TVD 4x7 review
So, that was a lot of fun until the last five minutes were super-gross? I can’t really deal, and I guess my expectations for the show are not high enough to have expected better, so I’m going to proceed to fanwank like crazy until something in the show forces me to accept that as reliable narration. But, you know, anyone who is just outraged, I'm not arguing that point. But I don’t actually think Elena is sire-bonded to Damon, even if it’s still a gross exploitation of rape culture. It seemed to me like Caroline and Stefan were looking for an excuse to reject Elena as they’re seeing her now, without revising their opinion of Elena herself, and it’s easiest for them to blame her bond with Damon.
I forget where, I think on tumblr? Or maybe in comments on one of your posts. I think there’s a lot of contradiction of the sire bond thing within the text. Like that time Damon was like “Elena, don’t stand there and burn alive!” and she was all “I’M JUST GOING TO STAND RIGHT HERE AND BURN ALIVE.” Or the time on campus he tried to influence her into adopting his predator strategy, which she didn’t. Or even while she was transitioning and he tried to talk her into feeding - she tried to avoid that at all costs and from all appearances came to the decision on her own.
I could really like the subtle thing we’re seeing with Elena’s identity issues. She’s now at this place where she is still reflexively trying to please everyone around her, but now she has power and so her decisions have to be her own, because they matter. She pretends to like the blue dress with Caroline, because Caroline likes conservative; she also likes the red dress Damon picks out. She’s experiencing a lot of fear and uncertainty generally, and Damon is good at making her narrative fit her personality, so his way of thinking has become influential to her.
If getting my humanity back means stripping Jeremy of his, I don’t want the cure. And again, I really like how this happened. I don’t think Elena was entirely sure one way or the other whether she wanted to be human again, but she does think that Jeremy’s humanity is too high a price to pay, and so that’s what tips her into being against the cure.
Setting that aside, there’s a fair amount to the episode that I did think was pretty smart. I continue to love just how aware of Stefan’s flaws the series is (and his behavior earlier in the episode is a huge point in favor of the sire bond being a red herring). I don’t think Stefan actually intended to leave town the first time around, so much as, he was trying to put Damon off so he could go on his little Gilbert exploitation outing. But he sold it as well as he did because he did mean it to some extent. Stefan gets pissy with Damon because it’s safe to be pissy with Damon. He stays away from Elena because he knows she can hurt him more, which Damon won’t do. He’s doing what he did at the end of S2/early S3, when he took the “I have to do it” excuse to push everyone away while he works out his stuff. He projects his ripper issues onto Jeremy.
I’m going to take a probably-unpopular stance and defend Caroline here. I think there’s a really clear line from her abuse by Damon in the first season and her inability to see similar behavior in Stefan this season. It’s much easier for her to think that ~only bad Damon who is bad does these things, than to think too hard about what “these things” are. I don’t think that makes her correct, to be clear. I’m just saying, I understand how her unwillingness to deal with the vulnerability of her human life and the way Damon exploited it (and her friends, including Stefan, allowed it to happen) would lead to her clinging to what she sees as a positive interpretation of the whole thing, regardless of what she knows on some level to be true.
JEREMY GOT STABBY. I’m so intrigued to see that hunter identity develop. I like this much better than the ring mythology. I think this is that metaphor done right. Engaging in violence gets easier every time, especially if you’re someone who has reason to be angry, as any kid in Mystic Falls does.
I want to be mad at Matt for outing Jeremy, but it’s not like she didn’t have a right to know. And he’s a good friend for stepping in for April. And I really liked him and Jer as buddies earlier last season. Matt is not at all a good boyfriend, but he is very capable of being a good friend.
Unsurprisingly, I really liked the werewolf stuff. Hayley’s insistence that she’s above the girly girls is unflattering but understandable, and she’s not the only wolf that just can’t even with other people’s crap. The half-sister theory gets a lot more credibility, when she says she was adopted. I’m not sure where to take that in terms of my read on the mythology.
And damn, Professor Shane is just behind EVERYTHING here. He’s insinuated himself into a position of trust with the Council, not unlike the way Damon did at first. He is confident in Bonnie’s dependence on him.
I continue to love Klaus. That big, grandiose story he gave when she asked him if he ever “thought about” humanity, that basically boiled down to ‘lol, no.’ She pointedly didn’t ask him if he’d take the cure, mind, just hypothetically brought up the concept of being human. He could have evaded it by pointing out that he once was, but Klaus cannot deal with what he sees as the shame of having once been mortal and vulnerable. And so instead, he plays up the idea of empathy, giving her a bunch of purple prose about how he once considered the tragic plight of the non-immortal.