100 Reviews: 73
And so we return to TVD again. And can we admit this is kind of a stupid title?
TVD: 1x05: You’re Undead to Me
This is a really important episode that I find pretty boring to watch. There’s quite a few scenes in this episode that feel like either a total waste of time or just drawn out longer than need be. In some ways its almost another pilot to the show because it starts over from here in a lot of ways, a better idea now which pieces it wants to employ in the story.
Any scene involving Damon bores me stiff this episode. Caroline still doesn’t feel like a finished character. Stefan’s sharing scenes drag on way too long for how little they say (I’ll come back to that). The scenes with Jenna and Logan serve very little point in the story. The scenes with the magical black guy who wanders through the story are pretty slow even if they do eventually matter. Bonnie’s stuff is okay, and I have some Jeremy and Vicky thoughts I’ll get to in a moment. My favorite pieces of the episode actually involve Matt, though aren’t really *about* him, because they’re mostly about Elena.
The ending is good though. Watching Elena put the pieces together and realize that the world is not the place she thought it was (though...shouldn’t the Gilbert parents have been at least hinting at the type of world they loved in? I know none of the founding families seem to have done that at least this generation as all their kids are just shocked to find it’s real, but I think that just may have been the wrong choice) and going out to demand some damn answers. I know there are some people who have a problem with it taking so long for her to figure out what was up but I don’t. Yes we live in a world where vampire stories are very well known, but they’re stories. In high school I had a friend where we had a while story about how we were aliens from neighboring planets on the other side of the galaxy, we loved the X-Files and believed in aliens and the possibility if not the fact of alien visitation. But if people acted strangely we didn’t immediately start to wonder if they were aliens or alien controlled or anything. Even if you believe these things are possible you know they’re mostly stories and if on the off chance they are real not the most likely explanation for every strange thing about the world. And that’s aliens, where even if everything we like Mulder wanted to believe in wasn’t real, the possibility that aliens *exist at all* is more easy to accept than vampires at this point.
Like Elena says, she’s not a believer. I take that to mean she isn’t particularly religious (not that anyone besides maybe April seems to be on this show), doesn’t believe in much of any kind of supernatural beings (again Gilbert parents, bang up preparation there), probably doesn’t believe in aliens either. She has a fairly direct view of the world, people and things are supposed to be what they appear to be, lies are a distraction from that but liars are against the way she believes things should be. She’s always been explaining Bonnie’s early witch skills with rational logic, so it’s only expected that she would look at the slightly weird stuff she’s seen from Stefan and Damon and think there’s a rational reason for it, most of us would. It one thing that I think the show lost sight of after about s1, the effect that learning that all this stuff is real has on someone who was sure none of it could exist (you get a little of it with Matt in later seasons, but most everyone else has just surrendered to the idea that everything they didn’t think was real actually is, and in him it’s wrapped around a lot of other issues).
Anyway, before the end, I did like the stuff between Elena and Matt here (I usually do). Their scene at the Grill is really...good. They really come across as two people who are right in the grey area between friendship and romance, and it would be easier if they really fell to one side or the other. They’re trying to figure out what they are now, while they’re feelings are still so complicated; and again they’re teenagers who were moving towards each other from the sandbox trying to figure out how to pull back in some areas while keeping others, while he still believes in them and she...doesn’t exactly disagree, I’m pretty sure Elena believes he’ll always be there if she changes her mind and she always could change her mind (and she’s not exactly wrong). But in this instance they can be friends, no matter how weird it is to talk relationship problems with each other, and he can tell her fairly standard love advice but stuff she needed to hear.
And then the scene with Matt and Stefan was just another reminder of why I wanted Elena and Matt to find their way back to each other. But it also contains a rather amusing line for my main ship, “Elena’s big on trust.” Oh Elena and Elijah and your exercises in trust and honor, you better hurry up and get back here or I’m going to have to go back to my first ship (I kid, though my Elena/Elijah love has always run into my other half that thinks Elena would be happier ending up with Matt).
