’s darker personality is strongly suggested to be the inevitable outcome, it never happens. Damon’s assessment – that Stefan “has spent too long not being himself” – remains accurate at the end of this episode, and continues intact at the start of the next episode. It’s disappointing that we don’t get to see Stefan “being himself,” but moreover, it’s disappointing to acknowledge that we’ve spent three-quarters of a season watching a central character not being himself. From a creative and dramatic standpoint – for the viewers, the writers and the actors – it’s rewarding to know that there’s a hidden side to Stefan we’ve yet to be introduced to. But the discovery that the side we’ve grown so emotionally invested in is a sham somehow makes Stefan himself a sham; it turns him into the epitome of the secrets and lies he’s advocated throughout the season.

Which, arguably, is exactly what Damon wants Stefan to admit when he urges his brother to give in to his craving, and exactly what he wants Elena to think when he urges her to consider that there’s a hidden side to her boyfriend that she’s oblivious to. Damon reasserts himself in this episode as both truth-speaker and expert manipulator, but what’s left open to interpretation is why he’s so intent on persuading Stefan to accept his basest urges. The twisted thrill of watching Stefan overcome by adversity is perhaps retribution for the backstory we gleaned in “Children of the Damned,” and an instance that demonstrates why Stefan isn’t as strong-willed as he thinks he is would render his moral superiority over Damon meaningless. But a moment of weakness on Stefan’s part would also demonstrate that he’s as prone to monstrosity as Damon; it puts the Salvatore brothers on an equal footing, suggesting that, if Stefan is capable of the same depraved behavior as Damon, Damon is equally capable of Stefan’s nobility.

Which ultimately brings the focus back to the show’s ongoing preoccupation with the Salvatores’ redemption, and in turn to the Salvatores’ redemption through Elena. Damon claims that his motive for resisting the urge to feed on humans is to misdirect the Founders’ Council’s efforts to track him. He also snaps the neck of Elena’s uncle and tosses her uncle’s dead body from a balcony. But in spite of these words and actions, Damon’s demeanor whenever he’s with Elena leaves no doubt about his attachment to her. Consciously or not, his efforts betray an unswerving ambition to win her approval, and to reintegrate himself into society. “I like my life in Mystic Falls,” he tells Sheriff Forbes at the pre-party. “It’s starting to feel like home again.” We know he’s deceiving her, but perhaps the irony is that he’s also deceiving himself. We know that Mystic Falls is as close to home as he’ll ever find; we know that he’s happy enough with the status quo to guard it from Pearl’s belligerent community of vampires; we know that he’s content to masquerade as Stefan’s guardian and to continue to toy with Elena’s alternating disgust and toleration of him. In the end, the underlying motive behind Damon’s effort to bring out Stefan’s bloodthirsty aggression seems to be about proving that each of the brothers is as depraved as each other.

Demonstrating a different variety of depravity – one that’s ensconced in superficial charm and a disarmingly boyish grin – is John Gilbert. While the character’s pompous self-importance is evident in the fact that he shares the same name as Joe Knezevich’s character in 1864, David Anders fashions his own character with the kind of zeal and kinetic energy not seen since Arielle Kebbel’s performance as Lexi in “162 Candles.” Anders’ portrayal of John’s cloyingly smug nature and infuriating arrogance is such that we’re immediately inclined to think the worst of him. Despite his ostensible good intentions – his pride of the family estate, his emphasis on “distinction” and “heritage,” his goal to solve the blood-bank break-ins and random disappearances – our perception of the character is largely determined by the perception of everyone around him. “I never really liked that guy,” admits Matt. “His name is John, but I call him Jackass,” reveals Sheriff Forbes to Damon. Anders, however, submits a delightfully enigmatic persona that both straddles and defies categories. Where Knezevich’s Jonathan Gilbert was quickly established as a brilliant-yet-naïve aristocrat, John Gilbert is both an open page and an inscrutable mystery: frank yet impenetrable, open yet guarded, goofy yet composed. We immediately see why John engenders reflexive (and often amusing) dislike, but at the same time it’s somehow sad to observe the way he tries to reconnect with Jeremy. “Why does she hate you?” Jeremy asks when Jenna fires another barrage of caustic quips at John. “We used to sleep together,” replies John, earning an incredulous expression from Jeremy and a newspaper-turned-projectile from Jenna, but also establishing John as the only character who’s entirely honest with Jeremy throughout the episode. His ambiguity of intention is almost as intriguing as his familiarity with the characters’ backstories. Despite his smarmy, artificial demeanor, I’m inclined to believe there’s something benevolent about the character’s agenda.

The show would have us believe that Elena shares a similar inherent benevolence, particularly when it concedes her dishonesty and attempts to dismiss it with a traditional caveat. “It’s not safe for them to know the truth,” Elena explains to Alaric, “so yes, I keep it from them. But it’s only because I love them.” Whether it’s in response to the show’s overblown adoration of the character or a simple suspicion of a character who tries to be all things to all people, I find myself harboring a continuous dislike towards Elena as the weeks go by. At times, she can be selfless, caring and courageous, just as the show’s writers intend her to be. It’s also a credit to the character that she experiences such intense distress and trauma at such a young age, absorbing tragedy and exuding resolution with a perfect balance of grace and humility. However, Elena can often be self-centered, self-possessed and evasive, and her actions this week demonstrate why, when left unchecked, her decisions make everyone’s lives more difficult than they need to be.

With “all these secrets just piling up,” Elena decides it’s a good time to open up to Jeremy. When she finally reveals that she was adopted, however, it’s not out of any sense of obligation to be honest with her brother, but rather an adherence to The Stefan Maneuver: tell them something honest if it’ll shut them up, or if it’s a necessary compromise in order to extract some valuable truth from them in return. “I’m not saying you should tell him everything,” suggests Stefan (at this point the established master of selective honesty), “but at least try to find out what he does know.” It’s worth noting that Elena fails in her attempt to gauge why Jeremy wrote a paper on vampires for Alaric – possibly because her attempt at honesty with him never extends to the truth about Isobel and Alaric, or to Anna, or to the group of vampires intent on avenging themselves after a Gilbert spearheaded their capture, or – most obviously – to the circumstances surrounding Vicki’s death. As empathetic as I am to Elena’s predicament – would telling Jeremy the truth solve anything, or would it put him in even more danger? – ignoring the truth is a choice that in itself puts Jeremy in danger.

“I’ve done so much to protect him from all of this,” insists Elena when Alaric brings Jeremy’s literary foray into vampirism to her attention. While “done so much” seems synonymous with “lied through my teeth,” what’s staggering about Elena’s perspective is that she obstinately clings to the notion that she’s doing Jeremy a favor by keeping him in the dark (if he’d been unaware of the existence of vampires to begin with). Putting aside the fact that Jeremy would have been at a disadvantage for lack of any idea of the peril surrounding him, the crucial fact is that he intuitively senses dishonesty. He demands to know why Sheriff Forbes is dismissing Vicki’s death as an overdose in spite of questionable evidence to the contrary; he challenges Elena’s blithe acceptance of the circumstances surrounding Vicki’s death and asks her why she won’t make eye contact with him when she claims there’s nothing she’s not telling him. The impression we’re given throughout is that Jeremy’s perception extends beyond what he’s told, but perhaps more importantly that his trust in the people around him – in his sister and in the authorities – is wavering. While Elena has been portrayed as a fundamentally well-intentioned character whose dishonesty stems from an impossible predicament, her inability to grasp that her lies are doing more harm than good – and that they’re hurting her brother the same way they hurt her when Stefan was so cagey – means she’s losing a brother to despair and disillusionment, and to a loss of confidence in the bonds that tie him to family and to society. Jeremy’s assertion to Anna in last week’s episode – that she should turn him into a vampire because he doesn’t “have anything else” – suddenly seems much more accurate. He doesn’t have anything else, at least insofar as he doesn’t even have the trust and respect of his sister. As irresponsible as Jeremy might have been for wanting to cut his ties to Elena and Jenna by becoming a vampire, he demonstrates at least as much level-headedness as Elena in accepting that vampires are a reality in Mystic Falls.

When she’s not busy doing “so much” to protect Jeremy from the truth, Elena spends this episode usurping Caroline’s boyfriend. “Thank you, by the way, for just… for everything,” Matt tells Elena with overtones that are hard to ignore. “I couldn’t have done it without you.” While this may be a friendly expression of gratitude, it’s sad to acknowledge that there’s inarguably more to it: between the wistful music, the furtive glances, Elena’s hand on Matt’s arm and the underlying fact that Elena is not Matt’s girlfriend, Elena is forced to guiltily move past her chemistry with the guy who turned to her in his moment of his grief, and to alleviate her guilt by turning the focus to Caroline – who, as we learn in the character’s absence, tried to make herself useful by baking for Matt. It’s a detail that’s played for laughs because of Caroline’s culinary incompetence, but writers Barbie Kligman and Andrew Chambliss leave the subtext for us to discover: Caroline’s sense of neglect was such that she felt compelled to try to support Matt, so much so that she resorted to something she was bad at in the hope that it would make him happy.

All of which has as much to do with Matt’s attachment to Elena (and the writers’) as it does with Elena herself. Nevertheless, the point is that Elena realizes she’s the center of Matt’s world and yet is happy to bask in Matt’s adoration behind Caroline’s back, reassuring herself that she’s being A Good Friend to Matt and that there’s nothing wrong with a reassuring hand on the arm or a long and uninterrupted gaze into his eyes in his girlfriend’s absence. This, above all, is the source of my antipathy towards the character. Elena is The Towering Pillar of Support to anyone who needs her – even rejected ex-boyfriends who secretly wish they could win her back in the midst of their mourning of a dead sister.

In fairness to Matt, his disloyalty and general lack of appreciation for Caroline are rewarded when Tyler unleashes a brutal torrent of blows to his face, briefly eliciting my sympathy for the character until he summarily makes his mother homeless. It apparently never occurs to Matt to consider why Kelly might be so desperate to hook up with every guy who looks at her, or that she might suffer from a sense of worthlessness similar to Caroline’s, which is to say that both characters suffer from an intense lack of confidence and self-esteem. Equally, in fairness to Tyler, we’re presented with a character whose intense guilt over how he treated Vicki precludes any sense of entitlement to grieve for her, as well as a character whose sensitivity is such that the moment he realizes how viciously he attacked Matt, he withdraws into an odd and almost shell-shocked catatonia.

Regrettably, there seems to only be room for one Towering Pillar of Support on the show, and she’s busy doing “so much” for Jeremy and Matt.

Director David von Ancken elicits outstanding material from all of the cast, however, and Trevino delivers one of several stellar performances alongside Wesley, Somerhalder and Anders. There are also some remarkable scenes for the supporting actors, particularly Melinda Clarke as the incorrigibly promiscuous mom who can’t pull herself together long enough to be a parent to Matt, and Ron Pralgo as the domineering-yet-ostensibly-easygoing mayor-and-patriarch Richard Lockwood, whose insistence at the pre-party that everyone “have a good time” after his son makes a bleeding mess of Matt’s face seems both callous and almost inhumanly cold-hearted. Of the episode’s many darkly delightful moments, however, one of the most unnerving is surely the culmination to Tyler’s evening: a disciplinary smack to the face from his father so harsh that the walls on the set reverberate, and, with a mannerism that captures the heartlessness of the character quite brilliantly, a shot of Papa Lockwood turning his back on his son and, before walking away, pausing to straighten his shirt and jacket.

It’s clear by the end of the hour that “Under Control” was designed to lead the story into the final episodes of the season, and in a way, this is what makes it such an exasperating experience for viewers. We’re brought to the precipice of significant change, with Stefan’s descent into self-destruction gathering momentum and John’s arrival suggesting that the various strands of the town’s backstory are much more interconnected than we realized. Unlike previous installments, however, this is an episode that, where it counts, holds back. Stefan very nearly feeds on Kelly, but doesn’t quite; John very nearly reveals to Damon why he returned to Mystic Falls, but doesn’t quite; Jeremy very nearly confronts Elena for lying to him, but doesn’t quite. And throughout the episode, we’re wondering where Pearl and Anna are; where the “entire tomb” of vampires that was mentioned at the start of the episode has gone; why Elena and Alaric still can’t seem to address their connection through Isobel.

If nothing else, we can quite legitimately ask where Carol Lockwood was hiding during the Founders’ Day pre-party celebration that was so important to her husband.

Suffice to say, many of the pivotal revelations and developments are artfully evaded for a week, and the result is an episode that, while rich in character exploration and thematic development, feels slow-paced and insubstantial. On a visual level, “Under Control” is frequently mesmerizing, rendered with exquisite detail by the production team and leaving a series of fragmented yet sublime images that each tell a story of their own. On a creative level, it’s in turns disturbing and touching, digging deeper into the town’s collective mentality than any episode before it and unearthing a spirit of conscious denial that’s at once understandable and reprehensible.

Yet the episode is always hinting at something it wants to delay showing, the explanation presumably being to ensure an appropriately momentous tone as the season draws to a close. While it puts this episode in the oddly stoic position of arranging the characters and story while never enjoying the reward, it also results in an episode that’s at times empty and lifeless, relying on aesthetics and context to make it entertaining. This is perhaps the episode’s insurmountable challenge, because unless viewers are deeply invested in the characters, it’s hard to watch an episode that consists of so much drinking and arguing without wondering where this focus is taking the story. It’s impossible to deny that it is taking the story somewhere, but that somewhere seems so remote at the end of this episode that the underlying response is one of disappointment: we watched an hour of characters we know and love getting drunk and violent so that the final episodes of the season can be great. In the episode’s defense, this yields some worthwhile drama. But the episode’s most memorable moments are allusions to upcoming storylines and revelations, and as tantalizing as this might be, it’s never quite enough to elevate this episode beyond merely a noble effort.

3 out of 5

Review of 1x17: "Let The Right One In"

5/28/2011 12:23:09 PM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Frederick captures Stefan, and, with Pearl busy manipulating Papa Lockwood at the Grill, brings him to the farmhouse to torture him.
Damon and Elena persuade Alaric to help them mount a rescue, but it takes Pearl’s tut-tutting and Stefan’s blood-fuelled frenzy to stop Frederick and his lackeys.
Elena has Issues after witnessing Stefan’s ferocity while high on her blood, and perhaps rightly so, because that one instance seems to have left him with an insatiable craving.
Anna refuses to turn Jeremy, which is possibly for the best after we learn that the only real reason he wanted to be turned was to spend eternity with Vicki…
… which might have been problematic, given that Caroline this week uncovers Vicki’s corpse at the edge of the falls.

From the melancholy of its rain-soaked opening to the spectacle of its blood-curdling conclusion, “Let the Right One In” is an episode that aspires to be all things, from subtle character piece to cinematic milestone. It delivers on all fronts, with a densely packed story that’s told with style and wit. It’s remarkable in no small measure because of its continuous torrential downpour, and because of its near-total absence of sunlight. While the high-school scenes in last week’s “There Goes the Neighborhood” were notable for their toned-down grays and muted beiges and browns, “Let the Right One In” signals a shift to a pervasive and almost all-encompassing sense of despair. To the show’s credit, however, the result is appropriately chilling and morbid, yet somehow also stylish and exhilarating.

There are three distinct story threads in the episode: Damon, Elena and Alaric rescuing Stefan, Jeremy pleading with Anna to turn him and Caroline discovering Vicki’s corpse. These threads are disparate, but they’re woven together in a way that appears effortless, creating a fabric that has texture, cohesion and a multitude of promising story developments. Perhaps the most tantalizing of these is Stefan’s resurgent craving for human blood, which hints at a destructive backstory and a very uncertain future with Elena. It affords Paul Wesley the opportunity to deliver his strongest performance of the season so far, resisting Elena’s plea to feed on her when he’s dying and appearing to lose all bearing on reality while repeatedly stabbing Frederick. Wesley makes the most of the available accoutrements, from the tree root and the fangs to the blood and the vampiric make-up, but it’s his vivid portrayal of Stefan – as a vampire driven to insanity by his thirst for human blood – that makes the scene so disturbing. While Stefan made a cryptic reference to his “past behavior” in “Haunted,” and while his reluctance to drink a bag of human blood in “162 Candles” implied a lurking fear of the consequences, we this week get a glimpse of a side to Stefan that’s unrecognizable: one that’s visceral, instinctive and primal, and wholly oblivious to the world around him.

What’s remarkable about the way this transformation is portrayed is its economy. Stefan’s absence of recognition when he reacts to Elena in the forest suggests a personality subsumed beneath his instincts. His look of remorse and desperation when Damon finds him chewing through blood bags in the episode’s final moments conveys a remnant of the Stefan we know, fighting to claw back control of his actions. In both cases, Wesley’s performance is such that his eyes do almost all of the work; they tell a story of their own through expression and context. Similarly, the anxiety in the air when Stefan tries to reassure Elena that “everything’s going to be OK” is captured through the performance: a cold distance and underlying uncertainty that signal how irreparably this experience has driven the characters apart.

Elena’s heroism presents itself in her willingness to hold her wrist to Stefan’s mouth and endure the nausea-inducing experience of having her blood drained, and she has a proactive role throughout the episode that represents a significant step forward. In contrast to her overstated declaration in “Unpleasantville” that she “fought back,” her bravery and determination in this episode are subtle. We see Elena dragging Stefan through the forest; we see her driving a tranquilizer dart into Frederick’s back; we see her desperately trying to stave off panic when Stefan loses consciousness and Frederick wakes up, thinking on her feet and realizing that she needs to save Stefan with a dose of her blood. While the show occasionally struggles to make Elena likeable – and while it sometimes overcompensates by extolling her virtue to the point of saintliness – it’s hard to deny that the character proves herself in this episode, demonstrating a level-headed conviction and resourcefulness that make Elena an active participant in the story rather than merely a victim or object of affection.

