TVD review - stand by me
So for a TVD episode, very little actually happened here. Some traveling, some exposition - nothing really happens until the last scene.
And yet.
AND YET.
I think it was one of the best episodes of the show. Possibly the best episode. I mean. Can we talk about how much I loved an episode that featured neither Tyler nor Klaus? Oh, we can't? Fandom why you gotta be this way?
IF YOU ARE GOING TO FRIDGE A CHARACTER THIS IS HOW YOU GODDAMN WELL DO IT. I didn't entirely buy it last week because I was like "psssht, show, you wouldn't actually go there" and now I totally believe it. Plec's interview with EW - yes, there are spoilers for upcoming episodes - gives us just a peek into how thoughtfully this decision was made. And it's made to fit into the plot as Silas breaks free - immortality stalks through the earth as Jeremy, the lynchpin of Elena's humanity and one of the Five, a hunter meant to keep Silas (and generations of Elenas) in check, walks the earth. Elena's adjustment period is over.
The search for the cure has really been a long, drawn-out metaphor for the denial we see Elena crash through here. Jeremy and the Cure vanished by way of Katherine. And the writers made sure all this was happening as we found out about the Other Side. That whole existential question - these people know where their loved ones go when they die. And they have to make a decision about it. If it happens, it'll be because Jeremy was Bonnie's weak spot, not anyone else; she would know that her Grams wouldn't want her to unleash hell on earth just for the sake of Grams' life, but Jeremy.... But it's not just the arc. It's that everyone is allowed to react. It's not just about Elena's manpain.
Jer used to draw with Tyler; a picture of a wolf burns up in flames. Matt sits in a parked car and cres, because Jer was his buddy, was his last bit of Vicki. (That scene at the stoner pit, MY POOR HEART.) Even Rebekah and Damon, as isolated as they are from the whole thing, are worried about Elena.
The emotional moments were all perfect, all clear in their importance but not overplayed. The exchange between Stefan and Damon on the front porch was just EVERYTHING I love about watching the Salvatore brothers together. Stefan tries to be open and real with Damon, in a way he never trusts himself to do in front of anyone else. He struggles with it, though, because it's so hard to be real with something he feels so deeply. And Damon - Damon who is so bad at artifice that he's turned smacking people in the face with a warped, ugly version of the truth into an art form - just accepts it. I know, Stefan. That understated scene touched me more than anything they could have possibly said or done.
I don't really speak visuals, but even I could tell that whoever directed this episode is a goddamn champ. The camera lingers on every quiet moment, lets the writing have the impact it deserves, doesn't overplay anything.
Nina Dobrev is so ridiculously talented. I could say that every week and mean it every week, obviously, but wow, she was heartwrenching here, and I love so much that everyone involved in making this episode trusted that amazing talent enough to maximize its use. She says very few lines throughout the episode, as if all of her words for the day are saved up for her first outburst when she realizes Jeremy is dead, and her second one when she decides to burn down the house. It is such a believable picture of shock and grief.
I think part of the reason I was avoiding finishing this post was that I made the mistake of checking tumblr before I was done, and the bullshit sire bond wank was already in overdrive and it kind of snuffed out a lot of my enthusiasm. This is my position: that the sire bond metaphor can be read in a lot of ways. Whether or not that is appropriate for the narrative (I happen to love the vagueness of it, for reasons that probably belong in a broader season 4 post), it does make me skeptical of the One True Opinion on it, in this case, that it was HORRIBLE!! that Damon told Elena to turn off her humanity.
But anything I see too many times will piss me off, so I'll bite: This assumption inherent to the OTO that we should just ignore the silly girl's literal cry for help because it makes us uncomfortable so clearly she doesn't know what she's saying would be highly suspect even not in context of a show that tends to feature fifty life-ruining violations of agency before the opening credits. I don't have the energy right now or ever to (a) do the 101 on why that is hardly an unassailable stand for equality or (b) put up the whole Social Justice (TM) Outrage Deflection Shield tearing open of wounds and rending of garments about why that is not just intellectually suspect but viscerally disturbing to me.
So, counterargument: "It hurts just make it stop" is explicit consent, getting hacked off and equating this scene with compulsion is about as impressive to me as someone watching House MD and crying about Chase stabbing the patient. They checked in and signed a surgical waiver because they don't want to die, what the fuck else do we want? Disagreeing with this read is fair enough. Dismissing it is seriously questionable.
It's not like the incident it's meant to mirror back in S1, where Jeremy expressed pain and Elena had a super-Damon-whammy laid on him, clearly without Jeremy's consent. By contrast, Elena clearly knows what is up with the supernatural world, she understood that she was asking to have her mind altered by someone she knew was capable of doing it, and she expressly asked them to "make it stop." I'm so squicked out by the implication that they all should have stood around and said, no, little lady, WE think what you REALLY want is to be miserable, you HAVE TO sit there and be incapacitated by your own grief because WE THINK you have to feel your own feelings just to prove that you can. It's Elena's life, she's allowed to use any and every tool at her disposal to make it bearable for herself.
