- Elena continues to conflate control and morality in this way that pretty much guarantees she won’t have either when it counts. Which, I was a Catholic girl, I get it, I was still working that out of my system at 18 too. Her song and dance about how she was ~so awful at the party last week is actually about, as Damon says, a shame spiral. “I got high on blood like some crackhead and then dirty danced with you” is completely about embarrassment about getting caught letting loose with ew, Damon, Prince of the Id. It’s not about “I drank people and messed with their minds!” Then at the end of the episode, she tries to dodge her guilt over killing Connor by saying she “lost control.” That’s after she sat and had a nice chat with Jeremy, stalked Connor through the sewers, and drank a little bit of his blood and then easily stopped herself to make a point. Yeah, he stabbed her before she killed him, but it’s hardly self-defense if you hunt someone down to pick a fight with them. Her claim that she “lost control” is (IMO intentionally) a transparent disavowal of responsibility.
I’m not sure how I feel about the forcefulness with which Elena’s struggle with feeding scans to me like a lot of the double-binds about female sexuality. She’s not supposed to want to; it’s marginally acceptable to be swept up in the throes of passion and indulge when she’s out of control, but acknowledging that desire is different. She’s wired to want it, like the vast majority of her species, but if she wants it she’s BAD so she represses and denies. And so she ends up concocting this scenario where she’s “forced” to do the thing she wants to do anyway. Because once she goes through with it, once, goes all the way, then there’s no going back. I mean, it’s a fascinating inversion, to make the lure of the forbidden from the vampire’s perspective, rather than the Twilight human girl/vampire guy model? But I don’t know if I can get on board with that metaphor for obvious reasons.
She only jumps on Damon after she gets “killed.” It’s a clever little moment - it looks to Elena like it means she knows how to defend herself and she’s ready to get involved, but all that proves is that she missed Damon’s point entirely. - Bonnie’s selective expansion of her worldview is set up to come back and bite her. It suits her to accept that she might be able to gain some power without going through her ancestors, and it also suits her to continue to stick to her previous, limited experience with mind control, in saying that witches are immune to “any sort” of manipulation. Bonnie’s surrounded by people who don’t pay a whole lot of attention to her, except when they need her (and therefore she feels as if she’s the party with the power in that transaction in a lot of ways). So she’s totally unprepared for the dynamics of someone taking an interest in her. Bonnie’s not any better at social games than Caroline, I don’t think, but she’s more independent and has far less reason than Caroline to expect that social success will pay off for her. So she is completely unequipped to figure out if someone’s playing her, which Shane totally is.
If Shane did know Bonnie well, he couldn’t be any better at manipulating her than he is. He appeals to her hard-earned insecurity about the world, promising that she doesn’t have to be afraid anymore. He simultaneously downplays the threat posed by the Bennetts from the beyond (by saying they “threatened” Sheila, not “tortured and possibly double-plus-killed” her) and appeals to Bonnie’s desire to create some security for herself. He drugs her with witch-peyote, and manipulates her out of any contact in the outside world. - I continue to like what the show is doing with the nature/nurture interplay, with Tyler and Klaus, Bonnie and Shane, and now Jeremy and his hunter identity. We started out kind of assuming the sire bond was the thing that kept Tyler in line when he was first turned, but it’s not effectively that different, Tyler still does what Klaus asks. Shane may or may not be hypnotizing Bonnie or pulling Esther’s gradual-brainwashing gambit, but he’s saying all the right things. Maybe hunters have some innate predisposition to want to fight vampires, but they tend to live lives which give them an awful lot of reason to develop animosity toward the undead.
- Jeremy is way too easygoing about getting mind-wiped AGAIN and then shot. Like. Suspiciously okay with it. I do love that he stepped in to help April at the end there.
- Connor, RIP. Ugh.
- See, I don’t get where people are getting the idea that Stefan’s characterization as a manipulative douche is not intentional? He subtly coerces Elena into policing herself, “reminding” her that to be who she is, she has to either smother all of her proactive instincts or be destroyed by guilt. Stefan is clinging to the dynamic he has with Klaus not because he doesn’t trust Damon with the cure, or even because he’s really afraid of Klaus when Klaus is away, but because his reaction to crisis is to retreat into that backdoor-dealer role. He’s not quite as good at it as he wants to think he is - Damon is onto him right away, and Elena clearly knows something’s up - but it’s worth saying that he is decent at the strategy end of it. The hostages do get out alive, and Connor dies as a result of his having shut Elena and Damon out, not because of anything that went wrong in the bar.
He’s also clinging to Klaus because he wants an excuse to shut Elena and Damon out of the conversation about the cure. I think Stefan knows, on some level, that Elena doesn’t hate being a vampire. That she might have made peace with it, or even enjoy it. And he just CANNOT DEAL with that. Because it would knock her off that pedestal (which makes a lot more sense in the vampirism-as-sexuality reading), and then he will lose his purpose of the last couple of years. It’s an ego thing, too, because of course if she wouldn’t turn for him in those earlier seasons, then she doesn’t prioritize him in the way they’re pretending she does. And he knows that she doesn’t entirely want to face the question of whether or not she would go back to being a vulnerable human/doppelganger, so he uses that as a justification for taking it out of her hands entirely. - By the way, I am not any more impressed with Damon’s behavior. It’s cute that he doesn’t care if Elena’s a human or a vampire (and I believe that’s true, btw), but I don’t see how supporting and enabling Stefan’s controlling douchery because BROS BEFORE HOS is any better than actually engaging in it. I’m probably being unfair in that it seems a little worse to me, because obviously I shouldn’t be expecting better from Damon. Damon is a good brother, but he is a terrible person.
- Loving the free-the-hybrids plan! Not so much loving Care’s attitude! I didn’t want you dead, and therefore you have no right to have anything in your life that I don’t know about. Wow, Caroline. Not your finest moment.
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