Arguably viewed by Damon both as a victim and as an object of affection, the dynamic between Elena and Stefan’s brother this week progresses from undisguised contempt to unspoken solidarity. “I’ve accepted the fact that you’re a self-serving psychopath with no redeeming qualities,” Elena spews at Damon at the start of the episode. Ian Somerhalder’s performance is as ambiguous as ever, but Damon’s reply to this early insult – a simple, mildly sarcastic “Ouch!” – betrays the character’s dependence on humor as a defense mechanism. At no point is this disguise more apparent than when Elena challenges Damon to “not joke around for two seconds,” ending his entertaining riff on An Officer and a Gentleman and briefly but crucially drawing out an earnest side to him. “I can’t protect you, Elena,” he barks. It’s a moment that reveals Damon’s anxiousness to save his brother, but also his concern for Elena. Damon rebuffs Elena’s resolve to be a part of the rescue effort, but it’s accompanied by a gesture that’s fleeting yet pivotal – Damon placing a reassuring hand on Elena’s arm. Despite being branded a psychopath, and despite earning Elena’s hatred both for turning her biological mother into a vampire and for attempting to kill her impervious stepfather, Damon’s attachment to Elena throughout this episode is never articulated but always apparent. “I know, Elena, I know,” he intones with surprising and almost touching earnestness when he and Elena stand outside the farmhouse and acknowledge that they have to rescue Stefan. It’s memorable for Somerhalder’s somber delivery of the line, but also for the way Damon reassuringly takes Elena’s head in his hands and steadies her. The chemistry between the actors does most of the work, and director Dennis Smith allows the camera to stay with the actors well beyond the point when he could have cut away, mining the magic of the moment for all it’s worth. But the rest is achieved by the implication that Damon cares enough to want to steady Elena. For a character whose depiction has varied between nemesis, adversary, antagonist and outright villain, Damon suddenly seems to alternate between anti-hero, rogue, nuisance and reluctant hero. His conviction while trying to save his brother underscores his loyalty to Stefan – a loyalty that transcends the hostility between them over the years, but which also suggests an intense determination to make Elena happy. There’s something inherently tragic about making her happy by reuniting her with her boyfriend, but also something quietly noble about the way he tries to redeem himself through familial ties.

In keeping with the show’s almost trademark ambition of defying its own efforts, Damon’s determination to rescue Stefan takes a shocking turn when he reaches the farmhouse, meets Miss Gibbons, the compelled and mutilated resident, and promptly snaps her neck. Miss Gibbons was hardly an established character; her description seems to be summarized by “the nice lady who serves as a human snack for Frederick and the other vampires from the tomb.” But her death is a moment defined by its brutality, and one with the potential for multiple interpretations. Damon kills Miss Gibbons because he needs rapid access to the house without an invitation, but his reason for asking her whether she had any immediate family might go beyond simply assessing whether there’d be anyone to prevent him from gaining access to the home. It’s possible that Damon planned to kill Miss Gibbons anyway, and wanted to know if she’d leave any family members to mourn her (which, as we learn with a modicum of sadness, she doesn’t). It’s also possible that Damon realized the kind of psychological damage Miss Gibbons would be left with once her compulsion wore off, and between the invasion of her home and the scars all over her body, it could be that Damon took it into his own hands to put her out of her misery. The third possibility is that Damon put his brother’s life – and his promise to Elena to rescue him – ahead of Miss Gibbons’ life. This final possibility is the most likely, but it raises the question of whether Damon’s perspective on human life has changed at all since he drained Tanner and killed Vicki. “She’s human!” Alaric immediately protests. “And I’m not, so I don’t care,” is Damon’s reply. Somerhalder plays the moment with brusque impatience, which, in an episode in which his familial bonds and human attachments emerge, makes his moral ambiguity all the more impenetrable. We’re not sure whether he felt remorse for killing her – or indeed whether he enjoyed killing her for the pure thrill of the violence. As has been the case throughout the season, it’s impossible to say whether Damon is essentially a villain who’s trying to redeem himself through good deeds, or whether he’s a good person whose anger, bitterness and appetite for revenge have brought out the worst in him.

An integral part of Damon’s role as the surprising hero of the episode is his uneasy alliance with Alaric, whose hostility and rapid banter with Damon make their scenes a delight to watch. “You can’t deny – we were badass!” Damon tells Alaric at the Grill after they narrowly escape Pearl’s wrath over finding the bodies of her community strewn across the farmhouse floor. Alaric’s swift punch to Damon’s jaw is amusing – not least for the way Damon shrugs the outburst off with a nonchalant “It happens” – but it punctuates an arc for Alaric that’s never as fully developed as it deserves to be. “Mr. Saltzman, we need your help,” pleads Elena. There’s a brief exchange of glances to acknowledge how much remains unacknowledged, but we’re left to ponder why, two episodes after Elena discovered that Alaric was her stepfather, the topic remains to be addressed. Does Alaric help Elena out of a sense of obligation? Does he ever really believe Damon’s promise that Pearl can help him find Isobel? Does he even care about finding Isobel now that he knows Isobel chose to become a vampire? Or has Alaric reconsidered every part of his life after dying, and has he abandoned his mission to find Isobel and hunt vampires, hence his initial response to his stepdaughter: “I’m sorry, Elena, it’s not my problem.” Not one of these questions is addressed in this episode, and although they’re sure to be explored at some point, their lack of resolution leaves them lingering over the character, prompting us to wonder why Alaric changed his mind and decided to help Damon and Elena.

Less inscrutable but equally puzzling is Jeremy, whose disillusionment with life is articulated when he reveals that he wants to become a vampire because he doesn’t “have anything else.” It’s a subtly harrowing scene in which we learn that Elena’s teenage brother is effectively ready to end his life, but there’s something both gut-wrenching and infuriating about it. On the one hand, it’s easy to dismiss: you could argue that Jeremy is a kid who doesn’t know what he’s saying, that he’s so smitten with Vicki and so infatuated with Anna that he’s acting on his feelings, or that he isn’t ending his life so much as asking to be made immortal. On the other hand, Jeremy qualifies his request to Anna: “I wake up everyday and I feel OK, but there’s something missing, like a hole. Some people, they fit – in life, or whatever. I don’t.” It’s difficult to argue that Jeremy isn’t in many ways a social misfit, but as we’ve gleaned from his almost effortless meeting with Anna at the library in “Bloodlines,” that’s a choice he seems to have made himself. Perhaps he could fit in if he tried; perhaps he has tried. His line at the party in “Fool Me Once” – “I’m not really sure what my scene is anymore” – suggests a young adult who’s struggling to figure out where he belongs and what he’s supposed to be doing, but floundering because he never found the sense of belonging he was looking for.

Jeremy’s request to Anna now, however, is so extreme and so unfounded that it makes him look selfish and stupid. Besides the fact that he’d break Elena and Jenna’s heart – if only by concealing his immortality with an abrupt departure from Mystic Falls before anyone could realize that he wasn’t getting older – there’s something faintly ridiculous about chasing an ex-girlfriend – one who may or may not be a vampire – when she vanished and hasn’t been seen in months. Not only does Jeremy have no idea whether or not Vicki is the creature he’s now asking to become: he doesn’t know where to start looking for her, or whether she even wants to be found. There’s also something fundamentally selfish about the way Jeremy pretends to care about Anna and then reveals that the only reason he wanted to be turned was to spend eternity with someone else. In Jeremy’s defense, he apologizes for this, and it’s apparent at several points in the episode that Jeremy genuinely cares about Anna. The tragic part is he obviously cares about Vicki more, to the extent that, taking the assumption that she was turned into a vampire on faith, he’s willing to sacrifice himself in order to go after her.

To Anna’s credit, she seems to realize this early on. “You only like me because of what you want from me,” she points out, observing the same as most of the audience: that Jeremy shows great interest in learning about vampires, but little or no interest in learning about her. The tragedy to this storyline is that while Anna continues to act like a teenager – smiling shyly at Jeremy and texting him to hold on to their “little secret” – the change in her is palpable. We see Anna defying her mother and proudly standing up for the boy she cares about, in spite of the fact that, as Pearl points out, “his family is the reason [she] was stuck in a tomb for over a century.” But Malese Jow also plays Anna differently when she’s with Jeremy: her jittery nervousness disappears, and Anna suddenly seems easy-going with him; no less quirky, but somehow more light-hearted and playful, as if she’s found someone who, while not necessarily someone she wants to spend eternity with, might be someone she feels she can confide in. If nothing else, Anna clearly cares about Jeremy enough to question her loyalty to the parent she spent over a century waiting to free from incarceration. There’s an innate sense of betrayal in the fact that Jeremy is willing to discard this kind of loyalty for the sake of pursuing Vicki, and it makes Jeremy all the more difficult to sympathize with.

Still more difficult to sympathize with is Matt, who this week learns that his sister has died and yet somehow remains as reprehensible as he was last week when ignoring the discomfort of his date. “I need to be alone right now,” he tells Caroline after she delivers the news that she found Vicki’s corpse buried besides the falls. Matt’s grief is such that we never really pause to consider how Caroline might be feeling after she lost her footing, alone in the dark and in the middle of nowhere, and stumbled onto a dead body. Yet Caroline remains a stoic figure in the episode’s final scenes, pouring coffee for Matt, Kelly and her mother, and offering her support to Matt at a time when he might need someone to talk to. As we see, that someone isn’t Caroline, whom he coldly rebuffs and leaves standing in the middle of an empty room, but in fact Elena, whose arms he immediately falls into, sobbing uncontrollably and suddenly desperate to find comfort in.

On several levels, I realize it’s wrong to judge Matt at a time when he’s grieving, just as it’s wrong to judge Elena after an episode in which she was so heroic. And yet I can’t help judging them both. Matt treats his girlfriend like garbage, and although he earns a small measure of understanding given the circumstances, it’s hard to feel for the guy who rejects his girlfriend’s support – following an ordeal during which she uncovered his sister’s dead body, no less – and who then immediately accepts the support of the girl he’s spent years pining for. Caroline deserves this outpour of emotion; firstly because she’s Matt’s girlfriend, secondly because she’s now recovering from the kind of trauma that, under any normal circumstances, would require counseling and would haunt the victim for years. Instead, she’s forced to look on helplessly while Matt opts to share his grief with the close friend whom he’s always secretly wished he could be with. I feel bad for Matt, but at the same time I despise him, just as I despise Elena for so willingly embracing this outpour of grief over a death that she’s known about for months. Elena’s decision to keep that death a secret from Matt precludes her right to his confidence, and to usurp his trust from Caroline – unintentionally or not – makes her contemptible. Ultimately, and perhaps paradoxically, Caroline emerges from this storyline looking like more of a victim than Matt.

Not that the show’s writers would expect us to dig quite so deeply into the character arcs, but it’s a testament to the depth and quality of the show that we can, and it’s a testament to this episode that it yields such complexity. The story, written by Julie Plec and scripted by Brian Young, is filled with nuances that could spawn extensive debate. Alaric’s unaddressed issues after “A Few Good Men” are one example, but there are many others. Some are valid and thought-provoking, such as why Anna would want to spend an eternity with an overbearing vampire for a mother. Some are mildly amusing, such as why the group of vampires at the farmhouse would ask Miss Gibbons to put vegetables in a blender, or why Pearl would have such an unshakeable maternal instinct towards vampires who seem content to spend their days in a farmhouse playing pool, watching TV and drinking alcohol. Other questions have the potential to be both thought-provoking and amusing, such as whether Stefan’s blood bags at the end of the episode really are the “two liters of soccer mom” that Damon mentioned at the start, or whether we should feel bad for Tyler given the fact that his mother takes every opportunity to flirt with Damon, and given the fact that, as we learn this week, his father is happy to have a drink with the first attractive woman he comes across. (“She’s a constituent, and a rich one by the looks of it.” “You can tell all of that by looking at her ass?”)

Beyond the debatable aspects, however, Young’s script sparkles with painstaking details. Pearl’s diction, for example, perfectly matches her serene temperament: she doesn’t just go into town to get a sense of who’s wearing and ingesting vervain: she makes “exploratory visits” to “assess who’s under the influence of vervain.” We aren’t entirely surprised when Caroline stumbles onto Vicki’s body, because the script made sure Vicki was already at the back of our minds when Matt compared his mother and sister’s tendencies to run off, and when Anna brought up the controversial issue of vampires who turn humans out of “boredom,” echoing Damon’s admission in “Haunted” that he turned Vicki because he had nothing better to do.

There’s also a subtle echo of the pilot when Caroline begins to ask Matt if he’s “OK,” then thinks better of it, clearly realizing – as Elena did in her journal in the pilot – that to ask someone who’s visibly suffering whether they’re OK is an insincere way to tell them you don’t care. And yet, not a moment later, Elena’s question to a visibly suffering Jeremy when they return home is, of course, “Are you OK?” Which suggests that, after 17 episodes, Elena hasn’t learned a thing about how to talk to Jeremy.

That, or the show’s writers just enjoy making fun of their heroine with a razor-sharp script.

In any case, amidst its wrist-guzzling, neck-snapping, heart-stabbing and vervain-laced eye-sizzling, “Let the Right One In” is that rare jewel of episodic storytelling: a dramatic hour that’s riveting by the pace and scope of its story, but an hour that’s also propelled by the depth and caliber of its characters. At once plot-driven and character-driven, it’s an episode that expands on the show’s ever-more-intricate mythology, yet also one that explores universal themes of loyalty, betrayal and passion. At its heart is Stefan’s uncontrollable thirst for blood, a thinly-veiled but potent metaphor for alcoholism, yet the most memorable aspect of the visual spectacle is surely the episode’s rainfall, which finally subsides but seems to leave the unavoidable impression that its turmoil has enveloped the characters and seeped its way inwards.

In the interests of character progression and great drama, I find myself hoping this proves true. As unnerving as it is to watch Elena graduate from damsel-in-distress to vampire-tranquilizing heroine, it’s oddly fulfilling. As heartbreaking as it is to see Vicki’s friends and family mourn her death, it’s gently cathartic. And as a template for epic storytelling that entertains, mesmerizes and challenges our expectations, this episode is hopefully the start of a trend that will continue until the season finale.

4 out of 5

Review of 1x16: "There Goes The Neighborhood"

5/28/2011 12:21:09 PM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Elena, Stefan, Caroline and Matt go on a double date to the Grill. Stefan and Matt mess around with Stefan’s old Porsche, and Caroline chastises Elena for being the center of Matt’s universe. It’s as fun as it sounds, and it falls to Damon to save the day (or possibly just the episode) by getting caught making out with Mama Donovan.
Pearl visits Damon and demands to know everything about the Founders Council and Damon’s supply of vervain to them. When he refuses to cooperate, she gouges his eyes out and proves she’s not to be messed with.
The remaining vampires in the tomb beneath the church escape, most of them finding their way to Pearl’s secluded farmhouse. One vampire named Frederick is a particularly aggressive and reckless specimen, but after a botched attempt to take revenge on the Salvatores for events in 1864, he returns to Pearl with his tail between his legs. Pearl stabs him in the chest with a spoon (!), and Frederick concedes that Pearl really does know best and is indeed not to be messed with.
Jeremy forces Anna to reveal that she’s a vampire, and after she feeds on him, he asks her to turn him.

If the measure of an episode’s success was its willingness to be sensational and grotesque, “There Goes the Neighborhood” would undoubtedly be one of the most remarkable of the season. It has eye-gouging. It has a puncture wound caused by a spoon. It has Pearl suggesting that a vampire feeding frenzy is in the works. And if the episode had only been willing to play to its strengths – blood-spattered eye sockets, lethal kitchen utensils, mass hysteria and all – those strengths would almost certainly have redeemed the episode, in turn making this a much easier episode to review.

“There Goes the Neighborhood” attempts to distinguish itself by a much broader approach, however, and that approach is normality. Elena wants to spend a “normal night” with her boyfriend. She wants to drive herself home unescorted, because apparently that’s what “normal people” do. Stefan wants to go out on a date so he can “try to be normal.” The infection spreads, and suddenly all Anna wants is to come back to high school so she can be “a normal teen,” and all Jeremy wants is for Anna to understand that he knows about vampires and believes they can be quite “normal.”

This is an episode that prides itself on its preoccupation with normality, to the extent that it aspires to be the epitome of normal – which is to say uneventful, unremarkable and unmemorable – in the most splendrous way. It devotes half of its hour to four central characters – one of them a vampire, one of them a distant descendant of a vampire – going on a double date. Before, during and after the date, the show heavy-handedly drives home the message that everything we see here is normal. Which is to say that self-centered conversations and passive-aggressive confrontations are normal. Obnoxious glaring and testosterone-fuelled macho posturing are normal. Chiding, scolding, rebuking and reprimanding are all normal.

If this was the goal, I’d say the episode succeeded, insofar as half of the episode extracts its supernatural elements and proves that it can indeed function without relying on fangs or life-or-death peril. It sadly behooves me to point out, however, that the result isn’t especially entertaining, and it saddles Pearl with the daunting task of rescuing the hour in the other half of the episode, making an enticing display of her brutality and plans for widespread chaos.

To Pearl’s credit, she makes a valiant effort and keeps the episode afloat. We get a glimpse of a community leader who’s been forced to adapt to a century-and-a-half of change and to formulate a plan – not just for revenge, but for the survival of the group she swiftly takes charge of. Brian Oh and Andrew Chambliss’ script is at its strongest when it focuses on the tomb’s vampires adjusting to a seismic cultural shift: in the opening scene, we see vampires examining clothes and grasping how fashions have changed over 145 years; we see vampires learning how to operate a TV remote; we see vampires discovering how to use a cell phone. It’s an oddly touching segment of the episode, partly because we can’t imagine any of these changes to civilization helping or hindering a vampire’s thirst for blood all that drastically, and partly because it humanizes this group of vampires, portraying it as a displaced community that’s trying to make its way in the world.

Kelly Hu excels in her role as mother, mentor, protector and disciplinarian, imbuing Pearl with the same mesmerizing grace and beauty she brought to the part in “Children of the Damned,” but also hinting at the immense physical strength and intelligence that make her a born leader. Her confrontation with Damon leaves an indelible impression of her ruthlessness and brutality, as well as establishing that she lacks Katherine’s emotional disposition, instead approaching each situation with clarity, purpose and unshakeable conviction.