I'm not saying it's good. It's goddamn creepy as shit, and the entire episode is set up to underscore the insane crapshoot that is the notion of trust. Silas' manipulation of Bonnie bleeds right into Shane's on one end and the initial brainwashing of Shane on the other. Even Damon himself, set up as the puppetmaster this episode, can't stop going on about Katherine.
All of the criticisms we in the audience - myself very much included - have made of the characters for their pack mentality are brought out into the light in this episode. The victims within Kol's line were far more than twelve; they were out of sight and out of mind. And if it was worth thousands of lives to save Elena's humanity, why isn't Jer's survival worth 12? It's a fair question, and one that seems to be the first thing the kids understand enough to slow their murderous roll.
Along the lines of Klaus in both Tyler and Ric, there's a great use of a villain taking a familiar shape. Shane himself knowingly started his own transition into Silas. Shane espouses Silas' dogma and does his bidding - at this point, is he functionally distinct from Silas? How can you fight the devil when you've never known what he looks like, when he looks like everyone you've ever seen?
and to everyone who's tried to couch their bullshit hate-on for Bonnie in claiming that THE WRITURRRRRRRRZ just DON'T CAAAAAAARE and don't DEVELOP HERRRRRR enough for their ~refined literary palates: I'm not even going to pretend to be too mature to say HA HA SUCK ON THIS. Bonnie's been on a collision course with the realities of what she can do - oh, she has always know that she can react to things well, but what she's capable of is a different story, and she knows it. Bonnie projects her insecurities about her abilities onto her friends. They're clear as a bell that the problem isn't that she can't, it's that she would successfully obliterate the Other Side and unleash some hellish undead zoo onto the world at large. But Bonnie blames herself for Grams - who has OBVIOUSLY NOT been forgtten - and she watched Jeremy die when it's been her job twice now to bring him back to life.
Unlike D/E, which is such a clusterfuck of tangled issues, the questions of agency and manipulation are presented really well in the Bonnie-Shanelas relationship. Shanelas claims that Silas helped him but didn't fully heal him, and then sets to justifying himself to Bonnie - Silas just wants peace, he can raise the dead but never you mind my leg, anyway what does it matter, man, we're all just one! We are the VAMPIRE GHOST ZOMBIE WORLD! The episode might actually be showing us something more powerful than compulsion - this ability to take a mold of your own mind and use it to craft the weapons against you.
I accept the Bonnie/Damon, Kat/Damon, and Rebekah/Damon shiptease in the spirit of trollish love in which it was clearly intended. JP KNOW HOW WE DO. This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/290024.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
And yet.
AND YET.
I think it was one of the best episodes of the show. Possibly the best episode. I mean. Can we talk about how much I loved an episode that featured neither Tyler nor Klaus? Oh, we can't? Fandom why you gotta be this way?
IF YOU ARE GOING TO FRIDGE A CHARACTER THIS IS HOW YOU GODDAMN WELL DO IT. I didn't entirely buy it last week because I was like "psssht, show, you wouldn't actually go there" and now I totally believe it. Plec's interview with EW - yes, there are spoilers for upcoming episodes - gives us just a peek into how thoughtfully this decision was made. And it's made to fit into the plot as Silas breaks free - immortality stalks through the earth as Jeremy, the lynchpin of Elena's humanity and one of the Five, a hunter meant to keep Silas (and generations of Elenas) in check, walks the earth. Elena's adjustment period is over.
The search for the cure has really been a long, drawn-out metaphor for the denial we see Elena crash through here. Jeremy and the Cure vanished by way of Katherine. And the writers made sure all this was happening as we found out about the Other Side. That whole existential question - these people know where their loved ones go when they die. And they have to make a decision about it. If it happens, it'll be because Jeremy was Bonnie's weak spot, not anyone else; she would know that her Grams wouldn't want her to unleash hell on earth just for the sake of Grams' life, but Jeremy.... But it's not just the arc. It's that everyone is allowed to react. It's not just about Elena's manpain.
Jer used to draw with Tyler; a picture of a wolf burns up in flames. Matt sits in a parked car and cres, because Jer was his buddy, was his last bit of Vicki. (That scene at the stoner pit, MY POOR HEART.) Even Rebekah and Damon, as isolated as they are from the whole thing, are worried about Elena.
The emotional moments were all perfect, all clear in their importance but not overplayed. The exchange between Stefan and Damon on the front porch was just EVERYTHING I love about watching the Salvatore brothers together. Stefan tries to be open and real with Damon, in a way he never trusts himself to do in front of anyone else. He struggles with it, though, because it's so hard to be real with something he feels so deeply. And Damon - Damon who is so bad at artifice that he's turned smacking people in the face with a warped, ugly version of the truth into an art form - just accepts it. I know, Stefan. That understated scene touched me more than anything they could have possibly said or done.
I don't really speak visuals, but even I could tell that whoever directed this episode is a goddamn champ. The camera lingers on every quiet moment, lets the writing have the impact it deserves, doesn't overplay anything.