Then contrast the way Elena and Matt talk to each other even as friends with Stefan’s big sharing scenes (I said I’d get back to it). Stefan rolls off “facts” and likes and dislikes about himself but even when he’s telling her about Katherine my objection isn’t that he’s leaving out some pretty important facts about what happened there but that he’s talking at Elena. He’s worked out this speech for how he wants to open up to her and it comes off as a speech rather than a conversation. Elena and Matt know each other, admittedly they have a bit of a leg up having known each other basically their whole lives, but even in their awkwardness they know how to talk to each other not at each other.
Now onto the contents of Stefan’s revelations. Really, a lot of the stuff comes off as really snobbish especially if you thought he was really a 17 year-old rather than a vampire who had seen all this stuff come into being. How many 17 year-olds would give a damn about ‘I Love Lucy’? Even ‘Seinfeld’ is getting towards being classic TV these days if not already there (I’m getting old). A lot of the preferences he expresses seen chosen to be the most recognizable ones to the audience, and that could apply in character too but I’m speaking to the writers with that comment. He expresses opinions no one is really going to argue with or be turned off Stefan because he has them, that kind of make him incredibly bland if you overthink it the way I am (and yet having even really bland opinions is 10000 times more interesting that book-Stefan). That or, as I suggested, he chose to have the most middle of the road opinions he could think of when he set out to tell Elena about who he is, so that *she* couldn’t object to anything he had to say (his music tastes in particular seem to be designed to be an unobjectionable as possible).
Anyway, I do have some thoughts on Jeremy and Vicky here that I want to get to before my mind wanders any more. This episode really seems to justify why Vicky really didn’t want to be with Jeremy, not her previous stated reasons of him being too young or what not, but because while someone like Tyler makes her feel like a loser with the way he treats her, Jeremy makes her feel like a loser because of who he is. She’s not wrong that Jeremy is going to get his act together one of these days and be able to get his life back, no one’s really written him off yet; he might have a little bit but this episode shows that given a little bit of positivity in his life he’ll start going back to his old self. While Vicky...has been written off, and has also written herself off (chicken and the egg about which started the ball rolling). The way she is now she thinks is all she can be, and she’s embraced it. When she did go to Jeremy in the last episode she classified it as making another bad decision because she “knows” it can only end badly and that she’s a screw-up whose every decision is a bad one. And here she sees it play out just as she kind of thought it would, she can help him get his life back on track, but she’s a lost cause.
I review-watching I find myself paying a lot more attention to Vicky then I do when I’m just watching, but I think I’ve always had a lot of thoughts I didn’t quite bother to explore before. It’s not so much that I even like her as a character but I feel like there was a lot to her story that gets overlooked (including by me). Her life was a tragedy long before Damon turned her into a vampire or she died because of lack of control. I also think I’m more interested this time than I was before because given my s4 bitterness (which has strangely enough not really come up in this review) regarding how overlooked the girls’ feelings are in all these love triangles and how I’ve grown accustomed to giving voice to them where the show doesn’t. Actually Vicky got off a lot better than Elena and Caroline have of late and she was *supposed* to have her feelings and desires overlooked.
Poor Zack, I really have nothing to say for your death. You will basically be forgotten as soon as the show can manage to do so, to the point where I’m really not sure why you ever existed. I mean, he does come off as being there for Stefan to bounce stuff off of, and you kind of expect that to last so his death is a surprise but...it’s not actually given any weight in the story outside of shock value. I suppose it signals that Stefan and Damon are going to be bouncing off each other more from this point on, but at this point (both through the previous episodes and based on my post-s4 anger) I really don’t care about Damon, or want to see more of him. Yeah I know he goes through a phase where I didn’t hate him so much, but Damon actually being a character I have to deal with in these rewatches no longer appeals to me in the slightest. I wish he’d desiccated in this episode, maybe then I wouldn’t have to deal with him the rest of the series.
You know, for being a fairly boring episode, I had a lot of thoughts to get out.
Next time:
Hmm, memory tells me it’s a pretty good TVD ep, but we’ll see which way I go.