It’s interesting to compare Pearl to Katherine given the friendship between them that’s alluded to, but it’s equally interesting to compare Pearl to Damon, given that she this week subjugates the character whose viciousness defined the first half of the season. The almost alarming ease with which Pearl asserts her authority over Damon illustrates how rich the show’s universe is – a universe in which the show’s principal merciless bloodsucker can be outdone by an even more merciless bloodsucker, by a female bloodsucker, it has to be noted – as well as illustrating the show’s complexity. Hu conveys various facets of her character throughout the hour, revealing a quick-thinking and pragmatic strategist, but also a tender mother to Anna and a Mystic Falls resident with a plan that may yet turn out to be surprisingly provincial. “She’s going to open up a little store, it’s always been her dream,” Anna tells Jeremy after Pearl approaches Jenna with a bid for John Gilbert’s old apothecary, prompting us to wonder whether her masterplan involves mass casualties or the purchase of a shop. In the best possible way, Hu makes her character at once terrifying and endearing, overbearing and vulnerable. “I can’t fight you too,” she pleads when Anna returns home, reminding us that, in addition to relying on her daughter to help her navigate a world she’s only beginning to understand, she needs Anna for love and support. It’s a strangely contradictory role, but one that Hu brings to life with a perfect balance of elegance and versatility.

Marginally less successful is the depiction of the vampires she’s herding. Harper remains as good-naturedly polite as he was when he apologized to his soon-to-be-meal at the start of “A Few Good Men,” and his loyalty to Pearl and respect towards Anna (watch how tentatively he tries to work her cell phone) suggest a benevolent character who shares their sense of civility and who would make a genuine effort to integrate into the world he’s woken up to. Frederick, on the other hand, is brutish to the point of caricature, played with delicious vitality by Stephen Martines but denied the chance to flourish thanks to a largely one-note role that consists of threatening to be violent, becoming violent and (somewhere in between) trying very hard to exude menace. His quest for vengeance against the Salvatores allows for an impressively well-shot and well-choreographed scene in which he and a fellow vampire ambush Stefan and Damon, but given the absence of any planning or foresight into the attack and the disastrous results that ensue, the vendetta and the attack both feel like they’re attached to an imbecile. Frederick is less neurotic than Logan, but not much smarter. He’s more experienced than Noah or Ben, but not much more formidable. He seems like a cross between a loose cannon and a blunt instrument, but in spite of the actor’s best efforts, Frederick lacks the depth that either of those imply.

Possessing an abundance of depth but sorely lacking the requisite material this week are Elena, Stefan, Caroline and Matt, who are the unfortunate victims of a cruel experiment that involves discovering whether the show can continue to operate without the danger and excitement supplied by vampires. I should mention at this point that I firmly believe the show can, but it has to be said that this episode doesn’t support that belief so much as decimate it.

In all fairness, I reached the end of this episode (which in itself is perhaps an achievement) and found I had a new-found respect for Stefan, whose patience with all three other characters is of such magnificent proportions that I suddenly understood why he’d be so intent on spending eternity with Damon: not out of some dysfunctional family loyalty, but as a way to develop his stamina for tedious social occasions – a stamina that extends all the way to listening to Elena and Matt recounting their trivial childhood antics – and to feign an interest in them. Even more admirably, Stefan feigns enjoyment, plays pool with Matt and shows off his vintage car. The overriding impression is that he’s making this effort to please Elena, hoping it will make her life slightly more bearable if she has a chance to forget the suffering and trauma she’s surrounded by. But there are also moments that suggest an old-fashioned romanticism. “When I decided to stay here and get to know you,” he reveals, “it was so that I could do things like this; so I could bring my girlfriend flowers, take her out on a date, try to be normal.” On the one hand, it’s almost indescribably disappointing to watch a character with such a dark and eventful past limited by such mundane material; on the other hand, there’s something honest and charmingly straightforward to his intentions, and for a brief moment I found myself hoping the character’s wish would be fulfilled.

Stefan does indeed bring Elena flowers, takes her out on a date and tries to be normal, but it’s an effort that’s nearly derailed – by Elena’s innate ability to make everything about her, by Caroline’s insatiable craving for attention and by Matt’s obliviousness to the fact that he’s paying more attention to Stefan’s date than his own. “I was just trying to make conversation,” Elena protests to Caroline, after smoothly shifting the focus of the conversation away from Matt’s job at the Mystic Grill and turning it into a protracted recollection of her most memorable experiences growing up. Like any self-possessed adolescent, Elena believes that making conversation is synonymous with talking about herself, and never considers that she might be dwelling on topics that neither her date nor Matt’s will be able to contribute to. To Caroline’s dismay – and to that of the audience – Matt unwittingly takes the bait and indulges Elena’s trip down memory lane, recounting with undisguised joy how much fun he’s had with Elena.

It’s painful to watch because we can see how much Caroline’s exclusion is hurting her. “We’ve known each other our whole lives,” Matt blurts out to Elena. Elena basks in the warmth of his gaze, failing to realize that she’s unwittingly making Caroline’s point later on for her: Caroline is “Matt’s Elena back-up” – the next best thing Matt can get and the person he’ll have to make do with. It’s a realization made all the more agonizing when we realize that Matt was aware of it the whole time. “Did I pass?” he asks Caroline at the end of the night. “This whole double-date thing was obviously a test to see how I’d do around Elena.” To Caroline’s credit, she resists the urge to tell him he failed miserably, or to ask how he can possibly think he passed when his previous scene involved him recounting what it was like making out with Elena in a sports car.

Matt watches Caroline cheerily greet his mother at home, then tells her at school, “You don’t really help the situation, you could at least try to be nice.” My first response was to wonder if Matt had suffered a severe blow to the head and forgotten Caroline’s effort to win his mother’s approval; my second was to speculate that, for reasons unknown, he’d been compelled into forgetting the scene at the house; my third was to assume the writers had no idea what they were doing from scene to scene, most likely the result of excessive alcohol while scripting the later scenes at the Mystic Grill, and that they just assumed that, since Matt has been a likeable personality for the vast majority of the season so far, we’d automatically forgive any inconsistencies and continue to find him as likeable as ever.

I now have a renewed sense of sympathy towards Caroline: firstly for her endurance throughout this ordeal – an ordeal which was borne of good intentions and an attempt to reassure herself that Matt cared about her more than he cared about Elena (a fact we’re only shakily sure of by the end of the episode); and secondly for her shamelessness, such that she’s won over by Matt’s eloquence in Stefan’s car and allows herself to be convinced that, despite an evening spent reminiscing with Elena, Matt genuinely cares about Caroline. This was the first episode which made me actively dislike a character: Matt’s blindness to his girlfriend’s insecurity, his lack of effort to involve her in the evening’s conversation and his success in winning her over with a few carefully chosen words combine to make him look like a disingenuous jerk who doesn’t realize how lucky he is. By the time he confronts his mother and reminds her that she’s supposed to be responsible for him rather than the other way around, I find myself wondering whether a another miraculously well-scripted speech – delivered with the appropriate heartfelt sincerity – will succeed in fixing his domestic life the way it fixed his personal life.

Escapism and denial are the two predominant motifs in this episode. Almost all of the characters are anxious to forget their burdens, to pretend they don’t exist or to walk away from them altogether. Perhaps tragically, it’s the few who defy this approach – Pearl, with her assertive nature and willingness to confront challenges head on, and Jeremy, whose combination of dumb courage and brave stupidity lead him to uncover Anna’s secret – that reach the end of the episode looking the most commendable. You could argue that each of the characters is in denial, including Pearl and Jeremy, but a relevant question is whether they realize they’re in denial, and I think it’s this self-awareness that determines how deluded the characters seem by the episode’s end. Elena calls Caroline “ridiculous” for being upset by Matt’s fond memory of making out with Elena. Caroline immediately adds that she’s also “insecure and stupid,” which goes to show how aware she is of her own weaknesses. By contrast, Elena never considers how horribly she might be hurting Caroline without realizing it, which perhaps highlights how blind she is to her self-absorption, and how effortlessly she makes herself the center of attention and hurts people in the process.

At an early point in the episode, Elena tells Stefan that she longs to “get through one day without having to deal with any of it,” it presumably being the engrossing, captivating and near-epic drama we’ve witnessed throughout the season. “There Goes the Neighborhood” achieves just that, limiting its focus to a glacially-paced double date that tells us nothing about the characters and which in fact serves to make two of them less likeable than they were at the start of the episode. The episode also fails to adhere to its lofty concept by bringing Frederick to the Mystic Grill, compromising its no-vampires-or-anything-similarly-far-fetched mandate and effectively admitting that it wasn’t going to make it to the end of the hour without at least some element of peril.

What’s disappointing about this is that the characters deserve better. Even without a vampire storyline to bolster the drama, these characters are entertaining, likeable and worthy of our emotional investment. This episode was a genuine opportunity for a light-hearted, touching and insightful character piece, and one that could have demonstrated the characters’ depth and complexity without any of the show’s stock-and-trade vampire lore or life-or-death crises as a backdrop. Instead, we’re subjected to a fragmented episode – one that’s split in half and hence split in quality. Half of it is memorable, with some respectable work from Kelly Hu and Malese Jow, the latter of whom captures a particularly potent moment when she finds herself torn between disgusting and injuring Jeremy or caving in to her instincts and drinking from the wound on his hand. Such moments in the stronger half of the episode are dragged down by the other half, however – a half that’s wildly uneven, painfully dull and devoid of the wit, charm or humor it was meant to have.

Worse still, the weaker half of the episode devours screen time that could have been used for a dozen storylines: Isobel’s whereabouts and intentions, Damon’s role in turning her, Alaric’s return from the dead, or Bonnie’s realization that her grandmother died opening a tomb that has now inadvertently led to a dozen vampires convening and apparently planning to make a buffet of the residents of Mystic Falls. It would be a worthwhile postponement of great story material if we gained a greater appreciation of the characters, or if we even shared the sentiment that Elena and Stefan express at the end of the episode: that they had “a really nice time.” If nice is a euphemism for “uninspiring” or “immediately forgettable” then this was indeed a very nice time, so much so that I feel a renewed longing to return to the story the show was telling beforehand. If this was an attempt to imply that the characters actually enjoyed themselves, however, I can’t help wondering whether Elena means it. “You’re such a liar,” Stefan immediately replies. He’s joking – or at least he seems to be – but it’s hard not to wonder whether he had any more fun than we did. Which is to say, none at all.

2 out of 5

Review of 1x15: "A Few Good Men"

5/28/2011 12:18:09 PM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Alaric learns that his dead wife was indeed Elena’s mother, and that she left her life with Alaric behind to become a vampire.
Elena tracks down a high-school friend of Isobel’s named Trudie, who seems very clued in to the fact that her friend is now a vampire.
Trudie shares happy memories of Isobel and establishes that Elena is not a vampire like her mom, then sends her away and is promptly killed by one of Isobel’s compelled messengers.
Said compelled messenger tells Elena that Isobel wants nothing to do with her, then promptly kills himself.
Damon tells Alaric that he turned Isobel, provokes Alaric into attacking him and stabs him with his own stake. Alaric revives, and we learn that his ring – a gift from Isobel – somehow protects him from supernatural injury.
A vampire named Harper escapes the tomb and rejoins Pearl and Anna in a secluded house.
Matt’s absentee alcoholic mom returns and doesn’t seem to like Caroline very much.

If there’s a watchword for “A Few Good Men,” it’s surely coincidence. “The coincidence is too much,” insists Stefan when he hears that Elena’s presumed-dead biological mother may have been married to the man who’s now dating Elena’s aunt. “It can’t be a coincidence,” insists Damon when he realizes that Elena’s mother left Alaric and sought him out, and that she may well be part of a lineage that stretches back centuries, all the way back to Katherine.

As fortuitous as The Vampire Diaries may at times seem, it’s hard to imagine any aspect of the show evolving out of coincidence. This episode is a prime example of advance planning: a perfectly crafted puzzle in which every nuance suggests rigorous care and meticulous attention to detail. Coupled with its intricate plot, however, is a story that’s surprisingly poignant, harrowing and – above all – human. The suggestion at the end of it is that events playing out in Mystic Falls are merely a chapter in a much larger mythology. The season is tiptoeing towards its conclusion and the scale of the show’s ambition is gradually becoming more awe-inspiring, but the events that unfold are depicted with vivid characters and identifiable predicaments, so much so that, no matter how coincidental the plot or how epic the scope, this remains a story about courage overcoming hopelessness and resilience overcoming despair. As flawless as its structure might be, the episode’s merit lies equally in its focus on universal themes and intrinsically human drama.

To say that this is a human drama is of course a paradox, as the show’s latest recurring character is an immortal one, and one who remains to be seen in the present day. Isobel’s influence throughout this episode is immense, however. Via flashbacks to a time several years earlier, we see her making decisions that are now having far-reaching consequences in the present, and via compulsion and sheer menace, we see her dictating the actions of people around her and controlling every step that Elena takes.

Despite her prominent and often brutal influence on the characters, Isobel in many ways represents the heart of the narrative; the figure at the start of a story that culminates in a daughter and husband confronting the vampire responsible for turning her. One of them is barely able to process what she’s learned, while the other charges to his death in an effort to avenge her. Ironically, what we learn about Isobel can mostly be gleaned from what people say about her, and from what they’re willing to do for her. “You don’t want kids, you’re never home, I just want us to be normal people,” laments Alaric during one of the episode’s final flashbacks. It’s at this point that we realize that Isobel’s obsession with vampires has taken over her life. “Maybe I don’t want to,” Isobel’s replies. “Maybe I want more.” It’s a moment that overshadows previous flashbacks to Alaric’s life with Isobel – a life that seemed blissful and uncomplicated, which is to say the opposite of the life that Isobel’s husband and daughter are living in the present.

What’s remarkable about this revelation is that it turns Isobel into a counterpoint to Katherine. “I like it here – I’m not ready to leave just yet,” Katherine told Pearl during a flashback in “Children of the Damned.” By contrast, Isobel’s disillusionment with her life is such that she has more in common with Damon. Both characters became apathetic about their lives, and both feel a void that can’t be filled by their human existence. Which in turn makes Isobel’s choice to be turned by Damon all the more poetic, and which makes Alaric’s suicidal assault on Damon all the more maudlin, given that he’s avenging a wife who sacrificed herself to a vampire in the hope of being freed from a life with her husband.

Alaric becomes increasingly tragic as we learn more about him. Since his enigmatic introduction in “The Turning Point,” we’ve slowly pieced together the extent of his loss, to a point where his involvement with vampires amounts to the same obsession he berated Isobel for. What’s remarkable about this – and what now ties Alaric’s arc to Elena’s, to Damon’s, and at least to some extent to Matt’s – is the episode’s recurring preoccupation with abandonment. Alaric is suddenly forced to acknowledge that there were vast parts of Isobel’s life which she never shared with him, from the moment she gave birth to Elena to the moment she decided to leave Alaric in order to seek an eternity as a vampire. What follows is perhaps an inevitable realization – that Isobel found life among vampires more appealing than life with Alaric – but it’s a realization played with all of the conflicting emotions that would accompany it, and the show uses it to enrich the intricacy of its backstory with an intensely human dimension. When Alaric desperately lunges towards Damon with a stake in his hand, he’s not only attacking his wife’s killer; he’s attacking the creature who Isobel regarded as her salvation, and the source of Alaric’s guilt, shock and betrayal in light of his discovery. For a character who once described himself as “not a violent guy by design,” Alaric’s reaction is in sharp contrast to Elena’s sadness over learning that her mother doesn’t want her, and to Damon’s self-involvement after learning that Katherine wanted nothing to do with him. The theme running through each of the characters’ arcs – and what unites the strands at the end of the episode – is a common sense of abandonment; the idea that a parent or spouse left for lack of fulfillment, and that there was something that drove them away.

To Elena’s credit, she overcomes her feeling of abandonment by tracking down her mother’s friend and by trying to discover more about her mother. In a moment that captures Elena’s nervousness and delight at learning a piece of the truth, we see her visit Trudie and find out what life was like for Isobel in high school. With hindsight, it’s possible that large portions of Trudie’s anecdotes were either embellished or outright false, but Elena’s visit is significant because it illustrates her perseverance. “I don’t know if I can handle that,” Elena acknowledges when she contemplates digging into the background of a parent who might turn out to be dead. Yet despite her reluctance to add a biological parent to her deceased adoptive parents, Elena forges onwards. Even after learning that Damon killed Isobel, and that Isobel has no interest in meeting or hearing from her daughter, Elena finds it in herself to use the messenger’s cell phone to call her mother. It’s a choice that speaks perhaps to Elena’s naivety, but certainly also to her courage and tenacity. Unlike Alaric’s regret and self-doubt, and unlike Damon’s denial and self-pity, Elena proves herself an admirable role model by trying to make the most of a life beset by tragedy.

Equally admirable is Jenna, whose aversion to secrecy this week is endearing to the point of hilarity, and whose forthright effort to bridge the distance between Elena, Isobel and Alaric brings charm and, ultimately, momentum to the episode. Jenna and Alaric’s kiss early in the episode is punctuated with humor, but it’s also memorable for its spontaneity. It lacks any fanfare to signify its importance, but it’s passionate and impulsive, and in spite of the tragedy that ensues shortly after, it’s a moment that’s truly romantic. In a way, this belies Jenna’s crucial role in the episode: she researches Elena’s birth and helps Elena to track down Trudie’s address; even when she realizes that she’s about to ruin her kiss with Alaric, Jenna reveals the identity of Elena’s mother, sending Alaric to Stefan and prompting Damon to wonder why his experience with Isobel was so significant. While these developments could easily have been reworked to happen without Jenna’s involvement, it’s further evidence of the episode’s magnificent structure, with Jenna at once driving the plot, underlining her honesty and providing support for everyone around her. In a story defined by hidden motives, Jenna represents an approach that’s open, forthright and, if nothing else, in such direct contrast to Isobel that we immediately understand why Alaric would be drawn to her.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Stefan, who lies by omission when he fails to tell Elena who killed her mother, and whose ineffectual response to Damon’s murder of Isobel is so wholly consistent with his Do Nothing ethos throughout the season that, while it means Stefan remains in character, it also means he remains as reprehensible as ever. Stefan urges Elena to “hold off a little while” before talking to Alaric, perhaps fearing that the truth would render him obsolete. He reassures Alaric that he’ll “handle” Damon’s role in killing Isobel, but somehow it falls to Elena to confront him, and it falls to Alaric to challenge him. Finally, he urges Alaric to “let it go,” advice so devoid of sympathy that you wonder whether the show’s writers take perverse pleasure in portraying Stefan as a compassionless jerk.