Nina Dobrev is so ridiculously talented. I could say that every week and mean it every week, obviously, but wow, she was heartwrenching here, and I love so much that everyone involved in making this episode trusted that amazing talent enough to maximize its use. She says very few lines throughout the episode, as if all of her words for the day are saved up for her first outburst when she realizes Jeremy is dead, and her second one when she decides to burn down the house. It is such a believable picture of shock and grief.
I think part of the reason I was avoiding finishing this post was that I made the mistake of checking tumblr before I was done, and the bullshit sire bond wank was already in overdrive and it kind of snuffed out a lot of my enthusiasm. This is my position: that the sire bond metaphor can be read in a lot of ways. Whether or not that is appropriate for the narrative (I happen to love the vagueness of it, for reasons that probably belong in a broader season 4 post), it does make me skeptical of the One True Opinion on it, in this case, that it was HORRIBLE!! that Damon told Elena to turn off her humanity.
But anything I see too many times will piss me off, so I'll bite: This assumption inherent to the OTO that we should just ignore the silly girl's literal cry for help because it makes us uncomfortable so clearly she doesn't know what she's saying would be highly suspect even not in context of a show that tends to feature fifty life-ruining violations of agency before the opening credits. I don't have the energy right now or ever to (a) do the 101 on why that is hardly an unassailable stand for equality or (b) put up the whole Social Justice (TM) Outrage Deflection Shield tearing open of wounds and rending of garments about why that is not just intellectually suspect but viscerally disturbing to me.
So, counterargument: "It hurts just make it stop" is explicit consent, getting hacked off and equating this scene with compulsion is about as impressive to me as someone watching House MD and crying about Chase stabbing the patient. They checked in and signed a surgical waiver because they don't want to die, what the fuck else do we want? Disagreeing with this read is fair enough. Dismissing it is seriously questionable.
It's not like the incident it's meant to mirror back in S1, where Jeremy expressed pain and Elena had a super-Damon-whammy laid on him, clearly without Jeremy's consent. By contrast, Elena clearly knows what is up with the supernatural world, she understood that she was asking to have her mind altered by someone she knew was capable of doing it, and she expressly asked them to "make it stop." I'm so squicked out by the implication that they all should have stood around and said, no, little lady, WE think what you REALLY want is to be miserable, you HAVE TO sit there and be incapacitated by your own grief because WE THINK you have to feel your own feelings just to prove that you can. It's Elena's life, she's allowed to use any and every tool at her disposal to make it bearable for herself.
I'm not saying it's good. It's goddamn creepy as shit, and the entire episode is set up to underscore the insane crapshoot that is the notion of trust. Silas' manipulation of Bonnie bleeds right into Shane's on one end and the initial brainwashing of Shane on the other. Even Damon himself, set up as the puppetmaster this episode, can't stop going on about Katherine.
All of the criticisms we in the audience - myself very much included - have made of the characters for their pack mentality are brought out into the light in this episode. The victims within Kol's line were far more than twelve; they were out of sight and out of mind. And if it was worth thousands of lives to save Elena's humanity, why isn't Jer's survival worth 12? It's a fair question, and one that seems to be the first thing the kids understand enough to slow their murderous roll.
Along the lines of Klaus in both Tyler and Ric, there's a great use of a villain taking a familiar shape. Shane himself knowingly started his own transition into Silas. Shane espouses Silas' dogma and does his bidding - at this point, is he functionally distinct from Silas? How can you fight the devil when you've never known what he looks like, when he looks like everyone you've ever seen?
and to everyone who's tried to couch their bullshit hate-on for Bonnie in claiming that THE WRITURRRRRRRRZ just DON'T CAAAAAAARE and don't DEVELOP HERRRRRR enough for their ~refined literary palates: I'm not even going to pretend to be too mature to say HA HA SUCK ON THIS. Bonnie's been on a collision course with the realities of what she can do - oh, she has always know that she can react to things well, but what she's capable of is a different story, and she knows it. Bonnie projects her insecurities about her abilities onto her friends. They're clear as a bell that the problem isn't that she can't, it's that she would successfully obliterate the Other Side and unleash some hellish undead zoo onto the world at large. But Bonnie blames herself for Grams - who has OBVIOUSLY NOT been forgtten - and she watched Jeremy die when it's been her job twice now to bring him back to life.
Unlike D/E, which is such a clusterfuck of tangled issues, the questions of agency and manipulation are presented really well in the Bonnie-Shanelas relationship. Shanelas claims that Silas helped him but didn't fully heal him, and then sets to justifying himself to Bonnie - Silas just wants peace, he can raise the dead but never you mind my leg, anyway what does it matter, man, we're all just one! We are the VAMPIRE GHOST ZOMBIE WORLD! The episode might actually be showing us something more powerful than compulsion - this ability to take a mold of your own mind and use it to craft the weapons against you.
I accept the Bonnie/Damon, Kat/Damon, and Rebekah/Damon shiptease in the spirit of trollish love in which it was clearly intended. JP KNOW HOW WE DO. This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/290024.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.