Have suggestions? I have a place for them.
TVD: 1x05: You’re Undead to Me
This is a really important episode that I find pretty boring to watch. There’s quite a few scenes in this episode that feel like either a total waste of time or just drawn out longer than need be. In some ways its almost another pilot to the show because it starts over from here in a lot of ways, a better idea now which pieces it wants to employ in the story.
Any scene involving Damon bores me stiff this episode. Caroline still doesn’t feel like a finished character. Stefan’s sharing scenes drag on way too long for how little they say (I’ll come back to that). The scenes with Jenna and Logan serve very little point in the story. The scenes with the magical black guy who wanders through the story are pretty slow even if they do eventually matter. Bonnie’s stuff is okay, and I have some Jeremy and Vicky thoughts I’ll get to in a moment. My favorite pieces of the episode actually involve Matt, though aren’t really *about* him, because they’re mostly about Elena.
The ending is good though. Watching Elena put the pieces together and realize that the world is not the place she thought it was (though...shouldn’t the Gilbert parents have been at least hinting at the type of world they loved in? I know none of the founding families seem to have done that at least this generation as all their kids are just shocked to find it’s real, but I think that just may have been the wrong choice) and going out to demand some damn answers. I know there are some people who have a problem with it taking so long for her to figure out what was up but I don’t. Yes we live in a world where vampire stories are very well known, but they’re stories. In high school I had a friend where we had a while story about how we were aliens from neighboring planets on the other side of the galaxy, we loved the X-Files and believed in aliens and the possibility if not the fact of alien visitation. But if people acted strangely we didn’t immediately start to wonder if they were aliens or alien controlled or anything. Even if you believe these things are possible you know they’re mostly stories and if on the off chance they are real not the most likely explanation for every strange thing about the world. And that’s aliens, where even if everything we like Mulder wanted to believe in wasn’t real, the possibility that aliens *exist at all* is more easy to accept than vampires at this point.
Like Elena says, she’s not a believer. I take that to mean she isn’t particularly religious (not that anyone besides maybe April seems to be on this show), doesn’t believe in much of any kind of supernatural beings (again Gilbert parents, bang up preparation there), probably doesn’t believe in aliens either. She has a fairly direct view of the world, people and things are supposed to be what they appear to be, lies are a distraction from that but liars are against the way she believes things should be. She’s always been explaining Bonnie’s early witch skills with rational logic, so it’s only expected that she would look at the slightly weird stuff she’s seen from Stefan and Damon and think there’s a rational reason for it, most of us would. It one thing that I think the show lost sight of after about s1, the effect that learning that all this stuff is real has on someone who was sure none of it could exist (you get a little of it with Matt in later seasons, but most everyone else has just surrendered to the idea that everything they didn’t think was real actually is, and in him it’s wrapped around a lot of other issues).
Anyway, before the end, I did like the stuff between Elena and Matt here (I usually do). Their scene at the Grill is really...good. They really come across as two people who are right in the grey area between friendship and romance, and it would be easier if they really fell to one side or the other. They’re trying to figure out what they are now, while they’re feelings are still so complicated; and again they’re teenagers who were moving towards each other from the sandbox trying to figure out how to pull back in some areas while keeping others, while he still believes in them and she...doesn’t exactly disagree, I’m pretty sure Elena believes he’ll always be there if she changes her mind and she always could change her mind (and she’s not exactly wrong). But in this instance they can be friends, no matter how weird it is to talk relationship problems with each other, and he can tell her fairly standard love advice but stuff she needed to hear.
And then the scene with Matt and Stefan was just another reminder of why I wanted Elena and Matt to find their way back to each other. But it also contains a rather amusing line for my main ship, “Elena’s big on trust.” Oh Elena and Elijah and your exercises in trust and honor, you better hurry up and get back here or I’m going to have to go back to my first ship (I kid, though my Elena/Elijah love has always run into my other half that thinks Elena would be happier ending up with Matt).