Every bit as compassionless but also infinitely more complex is Damon, whose villainy this week transcends the horror of his past actions and renews itself with his present actions. In fairness to the character, it’s interesting to note that Damon respects his promise to Stefan in “History Repeating” and resists the temptation to kill. In one of this week’s more grotesquely amusing scenes, we see Damon trying to overcome his dismay at the news that Katherine left him by feeding on a group of sorority girls. We see bite marks all over them – on their necks, stomachs, legs and wrists – but somehow we don’t doubt that Damon is telling the truth when he insists they’ll wake up in their dorms still alive. Whether Damon intends to earn Stefan’s respect, or whether he’s hoping to change Elena’s opinion of him in spite of his past actions, his restraint when feeding suggests a conscious effort to change. If it weren’t for his near-therapeutic look of contentment while Alaric gasps for air at the episode’s conclusion, such restraint would suggest an imminent redemption arc. As it stands, the show applies its by-now-trademark penchant for challenging its own conventions, upstaging Damon’s attempt at redemption by reminding us that he’s a character who delights in inflicting physical and emotional pain.

Contradicting this, however, is the image of Damon – shocked to the point of speechlessness, remorseful to the point of self-loathing – after learning that he’s responsible for killing and turning Elena’s biological mother. It’s made all the more haunting by the fact that Damon was taunting Alaric moments earlier, and that he was comfortable enough to ask Elena to button his shirt in spite of everything he’s done to earn her hatred. In praise of Ian Somerhalder’s continuously sublime performance, he convincingly plays a character who wants to earn Elena’s forgiveness, who fights his own nature while watching his victim die a slow and agonizing death, and who now has clear designs on the girl who so closely resembles Katherine. “Where did our girlfriend go?” Damon jokes after Elena leaves Stefan to talk to Damon. It’s a throwaway line, and one we barely notice, but it dovetails with the show’s ongoing effort to emphasize how history is repeating itself. When Damon asks Elena to help him button his shirt, she gives a weary sigh to indicate that she knows the game he’s playing. And yet she obliges him and plays it, hurriedly moving away from Damon and towards Stefan the moment he appears. As underhanded as Damon’s efforts to win Elena’s affection might be, they’re clearly not futile, not least because the chemistry between Somerhalder and Nina Dobrev is electrifying, overshadowing Dobrev’s chemistry with Paul Wesley and making poor Stefan look more obsolete than ever. After this episode, however, and especially after we see Damon reacting to the news that he killed Elena’s mother, there’s also little doubt that Elena’s capacity to forgive Damon will be limited to the point of being nonexistent. Stefan smiles with amusement when he realizes what Damon was hoping to achieve by asking Elena to button his shirt. It’s a smile that conveys his trust in Elena, but perhaps there’s something more calculating to it; the realization that he can allow his brother to indulge in his fantasy of winning Elena over, because he knows that Damon’s actions – both past and present – will always sabotage his chances.

In a story thread that’s entertaining but oddly removed from the rest of the episode by its lack of a supernatural element, we’re introduced to Kelly Donovan when she returns home and finds Matt making out with Caroline on his couch. It’s a moment that captures the painful awkwardness of a parent walking in on a child discovering their sexuality, but given that Matt and Caroline’s state of undress was sparked off by Caroline feeling “bored,” it’s interesting that the show resists making any kind of a statement. Melinda Clarke plays Kelly with a dry and acerbic humor, but there are two things about her that immediately grab you: the first is that Kelly is insanely attractive; the second is that she’s insanely young. In light of this, it’s difficult not to imagine the conversations that must have gone on in the writers’ room with regard to boredom-inspired sex and unexpected teen pregnancy. While Matt and Vicki might not have been conceived under identical circumstances, Clarke’s portrayal of Kelly – as the irresponsible, hedonistic parent who relies on their child to take care of them – suggests the circumstances were at least very similar. It remains to be seen whether Kelly will remain in Mystic Falls long enough for Matt to address the sacrifices he’s been forced to make in the wake of Kelly’s departure, but in a neat reversal to Jenna’s devout honesty, Matt wins our admiration by choosing not to tell his mother that she ruined his life. I can’t help thinking she deserves to hear that, because when she pulls out a bottle of vodka, sits at her table and says to Matt, “Tell me everything I’ve missed,” she’s assuming a level of entitlement which her absence precludes. Given that Matt has been forced to give up his football career, to work around his classes and to worry about rent when he should be worrying about his weekend plans, Kelly’s alcoholic waywardness strikes me as comparable to Damon’s appetite for Isobel’s blood, at least insofar as both characters indulge in their own selfish interests without considering the repercussions.

Selfish – but apologetically so – is the blood-starved vampire Harper, whose escape from the tomb and reunion with Pearl bookends the episode. I struggled to decide whether my distaste for this storyline was entirely because of my association with last week’s disastrous episode, but my suspicion is that the rest of this episode is much more effective, and that, by comparison, a storyline involving a vampire who walks across Mystic Falls and feeds on a hiker along the way has a limited chance of capturing our imagination. It will be interesting to see what Pearl and Harper’s motive is now that they’re free from the tomb and able to take revenge on the Salvatore brothers for their father’s actions. But then, any association with the tomb – a storyline with such a monumentally disappointing finish that I shudder to recall it – has the misfortune of garnering my reflexive skepticism. I’ll say, then, that I simply await the development of this storyline with interest, and that I found it morbidly touching that Harper apologized to the hiker before draining him of blood.

A vampire’s remorse over his first kill in 145 years is only one of the many subtleties in “A Few Good Men,” however. This is an episode in which Elena takes up her journal in the wake of Bonnie’s grandmother’s death, emphasizing that, no matter what she does, Elena’s life is defined by macabre tragedy; it’s an episode in which Matt’s fridge has a picture of himself, Kelly and Vicki, reminding us that the departure of Matt’s sister coincides with the return of his mother and leaves Matt with exactly the same perpetual obligation to be a surrogate parent; it’s also an episode in which a hiker’s cell phone rings moments after his murder, and in which a high-school friend is tracked down and killed in a house adorned with family pictures, suggesting – with almost heartbreaking understatement – that these are two of the countless victims whose families will forever wonder what happened to their loved one.

Beyond the many subtleties, however, we’re also left to ponder several unanswered questions and inexplicable minutiae. The show sets up what will likely be an ongoing storyline – Isobel’s life after becoming a vampire, her relation to Katherine and the identity of Elena’s father – but it’s a storyline with occasional points that aren’t as well established as they needed to be. For one thing, it’s never clear why no one makes the most obvious assumption about Elena’s biological father: that he was Isobel’s husband – which is to say, that he’s Alaric. As young as Alaric might be, we know that Isobel was in high school when she became pregnant, and we know that Alaric and Isobel married in college, which doesn’t make Alaric’s chances of fatherhood all that unlikely.

Another detail that’s never quite clear is why Alaric is so intent on avoiding contact with Elena. Is he just shocked at how much Isobel never told him? Does he feel like he never knew Isobel well enough to tell Elena anything about her? Does he feel a sense of guilt and regret over discovering a step-daughter he never knew he had, and is the suddenness of the discovery what puts him off wanting to know her? Or is Alaric so reluctant to meet Elena for fear he’ll immediately want to tell her how her biological mother died, forcing Elena to wonder whether she wants to be with a vampire whose brother murdered her mother?

These are peripheral details, though, and they’re minimal in comparison to the abundance of beautiful nuances throughout the episode. Brian Young’s phenomenal script is supported by superb direction from Joshua Butler and mesmerizing photography by Paul M. Sommers. Alaric’s distance from Isobel is made all the more effective during the flashbacks by the frequent wide shots of the two of them on opposite sides of their bedroom, as well as by the exterior shots of Isobel from the outside of the apartment, suggesting that, already then, Isobel’s mind and soul were long gone, and they had left Alaric behind in the room. Alaric’s death at Damon’s hands is perhaps the show’s most visceral and disquieting moment so far, a moment made all the more unsettling by the close focus on Alaric’s eyes as his lungs run out of air and the life seeps out of him. His revival is arguably the most shocking instance of the series so far, but it’s an instance drawn out for every ounce of interminable agony it can conjure. By the time Alaric lurches back to life and discovers the properties of the ring Isobel gave him, we’re already halfway to resignedly accepting that the show had killed him off.

Most deserving of praise by the end of the episode, however, are undoubtedly the performances from the cast. Somerhalder, Davis and Dobrev all excel, but it’s Mia Kirshner who owns the episode, creating a multifaceted and intriguing character in Isobel Flemming who, within the space of an hour, evokes the emotional distance of a discontent wife, the relentless nature of a tenacious researcher and the brutal decisions of a devious vampire. Which, on reflection, suggests a level of complexity that borders on contradiction, but complexity on this show seems often enough to be borne not so much of contradiction as of coincidence.

4 out of 5

Review of 1x14: "Fool Me Once"

5/28/2011 12:14:57 PM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Stefan enlists Sheila Bennett’s help and they rescue Elena and Bonnie from Anna’s motel room.
Elena decides the best thing for everyone is to open the tomb and let Katherine out.
No, you didn’t misread that.
Damon is still bitter about the way Stefan and Elena betrayed him and doesn’t want to risk being betrayed again. Which, when you think about it, doesn’t make much sense. I mean, without help from a witch like Sheila or Bonnie, how else was Damon ever going to get the tomb open?
Anna had planned to open the tomb using Bonnie, but as we learn, it’s pretty much a two-witch operation, so that doesn’t make much sense either.
Matt and Caroline go through an awkward phase during which Matt wonders if he likes the hand-holding-in-public part of their relationship, and during which Caroline worries that she’s about to lose Matt. Which, after Matt admitted that Caroline was the best part of his life and after Caroline was ready to walk away from Matt if he was too scared to give their relationship a shot, makes no sense at all.
OK, I give up. Virtually none of this episode makes any sense, and I haven’t even gotten to the part about Tyler asking Jeremy for weed.
No, you didn’t misread that either.

Long story short:

Jeremy knows Anna’s a vampire but isn’t letting on to anyone.
Bonnie’s grandmother dies after lifting the mystical seal on the tomb so that Damon and Stefan can get out again.
It’s established that Katherine is not in the tomb.
At least Anna finds her mom in the tomb and gets her out.
The rest of the vampires in the tomb look like they might also get out soon.

It’s possible that, had this episode not come hot on the heels of the show’s defining moment so far, it might have looked less dismal. There are moments that make it worth watching, but they’re undermined by moments that range from vaguely inconsistent to wildly implausible, and after the epic stature of last week’s exquisite flashback extravaganza, this is an episode that feels ponderous and contrived.

Part of the problem is that the episode lacks any sense of peril. Another is that, despite several significant developments in the plot, the episode lacks substance. But above all, the problem is that the episode fails to capitalize on the opening of the tomb, an event that promised to be momentous but which instead feels pointless. After an episode that appeared to herald Katherine’s return – an episode that depicted the character in all her seductive, devious and destructive glory – we learn that Katherine has been roaming free for the past 145 years, and that Damon’s patience and effort to open the tomb have largely been an exercise in futility. While this doesn’t preclude the possibility that Katherine may yet arrive in Mystic Falls, it robs the immediate storyline of any sense of fulfillment, leaving us with the distinct impression that, after five episodes of heightened agitation and speculation over what her arrival would signify, we’ve been cheated out of seeing it happen.

Crucial to this sense of misdirection is Anna. As we eventually learn, Anna knew from the outset that Damon was never going to find Katherine in the tomb, a revelation that ascribes more deviousness to the character than she demonstrates at any other stage in the story. Considering she’s been planning this event for as long as Damon, yet makes vast parts of it up as she goes along, this goes some way to explaining why the episode feels so devoid of immediate danger. Anna is an incompetent villain: we know that she’s fast and strong, but she’s easily sidetracked, she lacks judgment and, perhaps most importantly, she lacks menace. “I’m Anna,” she tells Elena when they meet in her motel room. “Your brother may have mentioned me…?” The way Anna chooses to describe herself tells us a lot about the character: not as the fierce, calculating and hellbent vampire who’ll kill to rescue her mother, but as the quirky adolescent who’s disappointed that Jeremy never mentioned her to his sister. It’s an introduction that’s oddly endearing. It tells us that Anna doesn’t see herself as a villain so much as a lost and emotionally fragile child, and one who desperately wants to be reunited with her parent. But then, that’s where this episode encounters one of its central issues.

Anna is, if not the villain, then to all intents and purposes the antagonist. However, she lacks either the menace or the conviction she need to engage the audience in the first instance, and to actually bring her plan to fruition in the second. She succeeds in retrieving Pearl from the tomb, but it’s more of a happy accident – a conflux of events that happen to yield the outcome she was working towards – and in no way reflects the result of decades of meticulous planning. Anna arranges a meeting in a crowded town square to negotiate the opening of the tomb with the Salvatores, but when Jeremy intervenes and asks her out, her resolve is such that instead of compelling him to go away or simply telling him to leave her alone, she hesitantly strikes up a conversation with him. Anna doesn’t even consider how Damon will react after he learns that she knew all along that Katherine was free. His anguish fortunately overcomes his anger as he’s choking the life out of Pearl, but it’s a whimsical moment for the character, and one that could just as easily have ended with Damon staking Pearl as it could with him limping away in dismay.

Anna’s lack of planning extends to her circle of cronies, whose hopeless ineptitude is entertaining enough but which deprives the episode of any sense of urgency. Following Anna’s admission that Logan was “an idiot” and Stefan’s accurate description of Noah as “a dimwit,” we witness Ben falling asleep while guarding Elena. I’d like to believe that this was a subtle echo of Damon’s trick with Caroline in “Friday Night Bites” – a vampire giving its prey a chance to escape, then trapping it at the last moment – but our impression of Ben is such that I’m inclined to make the more obvious assumption: he really is stupid enough to fall asleep while guarding Elena. “Compulsion won’t work,” Anna warns Ben before she leaves him in charge. “Just use violence.” We want to believe that this is a hint at some latent streak of viciousness on Ben’s part, but it’s easier to imagine him electrocuting himself with the mini-bar’s power cord than torturing Bonnie and Elena.

These actors were clearly cast for comic roles, and they’ve been written as comic characters. The downside is they’re integral to a dark and unsettling storyline that involves dozens of blood-starved vampires taking revenge for their incarceration. Anna’s plan consists of idiots, and consequently it makes her look like an idiot. When she calls Stefan to tell him she has Elena and says, “Tell me you have the grimoire and she’ll stay fine,” we don’t doubt for a moment that she’s telling the truth. For one thing, it’s hard to imagine Anna sinking her teeth into anyone; she’s been portrayed as a vampire whose good manners and civility preclude human feeding. For another, she’s so clueless about how to restrain her hostages that we couldn’t imagine her harming Elena even if she wanted to.

Suffering from a similar bout of cluelessness is Stefan, whose awe-inspiring capacity for havoc is articulated when he stands outside the tomb brandishing a flamethrower and, with appropriate earnestness, delivers the line, “It’s everything I need to destroy them.” What little sense of peril the episode achieves, however, is predicated on the idea that Sheila and Bonnie will fail to restore the seal holding the vampires inside the tomb. Which suggests that, if the vampires had escaped, no really had much confidence in Stefan’s expertise with the flamethrower.

To his credit, Stefan succeeds in setting Ben on fire, a moment so merciful to the audience that we want to applaud – not because Stefan defeated a worthy opponent in battle, but because he rid the show of such an insufferable moron. In Ben’s defense, he was smart enough to drag Jeremy’s unconscious body to the tomb’s entrance before confronting Stefan, and it seems rather callous of Stefan that, throughout the scene in which he calls Ben “disposable” and “stupid,” he never once notices Elena’s unconscious brother at Ben’s feet.

Stefan’s lack of attention to detail perhaps says more about writer Brett Conrad than the character himself. Conrad’s script contains repeated references to previous episodes, so much so that it seems to sustain itself by regurgitating the brilliance of earlier material. But while it captures the essence of recent plot developments, it lacks any of the show’s ambiguity. “All I can remember is hating you,” Stefan tells Damon. “There might have been a time when that was different, but your choices have erased anything good about you.” Given the clear-cut tone of this dialogue early on in the episode, it’s hard to understand why Stefan doesn’t point his flamethrower at his brother. It’s also hard to reconcile this dialogue with episodes in which Stefan left Damon to enjoy “family night” with the Gilberts, and in which Damon helped Stefan to fend off vampires intent on killing Elena. While Stefan’s esteem for Damon undoubtedly suffered a blow after he last week threatened to turn Elena into a vampire, it’s not as if killing Vicki and Tanner, feeding on Caroline and staking Lexi weren’t equally worthy of Stefan’s hate. And yet the appeal of the show thrives on the ambiguity between the brothers; the idea that, as much as Stefan might want to hate Damon, he can’t – because Damon is his brother. Somehow, Conrad’s script ignores this ambiguity, to a point where the show’s richness and texture vanish, in which the trademark witty banter and memorable one-liners are nonexistent, and in which dialogue is reduced to its barest and most functionary form.

At no point does the episode’s dialogue feel more contrived than during scenes between Matt and Caroline. In a storyline that feels alarmingly trivial, Matt and Caroline attend a party (set, ironically, near the tomb where everyone’s efforts to release Katherine turn out to be equally trivial). In the course of these scenes, we learn that the party’s host is called “Duke” (on the basis that he attends Duke university), that Tyler likes beer and weed (all but effacing his implied sensitivity and talent for sketching), and – crucially – that Caroline has a penchant for speechifying. Her first “fully-scripted and well-rehearsed” speech is touching, at least insofar as it speaks to her thoughtful and quirky nature. But once the episode starts to turn this idea into a motif – giving Caroline a second and eventually a third speech – it’s hard not to regard it as lazy writing. Rather than assigning dialogue to both characters and allowing them to converse, Conrad imbues Caroline with an inexplicably neurotic nature and forces Matt – and us – to listen in bafflement as she anticipates his likelihood of “having second thoughts or regrets” over their kiss at the end of “Unpleasantville.” While Caroline was a self-described “pathetic insecure mess” in “History Repeating,” more recent episodes have portrayed her as a fragile yet indomitable character, one regaining her confidence and self-respect in the wake of an abusive relationship. To hear her suddenly offer Matt “an escape clause” seems inconsistent, especially after she demonstrated her independence by walking away from him for presumptuously deciding they were doomed if they admitted they were in a relationship.

Equally, Matt described Caroline in “Unpleasantville” as “the one good thing that I’ve got going for me right now,” yet in this episode he suddenly balks at “the whole public couple thing.” There’s a vague acknowledgement that Matt’s feelings for Elena make it awkward for him to be seen holding hands with Caroline, but given his willingness to admit to Tyler in “The Turning Point” that he liked Caroline, and given the heightened and almost fairytale nature of Matt kissing Caroline in the middle of the street in “Unpleasantville,” his reluctance to hang out with a girl he suddenly describes as “clingy” seems more than inconsistent: it seems out of character. Matt never came across as the kind of guy who cared what anyone thought, or as the kind of guy who’d feel ashamed to care about someone else. This entire story thread accomplished nothing; if anything, it takes Matt and Caroline a step back, with Conrad extracting all of the charm and warmth from their relationship and replacing it with insecurity and neurosis.

Overcoming her own insecurity and neurosis – and adopting an approach so impetuous that I wonder whether all of the characters this week have been lobotomized – is Elena. Despite Stefan “hating” Damon and despite Bonnie’s near-fatal wounds after Damon ripped her throat open, Elena decides to “let him have Katherine back.” To say that this is a mystifying choice by Elena is putting it mildly. It’s the single dumbest decision made by any character on the show so far. If Katherine had been inside the tomb and been allowed to escape, the responsibility for the death and destruction that surely would have followed would have rested solely on Elena’s shoulders. It’s easy to understand the half-baked reasoning – that Damon’s passion-fuelled quest which involved killing everyone in his way would finally be fulfilled and give him enough motivation to leave town – but it’s hard to agree with Elena when she ignores the ramifications to her decision. “What other choice do we have?” she asks, failing to consider any number of options, from mystical exile to teleportation to a deserted island to a perpetual migraine whenever Damon approached the tomb. Instead, Elena’s willing to risk the inevitable carnage, endangering Bonnie and Sheila (Stefan’s flamethrower notwithstanding) and the entire population of Mystic Falls, by allowing a known killer to be freed. There are ethical and moral implications to this choice that aren’t even mentioned, but ultimately the question is how Elena could make such an arbitrary choice and how everyone can suffers from such collective stupidity that they’re willing to follow her.

Perhaps not so shocking is Sheila’s willingness to open the tomb: we learn that she planned to open the tomb without lifting the mystical seal, trapping Damon inside the moment he entered it. This reveals a surprisingly devious side to Sheila. We’re forced to ask whether, despite her warm recollection of meeting Stefan, she had any regard for him, given that he would have lost his brother in the tomb for eternity if the plan had unfolded as Sheila intended. We’re also forced to ask whether Sheila realized the implications of Damon insisting on taking Elena into the tomb as “leverage”: if Damon had discovered that he couldn’t leave the tomb before Elena reached safety, one has to wonder whether Sheila would have happily watched him drain the life out of Bonnie’s best friend in revenge for betraying him.

There’s also something revisionist about Sheila’s contempt for Damon when we know from “History Repeating” that he made a deal with Emily to protect all Bennett witches. Not only is this overlooked – it’s actively contradicted by Damon’s threatening tone towards Sheila, and to Sheila’s revelation that “spirits talk,” implying that none of them knew of Damon’s role as the Bennetts’ guardian. It’s a small element of the backstory, but a detail that should have been acknowledged at least once.

In spite of her sudden ruthlessness, I’d be hard-pushed to say I didn’t find Sheila’s death affecting. She was a likeable character, played with humor and wit and inimitable poise by Jasmine Guy. The regrettable part, however, is that there’s really no justification for the character’s death. Sheila sacrificed herself to keep the seal lifted long enough for Damon and Stefan to escape, which will likely add an interesting dynamic to their already-uneasy coexistence, but which leaves a tangible absence of logic to Sheila’s death. Her role in opening the tomb didn’t accomplish anything besides allowing us to learn that Katherine wasn’t in there, and, indirectly, allowing Anna to leave with her mother. As a result, the overwhelming impression we’re left with is that Sheila let Damon confine himself inside the tomb, and that she then expended every ounce of energy within her in order to get him out again. Which speaks to her affection for Bonnie, but makes us wonder if she thought this whole thing through. Bonnie has a sister’s love for Elena, who loves Stefan, who certainly doesn’t have a brother’s love for Damon but who’s committed to tolerating him. For Sheila to sacrifice herself for a granddaughter’s friend’s boyfriend’s ongoing toleration of his serial-killing brother perhaps seems overly convoluted.

But then, to ascribe reason to this storyline is to suggest it contains logic, and I’m sad to say I see very little of that in this episode.

“Fool Me Once” represents a missed opportunity, and a misstep by the show on account of of weak writing, poor execution and deranged logic. There are one or two worthwhile moments – Bonnie weeping over her grandmother’s body, Jeremy remembering Vicki at the cemetery, Elena embracing a visibly distraught Damon after he realizes Katherine’s gone – but they’re few and far between. We’re left wondering why Sheila was killed off without any rationale, how Anna could have spent decades trying to open the tomb without anything resembling a plan, and why we waited with baited breath for a development that’s bereft of suspense or creative reward. There’s no sign of Katherine and – either thankfully or disappointingly, depending on your perspective – there’s nothing to suggest the hell-on-earth bloodbath that the release of two dozen vampires promised to deliver. It’s possible that the escape of one vampire from the tomb at the end of the episode hints at the chaos that’s still to come, but after an episode that involved such staggering stupidity on the part of several vampires – including the Salvatores – we can only hope the vampires in the tomb demonstrate greater ingenuity and ferocity than the ones who populated this episode.

A low point for the show so far.

1 out of 5

Review of 1x13: "Children Of The Damned"

5/28/2011 12:12:58 PM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Via flashbacks to 1864, we learn that calamity descended onto Mystic Falls when Katherine extended her stay longer than she should have. After drawing attention to herself through her seduction of the Salvatores and through repeated attacks on the town’s population, the patriarchs of the founding families united and hunted down both Katherine and Anna’s mother, Pearl, discovering along the way that Stefan and Damon had been harboring them.
Stefan hoped he could persuade Papa Salvatore that not all vampires were evil.
If you thought Stefan was a smug fool as a vampire… well, he’s exactly the same as a human, but even more misguided.
In the present, Anna swipes the Gilbert journal from Alaric, but after Damon gets a glimpse of it and after Stefan examines the copies Alaric made, everyone realizes that Emily’s grimoire is buried inside Papa Salvatore’s coffin.
Stefan unearths his father’s coffin and retrieves the grimoire, but Damon force-feeds Elena a dose of his blood and threatens to turn her into a vampire if Stefan doesn’t hand the grimoire over.
Given that Ben captures Bonnie, that Anna captures Elena and that Damon now has the key to opening the tomb, I’d say it’s not looking good for anyone in Mystic Falls.

It’s only minutes into “Children of the Damned” when, in the middle of a flashback to 1864, we see Katherine drain the life of a random traveler in a horse-driven carriage. Her proclamation to Damon, who’s both fascinated and paralyzed by fear, is “That’s how it’s done.” It’s a confident statement, and, with hindsight, one that foreshadows Katherine’s complacency and eventual downfall. But it’s also one that accurately reflects the masterpiece of storytelling which this episode represents. When an episode is as flawlessly executed as this one, in which the writers’ excitement to tell their story emerges from every line and in which the actors’ delight in playing their parts emanates from every scene, it’s hard to begrudge such arrogance. This is how it’s done.

By contrast, the present-day scenes involving the hunt for the grimoire almost seem perfunctory. They’re delivered with workmanlike efficiency and advance the various story threads towards a scenario that will almost certainly involve Katherine’s tomb being opened, but the pervasive mood on both sides of the screen is one of indifference. There’s an innate paradox in this, because the show makes little attempt to disguise the fact that the flashbacks lack any tangible purpose beyond glorified exposition. Writers Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson bypass traditional methods of integrating the flashbacks into the episode: there are no pretensions or conceits, the flashbacks aren’t the byproduct of dreams or apparitions, and there’s little to tie the backstory to the present-day story beyond the Salvatores’ vague realization that history is now in the process of repeating itself.

But then, this is perhaps where the episode is most successful. While the flashbacks could have been ascribed an overly elaborate relevance to the present, their justification is refreshingly straightforward: they enlighten and they explain, but mostly they entertain. By the end of the hour – and largely owing to the sheer electrifying energy from the actors – it’s hard to deny that the episode is enlightening, explanatory and entertaining. What sets it apart from previous installments is that it’s all of these to the extent that it’s the highlight of the series so far.

At the heart of the episode is a captivating introduction to the Salvatore family. The backstory that’s revealed in these flashbacks fits seamlessly with the hints we’ve been given throughout the season, but what we learn also subverts our assumptions and overturns everything we thought we knew. We’re introduced to Giuseppe Salvatore, played to perfection by James Remar, whose stern authority and unattainable expectation as the Salvatore patriarch are such that it’s easy to believe his specter has haunted Stefan and Damon over the decades. Damon’s reason for leaving the confederacy was established in “Lost Girls” as “simply having too much fun to return to battle,” but it’s established here that he’s been branded a deserter, and that his father’s disappointment in him has brought them to a point where Giuseppe can barely stand to speak to his son. In one of the episode’s most poignant moments, we witness Giuseppe walking alongside both of his sons, lamenting to Stefan that his brother doesn’t understand “the importance of duty.” It’s a moment that encapsulates Damon’s resentment towards Stefan, and illustrates how Stefan was always perceived as the favorite son. But in a broader context, it’s also a moment that’s oddly unfair. Given what we know – that Damon made a pact with Emily to watch over her descendants in exchange for Katherine’s safety inside the tomb, and that Damon respected his role in the pact for the following 145 years – it’s hard to imagine how Damon could have proved himself more dutiful.

The preoccupation with broken promises and damaged trust is predominant in this episode, particularly when it comes to the Salvatore brothers. We’re reminded at the outset that Damon’s notoriety lies in his inability to cultivate any meaningful sense of trust with his brother: “For 145 years,” recalls Stefan, “every single time that I have let my guard down and let Damon back into my life, he’s done something to make me regret that.” The line is delivered with appropriate earnestness by Stefan, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. By the time we reach the end of the episode, Stefan is conceding to Elena that his brother’s lack of faith in him is his fault, and that he “destroyed” the trust between them when he broached the prospect of vampires with Giuseppe. This is a crucial development in the dynamic between the brothers, because it defies the assumption we were led to make from the outset: that Damon’s malevolence stemmed from an inherently corrupt nature. I’ve identified instances along the way that have hinted this wasn’t the case – instances that suggested some significant moment when Stefan engendered Damon’s hostility – and it’s now revealed that Stefan’s decision to plead to his father for Katherine’s immunity was the moment that divided the brothers.

The Vampire Diaries thrives on its exploration of moral ambiguity, and its exploration is personified by Damon, who’s proven he can alternately evoke our revulsion and our pity, sometimes within the same episode. In “Children of the Damned,” we’re presented with a human who was desperate to die so that he could spend eternity with the woman he loved, who guarded Katherine’s secret with his life, and who was forced to watch helplessly as Katherine was restrained, locked up and driven away thanks to his brother’s misjudgment. “There was a time when I trusted him more than anything,” Damon tells Elena in the present, a statement delivered with such sadness and sincerity that we can’t help regarding Damon as a victim. It’s strongly implied that Damon knows that Stefan’s “renewed sense of brotherhood” will turn out to be an act, but it’s evidence of Damon’s capacity for trust that he’s willing to go along with it anyway. When Damon is denounced by Stefan as someone who’s “not capable of trust,” it’s a moment that demonstrates the show’s effortless ability to manipulate our sympathy for the character. In the same scene in which we feel compelled to defend Damon in the face of Stefan’s self-righteousness, we witness Damon forcing a dose of his blood onto Elena, effacing our sympathy for the character but also planting a shard of uncertainty in our minds. “The only one I can count on is me,” Damon points out. “You made sure of that many years ago.” It’s dialogue that reminds us that there’s enough blame to be shared between all of the Salvatores, and that Stefan’s actions in 1864, however well intentioned, resulted in Katherine’s incarceration and a century-and-a-half of psychological scars for his brother.

Stefan’s good intentions go a long way to ensuring that he doesn’t emerge from these flashbacks as a wholly unlikeable character, but they also establish his short-sightedness. We’re left perplexed by his decision to appeal to Giuseppe: did he think that such a mercurial and single-minded father could be swayed? Did he think that Katherine could be persuaded to limit her feeding proclivities? Did he think he could somehow forge a coexistence between humans and vampires? None of these questions are directly addressed, but when Stefan suggests to his father that perhaps not all vampires are “as evil as they’ve been characterized,” it’s hard to imagine what he was hoping to accomplish. The most likely explanation is that Stefan was trying to convince himself that Katherine wasn’t the monster he knew she was, and that he was hoping to win his father’s approval for harboring a killer.

This is the crux of the episode and the source of its emotional resonance, given that Stefan’s insistence to Damon that they can trust their father indirectly led to the hunt for Katherine, and, in turn, to Katherine’s imprisonment in the tomb. Damon’s willingness to trust Stefan when he promised he wouldn’t go ahead with his appeal to Giuseppe – a choice Damon made when he could have advised Katherine to simply compel Stefan into silence – is surely part of the tangled predicament that has plagued him in the ensuing 145 years. The most immediate conclusion we can draw is that Stefan’s idealism was his own undoing as much as Katherine’s and Damon’s, but it seems to be a flaw that has lasted up to the present day, when Stefan seems under the impression that he can undermine Damon’s attempt to retrieve Katherine from the tomb without catastrophic repercussions. Does Stefan think Damon will give up if Emily’s grimoire is destroyed? Does he think Damon will quietly leave Mystic Falls, consoled by the knowledge that he tried his best? Does he think Damon won’t notice the eerie similarity to events in 1864, with Stefan once again citing noble aspirations as a justification for treachery and deception? As contemptible as Damon is when he seizes Elena and threatens to turn her into a vampire, he seems more tragic than ever: a hopeless romantic whose dreams of eternal happiness have been ruined by his brother’s poor judgment; a silent guardian to a line of witches, whose loyalty has been betrayed by the witch who sealed the love of his life in a tomb that can’t be opened; and, above all, a brother who is willing to put the past behind him and who desperately wants to believe that broken trust can be mended. In this episode, we see Damon cooking for Jenna. We see him playing video games with Jeremy. We see him taking part in “family night” and telling Elena that he’s enjoying it “immensely.” There’s never a moment when we don’t suspect some underhanded motive on his part, but at the same time we don’t doubt for a moment that his underhanded motives spring from good intentions. These good intentions are squandered by Stefan and Elena, and although it’s easy to predict the havoc that will ensue if Damon frees Katherine, it’s hard to support actions that seem to once again prove that Damon can’t count on anyone but himself.

Another character who also seems to be counting on herself is Anna, whose motive for opening the tomb, from what we can tell, is to free her incarcerated mother. It’s not clear whether Anna was a vampire when Pearl was captured; if she wasn’t, Pearl’s urge to Anna to “be careful” when she approaches a horse outside the Salvatore mansion suggests a maternal instinct that overrides her awareness that a horse isn’t going to cause any lasting injury to a vampire. But then, if Anna was indeed a vampire at the time, it raises an oddly touching question about her motive for releasing her mother from the tomb: would anyone want to spend eternity with a parent who urges them to “be careful” around a horse?

The horse is one of countless details, however, that give the episode its texture. “Children of the Damned” owes much of its status as a masterpiece of the series to its spectacular sets, costumes and locations. Giuseppe’s study and Pearl’s apothecary, for example, are so authentically realized that I wonder whether the reason these flashbacks have only emerged now is because the production crew have spent every waking moment since the pilot designing and building them. Equally, Paul M. Sommers’ stylish and at times lurid photography captures the chilling nature of the flashbacks so perfectly that I can only imagine the painstaking effort that has gone into selecting every shot and angle.

Above all, this episode is memorable for its tone, at once darkly captivating and exquisitely unsettling. Part of this stems from the riveting story, part of it from the staggering production value, but more than any other factor, the response the episode elicits is surely cultivated through the sublime performances of its cast. The supporting cast are first-rate, but Kelly Hu in particular excels as Pearl, capturing the serene and almost majestic nature of a vampire who wants to blend into society in spite of Katherine’s reckless antics. Malese Jow is also a delight, delivering two distinct performances: the docile and demure personality in the flashbacks, and the independent-minded leader in the present.