Then contrast the way Elena and Matt talk to each other even as friends with Stefan’s big sharing scenes (I said I’d get back to it). Stefan rolls off “facts” and likes and dislikes about himself but even when he’s telling her about Katherine my objection isn’t that he’s leaving out some pretty important facts about what happened there but that he’s talking at Elena. He’s worked out this speech for how he wants to open up to her and it comes off as a speech rather than a conversation. Elena and Matt know each other, admittedly they have a bit of a leg up having known each other basically their whole lives, but even in their awkwardness they know how to talk to each other not at each other.
Now onto the contents of Stefan’s revelations. Really, a lot of the stuff comes off as really snobbish especially if you thought he was really a 17 year-old rather than a vampire who had seen all this stuff come into being. How many 17 year-olds would give a damn about ‘I Love Lucy’? Even ‘Seinfeld’ is getting towards being classic TV these days if not already there (I’m getting old). A lot of the preferences he expresses seen chosen to be the most recognizable ones to the audience, and that could apply in character too but I’m speaking to the writers with that comment. He expresses opinions no one is really going to argue with or be turned off Stefan because he has them, that kind of make him incredibly bland if you overthink it the way I am (and yet having even really bland opinions is 10000 times more interesting that book-Stefan). That or, as I suggested, he chose to have the most middle of the road opinions he could think of when he set out to tell Elena about who he is, so that *she* couldn’t object to anything he had to say (his music tastes in particular seem to be designed to be an unobjectionable as possible).
Anyway, I do have some thoughts on Jeremy and Vicky here that I want to get to before my mind wanders any more. This episode really seems to justify why Vicky really didn’t want to be with Jeremy, not her previous stated reasons of him being too young or what not, but because while someone like Tyler makes her feel like a loser with the way he treats her, Jeremy makes her feel like a loser because of who he is. She’s not wrong that Jeremy is going to get his act together one of these days and be able to get his life back, no one’s really written him off yet; he might have a little bit but this episode shows that given a little bit of positivity in his life he’ll start going back to his old self. While Vicky...has been written off, and has also written herself off (chicken and the egg about which started the ball rolling). The way she is now she thinks is all she can be, and she’s embraced it. When she did go to Jeremy in the last episode she classified it as making another bad decision because she “knows” it can only end badly and that she’s a screw-up whose every decision is a bad one. And here she sees it play out just as she kind of thought it would, she can help him get his life back on track, but she’s a lost cause.
I review-watching I find myself paying a lot more attention to Vicky then I do when I’m just watching, but I think I’ve always had a lot of thoughts I didn’t quite bother to explore before. It’s not so much that I even like her as a character but I feel like there was a lot to her story that gets overlooked (including by me). Her life was a tragedy long before Damon turned her into a vampire or she died because of lack of control. I also think I’m more interested this time than I was before because given my s4 bitterness (which has strangely enough not really come up in this review) regarding how overlooked the girls’ feelings are in all these love triangles and how I’ve grown accustomed to giving voice to them where the show doesn’t. Actually Vicky got off a lot better than Elena and Caroline have of late and she was *supposed* to have her feelings and desires overlooked.
Poor Zack, I really have nothing to say for your death. You will basically be forgotten as soon as the show can manage to do so, to the point where I’m really not sure why you ever existed. I mean, he does come off as being there for Stefan to bounce stuff off of, and you kind of expect that to last so his death is a surprise but...it’s not actually given any weight in the story outside of shock value. I suppose it signals that Stefan and Damon are going to be bouncing off each other more from this point on, but at this point (both through the previous episodes and based on my post-s4 anger) I really don’t care about Damon, or want to see more of him. Yeah I know he goes through a phase where I didn’t hate him so much, but Damon actually being a character I have to deal with in these rewatches no longer appeals to me in the slightest. I wish he’d desiccated in this episode, maybe then I wouldn’t have to deal with him the rest of the series.
You know, for being a fairly boring episode, I had a lot of thoughts to get out.
Next time:
Hmm, memory tells me it’s a pretty good TVD ep, but we’ll see which way I go.
Have suggestions? I have a place for them.