It almost goes without saying, however, that the episode is a crowning moment for Nina Dobrev, Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder. Their relish of the challenge posed by the flashbacks is palpable, and Dobrev as Katherine adds a tone to the episode that’s at times silky and seductive, and at others menacing and treacherous. We’re smitten, we’re terrified and we’re transfixed, but more than anything else, we’re fully convinced that the Salvatore brothers would be willing to die for this creature, a measure of commitment by the characters that’s achieved in no small part by the conviction of the actress. Wesley, meanwhile, creates a character that’s decidedly different from his present-day counterpart: a well-groomed son who aspires to become his father; an insecure teenager who desperately wants to please his father; a child whose attraction to a siren both excites and confuses him, and who allows himself to be ruled by his feelings but secretly wonders whether his feelings are real.

Despite the tremendous performances from Dobrev and Wesley, however, the episode surely belongs to Somerhalder, who captures the moral undercurrent of the episode, evoking conflicting feelings about the character, his predicament and his actions in both the past and the present. We glimpse a stage in Damon’s life when, condemned to rejection by his father, he’s resigned to death in the hope that it will allow him an opportunity to escape. Even before he becomes a vampire, we see a part of Damon that’s longing to be liberated; a part that’s fuelled by bitterness towards his father and jealousy towards his brother; a part that’s nauseated by blood but can’t wait to join Katherine’s world. We’re also presented with an incarnation of Damon in the present that should be contemptible when he threatens to kill Elena, but whose vulnerability when he reveals that Elena fooled him makes him so unequivocally tragic that it’s impossible not to sympathize with the character.

The episode’s pacing and editing are flawless, with flashbacks knitted between present-day scenes, complementing and enhancing one another without us realizing how masterfully the show is manipulating us by flitting between the present and the past. The narrative is so involving that we’re swept up, and until we reach the closing credits, we’re as immersed in the characters’ backstory as they are. Which isn’t to say we reach the end of the episode without a plethora of questions. It’s impossible not to speculate about the flashbacks that still remain to be seen: how do the Salvatores become vampires? Will it be Damon, Katherine or Stefan who kill Giuseppe Salvatore? The present-day portion of the episode poses equally intriguing questions: can the Salvatores ever become reconciled? How long will Elena delay her decision to tell Jeremy she was adopted? Does Alaric suspect that Isobel has been turned into a vampire, and does he realize she had a daughter who’s alive and living in the town he’s determined to rid of vampires?

These are surely the questions we’re meant to be asking, however, and it’s a testament to the episode’s success that we never once pause to wonder whether its flashbacks contributed anything significant to the present-day story, or whether the Gilbert journal didn’t in the end prove to be a MacGuffin designed to prolong everyone’s hunt for the Bennett grimoire. If there’s a downside to the hype and anticipation ahead of the tomb opening, it’s that we’re expecting a fanfare of epic proportions to accompany an event that’s been hinted at for what now seems like half the season. Short of failing to open the tomb at all, the worst outcome will be that the 27 vampires inside the tomb emerge and decide they’re not interested in draining the blood of the town’s entire population.

But then, given this show’s propensity for misdirection and surprise, I’m tempted to think that this is a very intentional reaction, and I applaud this episode for raising my anticipation for the next episode higher than ever. Which brings us back to Katherine’s initial proclamation. This is indeed how it’s done.

5 out of 5

Review of 1x12: "Unpleasantville"

5/28/2011 12:10:52 PM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Elena’s Mystery Vampire poses as a pizza delivery guy and gets an invite into her home. Stefan fends him off, but he shows up at the high-school dance and attacks Elena, finding just enough time to revel in his villainy before Stefan and Damon stake him.
We learn (quite incidentally) that Mystery Vampire’s name was ‘Noah’ (!), that he was part of a group of vampires that includes the Mystic Grill bartender (!!), and that this group is apparently taking orders from Anna, who is also a vampire (!!!).
Anna’s Vampire Society wants to open Katherine’s tomb, and they know the key to finding Emily’s grimoire is John Gilbert’s journal.
It’s not clear whether Alaric realizes the importance of the journal Jeremy loaned him, or the importance of his dead wife sharing a name with Elena’s mother (!!!!).
Stefan offers to help Damon open the tomb and release Katherine, secretly planning to derail the operation at an opportune moment.
Matt gets a job at the Mystic Grill… which, after all of the above, seems oddly unrelated, but it leads to a charming kiss with Caroline in the middle of the street, so I thought I’d mention it.

It’s fitting – and perhaps unintentionally ironic – that the title to this episode pays homage to Gary Ross’s richly creative movie about two kids who inadvertently find themselves in a 1950s TV show. Where Pleasantville owed its charm to simplicity, “Unpleasantville” struggles to escape its complexity. There are two crucial revelations – that Alaric’s dead wife might be Elena’s biological mother, and that Anna is a vampire – but they’re revelations which, along with a multitude of questions raised over the course of the episode, leave us longing for something less convoluted.

A development that will surely preface the opening of Katherine’s tomb is the introduction of a Vampire Society, ostensibly led by Anna. It’s intriguing to discover that members of the society have integrated themselves into various parts of the town, and that they know about the tomb and a way to open it, but the most intriguing aspect is surely that Anna herself is a part of this group, and that her motive for persuading Jeremy that vampires are real is the dim hope that he’ll accept her for what she is.

On the one hand, it’s a pleasure to see Malese Jow graduate from the shy and quirky good girl she’s played so far, because it means she can sink her teeth into a role that promises to explore Anna’s darker and more conflicted side. On the other hand, it dramatically reduces the character’s life expectancy, given that the only two vampires with any long-term outlook on the show are the Salvatore brothers. It’s also a development that forces us to question whether Anna ever really cared about Jeremy or simply used him as a means to obtain the Gilbert journal. I’m tempted to doubt that she’s been using Jeremy the way Logan used Jenna, firstly because she seemed so full of admiration and respect for Jeremy, secondly because there’ve been plenty of opportunities when Anna could have compelled Jeremy into bringing her the journal.

But then, this is where the episode begins to feel like the start of a dauntingly tortuous journey. It’s not clear whether Anna’s motive for wanting to open the tomb differs from everyone else’s in the Vampire Society. Noah makes a vague promise that Anna will “get what [she] came for,” but it’s not clear what she came for. She seems so considerate and good-natured that it’s hard to imagine her delighting in the prospect of two dozen vampires gorging on the population of Mystic Falls, but it’s also unclear whether she wants the tomb open in order to release Katherine, and whether she even knew Katherine. All we really know by the end of the episode is what we already knew two episodes ago: that Logan had stumbled on a group that was planning to open Katherine’s tomb.

We’re also left wondering whether every character on the show may yet turn out to be a vampire, and, if not, whether they’ll turn out to have a nefarious hidden motive. Logan deceived Jenna; Alaric is deceiving Jeremy; Damon deceived Stefan; Stefan is deceiving Damon. Artful deception has afforded the show some terrific drama so far, but it can only be used so many times in the space of a few episodes before it begins to feel repetitive. At this point, I almost expect the squirrels that Stefan hunts to be keeping some centuries-old secret.

Free of secrets but no less overwrought is the drama between Matt and Caroline. Matt takes a job at the Mystic Grill, tacitly replacing Vicki and prompting us to wonder whether his parents even realize that their son has been forced to abandon his dreams of a football career in order to pay his bills. It’s the most poignant part of the episode, not least when it turns out that Ben – the ex-jock bartender who seems like a cautionary tale for Matt – is in fact a vampire. Given that Ben plans to open a mystical tomb and wreak havoc on Mystic Falls, there’s something affecting about this storyline that even Matt is oblivious to: the implication that even lowly bartenders can aspire to something more, even if it involves unleashing 27 blood-deprived vampires on an unsuspecting town.

The social aspect of this story thread adds a certain realism to the show, particularly when Caroline dismisses Ben as “a washed-up jock who pours drinks for a living,” leading Matt to realize the different world she’s living in. We’re reminded that while some characters fret over who they’re dating or what they’re wearing, others are struggling without guidance or support and doing their best to survive. It’s heartbreaking to watch Matt sacrifice his ambitions and realize his girlfriend looks down on him for working in a bar – even after she apologizes for it – but it’s also somewhat contrived, because it’s not as if Caroline has any reason to look down on Matt. Tyler is riding his family’s name and pedigree and effectively set up for life; Elena and Jeremy seem financially secure, at least insofar as they’ve inherited their parents’ home and money has never once been mentioned on-screen. But given that Caroline’s single mom is a workaholic sheriff, and given that Caroline has no clear career path beyond a vague interest in broadcast journalism, it’s hard to gauge where her judgmental attitude comes from.

It’s an issue that’s brushed aside when Caroline manages to deflect the focus from herself and back onto Matt, berating his fear of a deeper relationship on the grounds that he’ll disappoint her and lose the only good thing in his life. It’s a moment that speaks to both characters’ emotional insecurity, and makes for a particularly memorable moment when Caroline challenges Matt’s cowardice, illustrating the distance she’s come from the superficial man-eater we saw in the pilot to the sensitive girl we see now. Nevertheless, there’s something half-developed about the storyline that involves a formerly bitchy cheerleading captain assuring Bonnie she could date someone “way better” than a bartender. Matt quickly forgives Caroline for being judgmental, and somehow the show escapes having to address a very real issue it presented in the first half of the episode.

An equally real issue – and one that will hopefully be addressed as the story thread unfolds – is Elena’s birth by a 16-year-old mom. We’re left with a dozen unanswered questions, most notably whether Alaric realizes he’s Elena’s stepfather, and whether he knows that Damon murdered both Elena’s mother and his wife. Perhaps most importantly, we’re prompted to wonder whether a particular detail in Alaric’s backstory – his mention to Jenna in “History Repeating” that he and Isobel “married young” – is a sign that he and Isobel had their first child young, and that Alaric may in fact be Elena’s biological father.

It’s worth noting that while Alaric has had numerous scenes with Jenna and with Jeremy, his only scene with Elena has been a brief meeting at the high-school career night in “The Turning Point.” Since then, the show has crafted the narrative so that the two characters’ storylines remain separate, which now seems like an intentional effort to make their eventual meeting all the more impactful. It’s also worth noting that the flashback in “Bloodlines” – which depicted Alaric discovering his wife’s blood-spattered body in Damon’s arms – never establishes whether Damon knew who Alaric was, or whether he even knew who the woman he was feeding on was. In a moment that’s played with exquisite poise by Matt Davis, we see Alaric approach Damon at the dance and attempt to make conversation with him. It’s a meeting that’s at once riveting and unsettling, and although it’s obvious that Alaric’s interest in Damon’s background arouses his suspicion, the impression we’re given is that Damon recognizes neither his name nor his face, making Damon’s attack on Isobel all the more impersonal, and somehow all the more wanton.

Less intentionally wanton is Elena, who, after a string of scenes in recent episodes that made her less than likeable, this week becomes outright contemptible. The show used Damon to poke fun at Elena in “162 Candles” when he asked her, “Does it get tiring being so self-righteous?” Elena’s self-righteousness this week reaches new heights, not least when she’s offered permanent use of Jenna’s car and doesn’t even say thank you, instead taking the opportunity to confront Jenna about her decision to keep silent about Elena’s adoption (which, judging from an earlier scene, she didn’t even have the courage to do until Bonnie spurred her on). “If my mom were here right now and I asked, she’d tell me the truth!” whines Elena. Having invoked the memory of her dead mother – which is to say, Jenna’s dead sister – poor Jenna has no choice but to cave in to Elena’s emotional blackmail: “Give me your car after I wrecked mine, and now tell me what my dead mother can’t, because *I* know it’s what she would have done.”

Elena’s self-righteousness then leads her to Caroline, who thanks her for a vervain-laced necklace and wonders what the occasion is. Elena’s response is, “Your friendship is important to me.” It’s a heartwarming sentiment – and a “mushy” one, from Caroline’s perspective – but it’s hard not to wonder whether the context doesn’t belie the gesture: if Mystery Vamp Pizza Guy wasn’t scouring the town and threatening to make a meal out of Elena’s friends, would Elena still be handing out these necklaces? Probably not, which makes Elena look like a hypocrite who exploits a life-or-death situation by making a display of how much she values her friendships.

Finally, Elena is gracious enough to give Caroline and Matt her blessing: “I wanted you to know that whatever’s going on with you and Matt, it’s OK.” Caroline reluctantly accepts this blessing and points out that Matt’s “not over” Elena, but perhaps the relevant question is whether she should feel like she needs Elena’s approval to pursue a relationship with Matt in the first place. To quote Vicki in “Haunted,” Elena had Matt “whipped for 15 years.” Then she dumped Matt. Then she rejected Matt’s show of support after her parents’ death. And in the final crushing blow, Elena moved on to Stefan and flaunted her relationship with him in Matt’s face. If anything, Elena should have asked Matt if it was “OK” for something to be going on with her and Stefan. Instead, she points out to Caroline that Matt “has to move on,” indirectly reminding Caroline that she’s the rebound girl who Matt has had to make do with. Which makes me feel more sympathetic than ever towards Caroline, and more certain than ever that the show is actively trying to make us despise Elena.

And yet we’re expected to root for this character, mostly on the basis that she resists Mystery Vamp’s attack by plunging pencils into his abdomen and palm, which (perhaps understandably) annoys him, but which hardly justifies Elena’s line later on in the episode – that she “fought back.” This statement should surely be predicated on the success of her resistance. Given that Elena only antagonized her attacker, and that it yet again fell to the Salvatores to come to her rescue, and that Elena could barely even watch as Stefan staked the guy who wanted to kill her, it’s not as if Elena’s decision to “fight back” yielded any tangible result. It demonstrates her courage, and I can appreciate that this is intended to make Elena look like a role model who young girls should want to emulate. But when you consider the scene’s context – with Elena still needing her boyfriend to come to her rescue, and with her actually seeming to begrudge the Salvatores’ decision to kill him (watch them justify themselves to her indignation: “He had to die…” “He’s been invited in…”) – it’s hard to feel anything besides contempt for the character. Which I don’t think was the intention, and which makes me wonder whether the show isn’t inadvertently making characters like Caroline and Damon much more likeable than Elena, who to all intents and purposes is the show’s heroine and protagonist.

But then, that seems to be the backwards part of this episode. The story has reached a point where Stefan is lying to Damon’s face and colluding with Elena, and where Damon is desperately trying to rescue the woman he loves after the specter of a witch – the one whose descendants he diligently watched over – betrayed him. Somehow we’ve reached a point where Stefan is about to undermine Damon’s quest at the last moment, crushing his brother and giving Damon every right to hate him. All of which raises a question I’m not sure we’re meant to be asking: is Stefan – the irreproachable and morally upstanding brother – really any better than Damon?

In the end, not even the visual spectacle of a 50s-themed dance or the carefree charm of Matt and Caroline kissing in the street can rescue “Unpleasantville” from its own overwrought narrative. This is a shame, because the effort that went into the episode is evident in its scale. Garreth Stover’s set work for the 50s-era dance is astounding, Jennifer Bryan’s costumes for the seemingly countless extras is extraordinary, and Liz Friedlander’s direction – particularly during some incredibly well-choreographed fight sequences – is commendable. The episode’s flaws relate firstly to the characters, and secondly to the narrative. We’re faced with a meandering storyline – one that a places a disproportionate sense of importance on retrieving a journal – and we can already predict the laborious arc that will lead to one or several of the characters finding Emily’s grimoire, which in turn will probably lead to someone figuring out how to reverse Emily’s spell, which – eventually – might lead to someone reversing Emily’s spell and opening the tomb. While The Vampire Diaries has thus far seemed incapable of biding its time or dragging out storylines for longer than it should, this is an arc that feels drawn out at its earliest stage.

“Unpleasantville” is a victim of association with preceding episodes. It lacks the propulsive momentum of “The Turning Point,” and it lacks the incisive character focus of “Bloodlines.” It wants to end with a sense of open-endedness, but instead it feels unresolved. It doesn’t drive the plot forwards so much as nudge it, and it doesn’t develop the characters so much as reposition them. Despite several dramatic developments, it’s an oddly soulless episode which suffers from an over-inflated sense of self-importance, aspiring to make a grandiose statement about female empowerment but letting itself down with limp execution, at times marveling over its complexity but miring itself in an overblown plot in which every character has an ulterior motive and every detail has some hidden significance.

Above all, this is an episode that wants to be engaging and profound, but which somehow reaches the end of the hour without ever figuring out what it’s trying to say. Does driving pencils into a vampire make Elena a hero? Is it romantic when Matt’s girlfriend implies that his job determines whether he’s worthy dating material? Is Stefan demonstrating his integrity when he plans to undermine his devious, treacherous brother with deviousness and treachery? By the end of the hour, we’re not sure, and by the look of it, neither is the show.

2.5 out of 5

Review of 1x11: "Bloodlines"

5/28/2011 12:08:32 PM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Damon rescues Elena from her car wreck and takes her on a road trip to a bar in Georgia.
The bartender, a witch Damon knew 20 years earlier, tells him the only way to open Katherine’s tomb is a reversal spell in Emily’s spell book… which no one knows where to find.
Lexi’s widower nearly kills Damon, but Elena pleads with him to spare Damon’s life.
This is unlikely to please Alaric, as we learn via flashbacks that Mrs Alaric was sucked dry several years earlier by one Damon Salvatore.
Bonnie freaks out after she realizes her powers are gone. Stefan visits her home and meets Sheila, and it turns out they met in the late 60s.
Jeremy meets a girl named Anna at the town library, who tries to persuade him that the vampires in John Gilbert’s journal were very much real.
After returning from her road trip, Elena learns that Stefan rescued her when her parents’ car crashed into the river, and that she was adopted when she was a baby.
Can anyone say “soap opera”?

“Bloodlines” is arguably a filler episode, and one that, on the surface, seems both uneventful and underwhelming. Among its highlights, it features burgers and beer, long conversations in a library, and a seemingly interminable encounter between a witch and an entrance to a mystical tomb.

It’s not long before the show abandons its aspiration to a change of pace and returns to its traditional cocktail of breakneck pace, momentous reveals and pivotal story developments. In spite of this, the plot remains refreshingly straightforward, with a story that looks back as often as it looks forward, serving as an opportunity for the show to round out the central characters and, in one case, to begin to reverse our perception of a character altogether.

Damon went from irredeemable villain to misunderstood antagonist in the course of “History Repeating,” yet this episode attempts to take the character’s arc a step further, challenging us to accept that he might be redeemable after all, and indeed capable of compassion and loyalty. “It’s a nice act,” Elena remarks after Damon buys her lunch at Bree’s bar and eagerly takes the pickles from her plate. “Is any of it real?” We’re inclined to ask the same thing, because it’s hard to reconcile this kinder, funnier and nobler Damon with the Damon whose atrocities have bookended nearly every episode so far. Coupled with Damon’s brutal murder of Bree at the end of this episode, we’re reminded even this week of how he killed Lexi, and of how he’s used Mystic Falls as a regular destination to feed for over a century.

Which makes the show’s writers all the more courageous, because in an episode that dredges up Damon’s most heinous acts, we’re asked to sympathize for a character who goes out of his way to be respectful towards Elena. “Don’t pretend to care,” she replies after she ends an uncomfortable phone call to Stefan, delivering dialogue that’s designed to make us wonder whether Damon does care. It’s supported by random gestures throughout the episode: Damon doesn’t just rescue Elena from her totaled car; he asks her if she’s OK and whether any bones are broken before he carries her to safety. Damon doesn’t just let her get out of her car when she demands that he pull over; he superspeeds to the passenger side and supports her as she clambers out. Even Damon’s attempt to take Elena away from the intensity of her life “for five minutes” seems well intentioned, especially after he points out that he could easily have compelled Elena into being “more agreeable.”

Elena’s influence on Damon now extends to saving his life after Lexi’s anonymous widower drenches Damon in gasoline and nearly sets fire to him. The fact that we don’t even learn the name of this bereaved vampire makes little difference, because in effect he represents every family member and loved one whose life Damon has ruined through wanton cruelty. Somehow, though, this doesn’t feel like a moment when we ought to rejoice over Damon’s demise. Three episodes ago, his death would surely have been accompanied by a rousing and triumphant score. But this episode succeeds in making us feel bad for Damon, because, as Bree points out, “After all these years, it’s still only Katherine.” We fear for Damon’s life when he’s on the verge of burning alive because, in spite of his viciousness, we don’t doubt that his devotion to Katherine is real, and that his attachment to Elena is real. In the end, it’s Damon’s repetition of the line “You’re not the worst company in the world, Elena” that signals his chance for redemption through her. It’s in keeping with Damon’s honesty and reflection whenever he’s been with Elena so far, but it’s also a testament to the caliber of the show’s writers that they incorporate this moment immediately after showing Damon ripping Bree’s heart from her chest. In spite of Damon’s villainy throughout the first half of the season, and indeed in this episode, the show overcomes our better judgment, and we’re won over by the integrity that emerges whenever Damon’s alone with Elena.

Elena’s backstory is embellished by the fact that she was adopted, but otherwise this episode changes our perception of Elena only insofar as we learn that she has a high tolerance for alcohol. After a string of episodes in which she made choices with questionable motives, Elena this week decides that it’s time to spend a day away from home without communicating her whereabouts to anybody. This sends Jenna into a state of panic, and forces Bonnie to return to the tomb where Emily brought her, hoping it will restore her powers but instead resulting in a nasty fall and an insight into the suffering that dozens of vampires experienced from blood deprivation over 145 years. As the episode goes on, we also see Elena drunkenly and dishonestly replying to a worried phone call from Jenna, and later punishing Jenna for respecting the Gilberts’ wishes and keeping Elena’s adoption a secret.

Stefan reaches the end of the episode looking both more heroic and more reprehensible than ever. On the one hand, his decision to hide the truth about Elena’s survival on the day of her parents’ death reinforces his integrity; he didn’t ask for gratitude, and he didn’t want Elena to feel any sense of obligation towards him. On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the emerging pattern. Stefan reveals the truth to Elena only after the photo of Katherine threatens to end their relationship, meaning he’s essentially doing what he did in “You’re Undead to Me”: telling Elena whatever he has to in order to hold on to her.

In all fairness, to admit that Stefan witnessed the death of Elena’s parents would be such an upsetting conversation that it’s easy to understand why he was reluctant to have it. But then, to withhold that kind of information – and information surrounding Elena’s adoption – only reinforces how fundamentally untrustworthy Stefan is. As with his decision to reveal the backstory between himself, Damon and Katherine, honesty seems like a last resort to Stefan. Regardless of his consideration over sparing Elena the distress of learning crucial facts, you’re forced to wonder whether this, like the truth that he’s a vampire, was something Stefan would happily have buried for an indefinite amount of time. It makes Stefan look dishonest, but it also denigrates Elena by making her look like the kind of fool that Stefan could have lied to for as long as their relationship lasted.

To Elena’s credit, she’s proven so far that she can’t easily be fooled, and that she’ll challenge dishonesty from the people around her. “What am I to you?” she asks Stefan. “Who am I to you?” It’s a valid question, and one we’ve been longing to ask ourselves. Stefan’s answer is predictably evasive: “You’re not Katherine.” As romantic as the moment is when Stefan tells Elena that she’s the woman he loves, it’s hard to understand how Stefan can say this – essentially the same thing he told Katherine in 1864 – and ignore the physical resemblance between the two women. To quote Damon in this episode, it’s “creepy.” It’s also somewhat saddening, because the reveal that Stefan knew Elena long before they met in the pilot undermines part of the charm of that episode: the spontaneity when Elena and Stefan met outside the men’s room now seems oddly one-sided, and the attentiveness with which Stefan listened to Elena as she described her parents’ death now seems wholeheartedly false. Stefan knew exactly who Elena was when they met, and he knew exactly how her parents died as she struggled to share a huge part of her life with him.

In Stefan’s defense, his intentions were almost certainly in the right place. It could be that Stefan wanted to form a relationship with Elena based on their experiences together, and it could be that he worried about the obligation Elena would feel if she found out who saved her. It could also be that Stefan genuinely planned to leave Mystic Falls the way he describes, that he never planned on introducing himself to Elena at all, and that, by the time they met at the start of the fall semester, it was too late to suddenly present himself as Elena’s savior. Moreover, if Elena’s parents had chosen not to tell her about her adoption, Stefan presumably decided to respect their choice and remain silent, meaning Elena would be wrong to berate him for his secrecy just as she’s wrong to berate Jenna.

It will be interesting to see how – or even if – Jeremy learns the truth about his parents’ death and his sister’s adoption. Jeremy’s naturally inquisitive nature this week becomes apparent, as we see him enthusiastically researching his paper – not just because it’s a chance for extra credit, but because he’s genuinely interested in his parents’ history and the town’s history. There’s something almost sad about Jeremy’s dramatic shift in behavior since Damon overwrote his memories, but at the same time it’s not as if we miss the whiny delinquent we met in the pilot, and it’s heartwarming to watch him good-naturedly debate history with Anna. Given the persistence which both characters demonstrate, it won’t be long before Jeremy once again stumbles on the truth about vampires, and Stefan’s involvement in rescuing Elena from the crash that killed their parents would surely be a logical extension of that discovery. What’s even more interesting is that this seems to be the character we never met. “I’ve had a rough go of it lately,” Jeremy tells Anna, “but I’m just now getting back to my old self.” It’s a line that suggests we’re looking at the “old self” now, implying that this is the kind of character Jeremy was before his parents died: bookish, thoughtful and perceptive. Just as Lexi revealed hidden truths about Stefan, Anna’s introduction to the show affords us an insight into Jeremy that we never would have seen.

Anna is never anything less than a delight to watch. Malese Jow plays her with a mixture of vibrant energy and caustic wit, imbuing the character with a personality that’s both sociable and spirited, amiable and independent. Anna’s background is conspicuously blank beyond the fact that she was home-schooled and suffers from a lack of cultural awareness (doesn’t know Lost Boys or Near Dark), and given this show’s tendency to always introduce a character for a specific reason, the fact that her ancestors grew up in and around Mystic Falls suggests her family will inevitably turn out to have some involvement in events in 1864. Even outside of this context, however, Anna is immediately adorable: quirky and awkward, but also unassumingly beautiful and fiercely intelligent. Unlike Vicki, Anna’s attraction to Jeremy seems built on admiration and respect rather than loneliness and despair. Hopefully we aren’t about to learn that Anna’s been watching Jeremy for months and that she once knew a boy who looked exactly like him.

One character who’s defined by loneliness and despair, and who now competes with Damon for the role of Most Tragic Character On The Show, is Alaric. This week we gain an insight into his life, starting with his home, a sparsely decorated series of rooms in which labeled boxes remain unpacked and in which framed pictures remain unhung. With just a couple of scenes, we get a sense of how empty Alaric’s life is and how devoid of meaning it’s become since his wife’s death. Matt Davis plays his scenes with remarkable flair – a kind of neurotic resolve that leaves his fingers trembling as he lifts a glass to his lips at the Mystic Grill and his eyes narrowing as he glimpses the vampire who killed his wife. Crucial to the way he’s introduced is the way his scenes are shot; he’s dressed in white, and his home is bathed in airy light – a sharp contrast to the darkness within the character that we glean during the episode. “I was right about Mystic Falls,” he types in his online journal. “There is evil here. I can sense it; feel it. It’s everywhere.” Between this and the “years of research and study” that he mentions, we’re given the impression that Alaric has dedicated his life to hunting vampires, as well as to hunting down the specific vampire who killed his wife. Alaric’s flashbacks are minimal, but they quickly and economically tell us everything we need to know about the character: that he was blissfully in love and that he was happy with his life until he returned home one night and found a vampire feeding off his wife. It’s a detail that neatly ties Alaric’s story thread to Damon’s, and which reminds us that Damon – the sympathetic vampire whose scenes with Elena this week sparkled with humor – still has a long way to go to redeem himself.

“Bloodlines” raises several intriguing questions, such as how a sheltered individual like Anna can be so good at foosball, the real reason why listeners were so “mesmerized” by Sheila Bennett’s rally in 1969 and what Damon’s “healthy diet of blood” consists of now that he’s sworn off humans. The relevant questions, however, are even more intriguing, and by the end of the hour we’re left with another dozen for the ever-expanding stack: are Elena’s biological parents still alive, and is she indeed related to Katherine? What’s Anna’s motive for trying so hard to persuade Jeremy that vampires are real? Will Damon’s first destination in his quest to locate Emily’s grimoire be Sheila’s home, and in doing so will he compromise the already fragile alliance between Sheila and Stefan?

Above all, the question we’re left with is the same question Elena asks Damon early on in the episode: “What are you trying to prove?” We’re no less sure at the end of the episode than we were when we first got a glimpse of Damon’s Mustang, but if the show’s attempt was to prove that it could arbitrarily manipulate our reaction, making us hate a character one moment and feel sorry for him the next, it’s a point that’s been effectively proven. Damon remains the most cryptic character on the show, but paradoxically also the most fully-rounded and three-dimensional. Ian Somerhalder deserves as much credit as ever for adapting to rapidly changing material – seemingly without effort – and delivering a performance that’s in turns visceral, raw and deeply compelling.

If this constitutes “filler” – as in, a largely uneventful episode which fills an hour between one crucial episode and the next – then I find myself looking forward to more filler from The Vampire Diaries.

3.5 out of 5

Review of 1x10: "The Turning Point"

5/28/2011 12:04:17 PM

Posted by Otto Berkeley

Stefan and Damon learn there’s a new vampire in Mystic Falls. Damon tracks it to an abandoned warehouse and discovers it’s Logan.
Logan’s attempt to kidnap and feed on Caroline is thwarted, but Damon is persuaded not to kill him after it emerges that Logan might know someone who can open Katherine’s tomb.
Alaric spoils everyone’s fun by staking Logan before he can be any more helpful.
Given that Alaric has the balls to call the mayor a “full-grown alpha-male douchebag” to his face, I think we can forgive him.
Jeremy reads John Gilbert’s diaries from the 1860s and discovers lots of crazy stuff in there about demons, slaughter and mass hysteria.
Elena tells Stefan she loves him, they make love, and then Elena finds the photo of Katherine and storms off. She crashes her car after colliding with someone in the middle of the road, and although we don’t know who that someone is, their rapid recovery suggests they’re a vampire.

For all the sex, gore and violence that make “The Turning Point” such an intensely dramatic episode, it’s a poignant and at times searingly beautiful character piece. After several episodes in which the show divided its focus between flashbacks, witchcraft and mystically sealed tombs, this episode returns to the initial focus of the pilot episode – the story of a vampire and a human who fell in love.

Elena and Stefan’s relationship, while plagued with passive aggression and questionable motives, has evolved without contrivance, and their decision to sleep together feels like an organic development to their relationship. Their scenes together this week radiate heat and passion, but they’re also realized with care and sensitivity, and they’re complemented by a subtle exploration of Elena’s motivation for wanting Stefan in her life, and by a sense of the loneliness which has haunted Stefan over the decades. It’s strange to think of this, an episode which starts with a vampire draining another body and which ends with a car crash, as a character-driven episode; indeed, “The Turning Point” powers through more story material than possibly any other episode so far, and hints at several storylines the show plans to run with in the second half of the season. But behind the epic scale of the story is a deliberate focus on the characters. The result is an hour that’s densely packed and grandly momentous, and yet also flawlessly cohesive and quietly absorbing.

The downside to such a rapid passage through story material is that changes in character and tone become more apparent. These are never glaring in this episode, they’re noticeable, and at no point is this more apparent than at the start of the episode, when we see Stefan asking Damon where he plans to go after leaving Mystic Falls. The most immediate detail is that music is playing during this scene: not ominous sound effects or a sinister theme, but an upbeat number by Five for Fighting, “Changes,” a song about limitless possibilities and hope for the future. It’s a song which carries on from the previous scene, in which Jeremy rediscovers his love for sketching and in which it’s hinted that he’s beginning to put his life back together. It’s an apt song for Jeremy’s scene because it fits with the character’s arc and sets the perfect tone, but it’s hard to see how anyone could have thought it was a suitable choice for a scene between Stefan and Damon – a scene between two vampires who’ve threatened to kill each other, and one of whom is a serial killer who delights in taunting his victims before ripping their throats open. Damon’s promise to Stefan in the previous episode (that he wouldn’t feed on humans) remains unbroken at the end of this episode, and the fact that he remains in Mystic Falls after learning of another vampire’s attacks hints at a lurking sense of obligation to protect the town. It’s a long way from convincing us that he’s a different person, however. As charismatic as Damon might be, and as pitiable as he was at the end of “History Repeating,” we’ve seen no indication that he wants to make amends, with Stefan, with Elena, or with anyone he’s hurt or killed. Somerhalder continues to play his character with the same irresistible wit, energy and inner conflict he’s displayed since the season began, but he never played Damon as a character who aspired to change, which is why the choice of playlist in this scene is so puzzling.

Bu then, the fact that Stefan and Damon are talking to each other at all is puzzling. The fact that they call each other on their cell phones is puzzling. The fact that they band together to stop Logan the way they banded together in “Haunted” to track down Vicki is puzzling – especially given that, since then, Damon went on to stake Lexi and to reveal that his century-and-a-half-old quest to rescue Katherine involved unleashing dozens of blood-deprived vampires on an unsuspecting town. The show seems like it’s trying to change our perception of Damon – from villain to antagonist – by suggesting that he’s not so much an irredeemable monster as an incorrigible rogue. “You don’t have any friends, Damon,” Stefan points out after Damon suggests he’ll visit friends in London. “You’re right, Stefan, I only have you,” Damon replies. “We’re a team. We could try out for the Amazing Race!” We laugh, partly because it’s sad to think of an immortal creature with no friends, partly because we can’t believe that an immortal creature as beautiful as Damon would struggle to make friends. But perhaps we shouldn’t laugh. Perhaps Damon – the vampire who ritually strung up campers in trees after draining them of blood, who brainwashed and abused Caroline, who drained Mr. Tanner, who snapped Vicki’s neck and who staked Lexi – doesn’t deserve that. Perhaps a character who’s been responsible for the kind of atrocities we’ve seen Damon commit since the show began doesn’t deserve to be downgraded from villain to anti-hero, and perhaps what he really deserves – rather than laughter – is contempt. Which, given Damon’s darkly comic humor and given Somerhalder’s irresistible performance, is of course easier said than done. In a way, Damon’s change in role is reassuring, insofar as it means he’s less likely to be staked by Stefan if he’s merely an annoyance. The show’s strategy in reshaping our perception of the character seems to be re-assigning the role of Most Appalling Vampire to Logan, making Damon look like the lesser of two evils when compared with the amateur who stacks his corpses in an abandoned warehouse.

Chris Johnson’s performance as Logan makes the contrast even starker. He avoids a caricaturized performance in favor of one that’s at once amusingly overplayed and unnervingly corrupt, but there are moments when he plays Logan with twisted relish and captures every nuance of the character’s despicable nature. In keeping with Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec’s penchant for ambiguity, Logan’s depiction is fraught with contradictions. He’s mostly villainous, but with shades that make him part victim and part scheming mastermind. He gruesomely drains the blood of a random jogger and plows wooden bullets into Damon, then paints a saddening picture of how he woke up in a shallow grave without any idea of what he was or who buried him. “It’s been a learn-as-you-go process,” he tells Damon, recounting how he discovered that he was barred from his own home and was forced to check into a hotel. Out of context, it would be harrowing; in context, the overriding response he elicits from us is moral revulsion. “I can’t stop killing people!” he declares. “I keep killing! And I like it! I’m conflicted!” Logan makes for a pitiable figure who’s struggling to understand what’s happened to him, but our perception is clouded, firstly by the fact that Logan continues to kill despite knowing it makes him reprehensible, and secondly by the fact that, as we later learn, Logan is working for people who may be capable of opening Katherine’s tomb, suggesting that his knowledge and self-control are at least stronger than he’s making them out to be.

Logan’s choice to continue killing suggests he’s succumbing to his darker urges, and his decision to ally himself with a group of newcomers in Mystic Falls suggests he’s consciously choosing to embrace his villainy. This is critical because it incorporates Logan into the episode’s focus on individual choices. Logan aligns himself at the opposite end of the moral spectrum to Stefan, with Damon somewhere in the middle, but all three characters appear to be victims of their own nature, given that none of them seem to have chosen to become vampires. There’s a sense of wasted opportunity in each of their lives. As contemptible as Logan might be, there’s something wistful about acknowledging that his career as a news reporter is effectively at an end (because of his fondness for killing, but also because of the restrictions on daytime reporting). There’s also a visceral tragedy to Stefan’s revelation that he would have become a doctor if it weren’t for his thirst for blood. And although we never get a glimpse into Damon’s pre-sociopathic career aspirations, his fondness for football in the “Lost Girls” flashbacks, coupled with his mention of the Amazing Race in this episode, indicate an inclination towards sports. In each case, what’s sad – in spite of their actions since they became vampires – is the thought of what could have been, and the prospects that were snatched away when these characters were turned into vampires.

Johnson’s performance is funniest when he’s channeling elements of his human persona. At the start of the episode, we see Logan’s jittery response to Jenna refusing to invite him into her home, a moment made painfully funny by the fact that Logan can’t decide what to do with his hands: he clasps them, runs them through his hair, puts them in his pockets and hides them behind his back, and finally places them on his hips. But in a moment filled with nuances that add texture to the character and the episode, it’s Alaric who upstages Logan, and it’s Matt Davis who shines, adding a shade of uncertainty to Alaric’s usually unflappable confidence. Alaric demonstrates courage in the face of mortal danger, but after standing up to Tyler’s brutally overbearing father, he finds himself standing up to a vampire, and suddenly he seems on the verge of an aneurysm. “I’m not a violent person by design,” he tells Logan. With hindsight, knowing that Alaric says this moments before killing Logan, it’s difficult to gauge how truthful the statement is. But then, even if Alaric is hiding a background that’s made him acutely aware of the vampire activity in Mystic Falls, we’re compelled to like him. Davis plays the character with such disarming charisma and integrity that, rather than questioning whether he’s perhaps more violent than he’d like to think, we sympathize with the character, not least because he overcomes his pacifism and rids Mystic Falls of a palpable threat. We’re also inclined to sympathize with a character who, regardless of his hidden agenda, has apparently made it his mission in Mystic Falls to protect the Gilbert family. His focus so far has been on Jeremy and Jenna, but it can’t be long before he makes his intentions clear and extends his mandate to protecting Elena.

This, of course, means there’ll be two characters with ambitions to protect Elena, after Stefan predictably decides to remain in Mystic Falls in spite of his resolve to leave. On the one hand, Stefan’s decision to relent to Elena’s wishes demonstrates his respect for the character. It also leads to one of their most heartfelt scenes when Stefan, in the midst of his passion for Elena, can’t resist reverting to his vampiric visage, and at which point Elena, far from recoiling, reaches out and lovingly traces the pattern around his eyes.

On the other hand, caving in to Elena’s wishes reinforces how irresponsible Stefan can be. It comes on the heels of Stefan’s resolution to get “as far away from [Damon] as possible,” making Stefan the kind of person who’s happy to let his brother continue on his killing spree, but who’ll stay with his girlfriend in spite of the danger he knows he’s putting her in. Despite Elena’s impassioned account of how miserable her life was before Stefan came into it, Stefan is right to point out that the situation now is “different.” Stefan is putting Elena at risk by dint of the fact that he has a psychopath for a brother and a tendency to attract mortal danger, and although his presence means he’ll be on hand to avert the various crises, it doesn’t change the fact that, in many cases so far, he’s caused them in the first place. Stefan’s decision to leave Mystic Falls – and Elena – was evidence of his selflessness. His decision to stay for Elena conveys a mixed message: that, regardless of the consequences, staying with the girl who tells you she loves you is the best solution for everyone.

The subtext beneath Elena’s decision to sleep with Stefan is even deeper. It’s a scene that’s intimate and deeply sensual, but also fraught with issues, not least that Elena gives herself to the boyfriend she’s afraid to lose. It’s clear that Stefan never intended to pressure Elena into sex, and the show very elegantly planted this detail into “162 Candles” when Stefan insisted to Lexi that he wouldn’t use sex to win Elena over. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that Elena practically throws herself at Stefan, telling him she loves him, kissing him and leading him up to his bedroom. No matter how noble Stefan might be, the ramifications are hard to ignore. The underlying message is that if a girl wants to hold on to her wayward boyfriend, all she needs to do is have sex with him. True to the stereotype, post-coitus, Stefan’s resolve to leave town has all but vanished, and Elena is nearly ecstatic in her domestic bliss, half-nakedly wandering around Stefan’s room and discovering details about the vampire she just lost her virginity to.

Discovering seems the best way to describe this process, given that Elena, whether she realizes it or not, isn’t just exploring Stefan’s room out of casual curiosity: she’s trying to understand the person she knows next to nothing about, and, for lack of any direct or honest answers, she’s forced to resort to independent discovery in order to glean the truth about him. The photo of Katherine is evidence of this, but again, the show’s choice of playlist tells a story of its own: Plumb’s “Cut” accompanies the scene in which Elena and Stefan make love. It’s a hauntingly beautiful piece that captures the emotional resonance of the scene, but also a song with lyrics that ostensibly validate self-harm as a method of self-discovery, and moreover, a song that unwittingly reveals the issues surrounding Elena and Stefan’s decision to have sex. “I’m not a stranger” is the song’s opening line. Elena’s discovery of Katherine’s photo illustrates just how apt this line is. Stefan’s decision to have sex with Elena before revealing that the love of his life a century earlier looked exactly like her demonstrates his dishonesty. It also gives him a chance to demonstrate his default ethos: if you’re not sure what to do, DO NOTHING. Stefan chooses to consummate his relationship with Elena while trying to ignore an unignorable issue, and although it could hardly be said that Stefan caused the car crash which Elena is now involved in, his selective approach to confiding in Elena is the reason he drives her away.

But then, this will undoubtedly form part of the springboard for the second half of the season, alongside Alaric’s apparent crusade to rid Mystic Falls of vampires, Damon’s reluctant change of heart and Jeremy’s discovery of John Gilbert’s encounters with “Death.” “The Turning Point” is also memorable for its introduction of several other storylines, notably Matt’s growing affection for Caroline and Tyler’s retreat into sketching as a way to escape the domineering influence of his father. In spite of its brisk pace and sprawling scale, “The Turning Point” is an episode that’s in turns bold and shocking, sexy and alluring, sinister and unsettling. It’s made all the more effective by some superb directing and cinematography: J. Miller Tobin chooses the perfect moment to zoom in, capturing the full claustrophobic horror of Logan confronting Sheriff Forbes, but he also knows when to pull back, selecting wide, epic shots that convey the catastrophe of Elena’s car crash. Nina Dobrev, Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder deliver stellar performances, but they’re ably supported by Johnson and Davis. The script feels suitably momentous, yet to the credit of writers Williamson and Plec, the episode never descends into sensationalism. It delves into the loneliness and isolation that drew Elena and Stefan together, and despite Elena’s tearful departure in the episode’s final moments, there’s something reaffirming in the realization that she accepts Stefan for what he is and loves him for who he is. Amid the testosterone-fuelled confrontations and the nail-biting conclusion, this episode returns to the early romance that captured our hearts and made the show so mesmerizing.

4 out of 5

Last transcript posted!

5/17/2011 1:22:24 PM

Posted by Jeff WoodieSo, is this good news or bad news? I just posted the last transcript of Season 2, As I Lay Dying. Also, I posted the images from the episode last night. We've got big plans for the summer for the site, but I'm already looking forward to an amazing Season 3.

'The Vampire Diaries' Daniel Gillies on Elijah and Elena: 'The romance has already begun'

5/12/2011 9:15:40 PM

Originally posted at From Inside The Box - Zap2It Now that Elijah betrayed Elena in favor of his family, their relationship may prove to be more contentious than affectionate. Still, Gillies likes the antagonism that exists beneath the surface.

Vampire Diaries' Daniel Gillies: I Like Playing Elijah with "Humility and Vulnerability"

5/12/2011 7:10:00 PM

Originally posted at TV Guide

It's hard enough to join a popular show mid-second season, but to enter the world of Vampire Diaries as a "villain" and yet become so well-liked is nearly impossible. Somehow, Daniel Gillies pulled it off.

"First of all, people absolutely love the guy who's not the good guy," Gillies tells TVGuide.com." I think the great thing we're doing is generating questions [and] not supplying answers. I think Elijah is the embodiment of the question — that's why people are so drawn to him."

Additional Stills

5/12/2011 6:05:00 PM

Originally posted at Vampire Diaries WebZap2it and Hollywood Crush have released two new stills from tonight’s episode and a behind the scenes shot. Check them out in the gallery!

The Vampire Diaries Finale First Look! Is Katherine Crashing the Party?

5/12/2011 5:38:00 PM

Originally posted at E! Online -TV NewsWe're not sure why Mystic Falls continues to have these big town events. Bad things always go down! But then again, we wouldn't have crazy entertaining episodes of The Vampire Diaries,...

The Vampire Diaries Finale First Look! Is Katherine Crashing the Party?

5/12/2011 5:38:00 PM

Originally posted at E! Online - Watch w/ KristinWe're not sure why Mystic Falls continues to have these big town events. Bad things always go down! But then again, we wouldn't have crazy entertaining episodes of The Vampire Diaries,...

‘Vampire Diaries’: Daniel Gillies talks Elijah’s betrayal

5/12/2011 5:36:04 PM

Originally posted at Vampire Diaries WebEW have posted a new interview with Daniel Gillies (Elijah) check out what he has to say about Elijah’s betrayal and his role in tonight’s episode. My question is this: If Klaus hunted down the rest of Elijah’s family, was he searching for Elijah all these years? What’s your take on that? I think Elijah [...]

Katerina Graham talks ‘The Vampire Diaries’ Season Finale

5/12/2011 5:33:52 PM

Originally posted at Vampire Diaries WebKaterina Graham has sat down with Zap2it to discuss Bonnie’s role in tonight’s upcoming season finale! She also chats about Bonnie’s relationship with Damon and Jeremy and how that will progress. In the midst of all the sadness, Bonnie had a really kick-ass moment when she came out of the darkness and spelled Klaus. We [...]

Nina on Delena’s Chemistry: “You Want What You Can’t Have”

5/12/2011 5:28:58 PM

Originally posted at Vampire Diaries WebIn a recent interview with TV Guide Nina has discussed the sizzling chemistry between her character Elena & Damon. Check out Nina’s thoughts on Delana below and watch the video interview here. “You want what you can’t have,” she tells TVGuide.com. “The writers so brilliantly have been putting it off and teasing it and building [...]

BtS pic from tonight’s ‘Vampire Diaries’ finale

5/12/2011 5:26:13 PM

Originally posted at Vampire Diaries WebPopWrap have released a rather intense looking picture from behind the scenes of tonight’s finale, As I lay Dying.

'The Vampire Diaries' finale photo preview: Will Elena forgive Damon?

5/12/2011 3:15:15 PM

Originally posted at From Inside The Box - Zap2It We're not sure how they'll be able to top last week's scary/romantic/heartbreaking/action-packed episode, but we've learned to never underestimate this show.

Kat Graham Talks Season 2 Finale with PopWrap and MTV Hollywood Crush

5/12/2011 1:04:00 PM

Originally posted at I *heart* Vampire Diaries Kat Graham talks to PopWrap and Hollywood Crush about tonight's season finale. Check out some snippets below and read full interviews at link provided.

PopWrap

PW: What are you excited about fans seeing in tonight's finale?

Kat: I think people are convinced that the finale is going to be about “let’s see who dies next!” and that’s not really the right perspective to have when watching the finale. You should be more concerned with the decisions that will be made, the outcome of those decisions and how they’re going to effect every single character. I think a good decision can be just as powerful as a bad decision, and both are more powerful than a death. The big death was Aunt Jenna and I think that’s oversaturating the audience with a sense of death, but that’s not what this show is about – "Vampire Diaries" is about second chances and choices and what you’re willing to sacrifice when you really love someone. That’s what I think the show is about. I think death is a very surface aspect of the show.

MTV Hollywood Crush

"I don't even necessarily think that the biggest problem Bonnie has in the season finale is Damon's werewolf bite," she revealed. "And I'm not saying that to be cruel. I'm saying Bonnie has an even bigger problem than that if you can imagine. If she's asking for help, it must be a really big reason."

Disclaimer: If this is the first time you've seen this please credit sources when posting to your fansite.

IHVD Fandom Appreciation Video

5/12/2011 10:26:00 AM

Originally posted at I *heart* Vampire DiariesVampire Diaries' fans check out the IHVD Fandom Appreciation Video for cast, crew, and writers. Thanks to everyone who recorded a message and sent in photos.

Nina Dobrev Talks Damon and Elena Chemistry with TV Guide (Video)

5/12/2011 9:49:00 AM

Originally posted at I *heart* Vampire DiariesHere's the 2nd part of TV Guide Robyn Ross' interview with Nina Dobrev. She talks about Damon and Elena's chemistry.

Disclaimer: If this is the first time you've seen this please credit sources when posting to your fansite.

Behind The Scenes Pics Courtesy of PopWrap and MTV Hollywood Crush

5/12/2011 9:43:00 AM

Originally posted at I *heart* Vampire DiariesIn case you didn't know the season 2 finale of Vampire Diaries is tonight...check out two exclusive behind the scenes photos from New York Post PopWrap and MTV Hollywood Crush.

Disclaimer: If this is the first time you've seen this please credit sources when posting to your fansite.

Daniel Gillies Interview Round-Up!

5/12/2011 9:32:00 AM

Originally posted at I *heart* Vampire Diaries Daniel Gillies (@mrholymonster) chatted with EW, The TV Chick, and Chicago Tribune about Elijah, season finale, relationship with Elena and more. Read snippets below and check out links for full interview.

Entertainment Weekly

When we chatted in January, we had a great conversation about who you’d love to see play Klaus. Any suggestions you’d like to share for members of Elijah’s family?

Oh, man. We can dig up some of those old names. I loved that you printed that…. I must say that Joseph Morgan [who was ultimately cast as Klaus] wasn’t impressed when he came to set. He gave me a punch on the arm and was like, “Jonathan Rhys Meyers?! Ian McShane?!”

The TV Chick

So it wasn’t wrong that I picked up on feelings he might have for her?

Yeah, I mean it’s just so natural. If you saw somebody who was just under threat all the time and was making these really brave decisions, and was doing things that [you] wouldn’t possibly have the courage be able to do, the bravery of her — I think he’s seduced by her, in spite of himself. Nobody’s got better restraint than Elijah, but I think that she’s just completely enchanting. Everybody’s behaving predictably around him, but I think she’s the only one who really places the experience and value of others before her own. You could say the same thing with Stefan. I think he has a degree of respect for Stefan. But Damon, not so much.

Chicago Tribune

Speaking of procreating, should Klaus and the hybrids be allowed to date werewolves, vampires, humans or only other hybrids?

[Laughs.] I think they can date whomever the hell they want. As long as there is consent, they can date whomever.

Disclaimer: If this is the first time you've seen this please credit sources when posting to your fansite.

TV Guide and Hollywood Life Vampire Diaries' Season Two Finale Scoop!

5/12/2011 5:26:00 AM

Originally posted at I *heart* Vampire DiariesI can't believe that the end of such an epic season is tonight. Of course, numerous interviews that tease what's going to happen are surfacing. Hollywood Life chats briefly with Kat and Daniel. Read full story here.

“You’ll see him in the finale,” Daniel promises, but unfortunately he can’t tell us whether the “bodies” mentioned in last week’s episode have the potential to return as vampires. “That’s a question even Elijah couldn’t answer. “We just don’t know yet.”

TV Guide's Robyn Ross talks to Executive Producer Julie Plec about tonight's episode. Read full article here.

What will Stefan do to try to save Damon?

Plec: Stefan ended the previous episode saying, "I am not going to let you die. I will find a cure." And, of course, there is no cure. So that's going to be complicated for Stefan, who feels very responsible for his brother as a result of having been the one who really pushed being a vampire on him in the first place. He also feels responsible for the fact that Damon now believes his wrongs led to his death — that it's karmic retribution — and Stefan is basically saying, "I don't accept that because if I accept that this is your karmic retribution, then this is my fault to begin with." So Stefan sets out on a pretty intense journey to figure out if there's any way to save his brother and ... it's a really harrowing experience for him. His own life is put in peril as a result of wanting to do anything he can to save Damon.

Disclaimer: If this is the first time you've seen this please credit sources when posting to your fansite.

Vampire Diaries Boss: A Lot of Our Characters Are at Extreme Risk in the Finale

5/12/2011 3:31:06 AM

Originally posted at Vampire Diaries WebTV Guide Posted another Interview with Julie Plec check out some of it below and of course the rest over at TV Guide , Spoilers Ahead! You recently said that Season 3 would be about the originals. Was that always the plan? Julie Plec: We always knew in a perfect world our Klaus casting [Joseph [...]

Katerina Graham talks 'The Vampire Diaries,' saving Damon, and braving danger for the sake of art

5/11/2011 11:10:48 PM

Originally posted at From Inside The Box - Zap2It "I don't think Bonnie would necessarily throw her arms around [Damon] and protect him over someone else, either, you know what I mean? "

Vampire Diaries Boss: A Lot of Our Characters Are at Extreme Risk in the Finale

5/11/2011 10:30:00 PM

Originally posted at TV Guide

While last week's episode of The Vampire Diaries was action-packed, and full of death and rings of fire, Thursday's season finale will have a different tone. "There's a lot of emotional resolution," executive producer Julie Plec says. But don't think that means anyone is safe. "A lot of our characters, in some way or another, are at extreme risk," Plec says. "There are some moves and surprises that will make the audience yell at us."

In Part 2 of our chat with Plec, she discusses plans to dig deeper into the backstory of the originals and why "Delena" fans will love the second half of the Season 2 finale.