Right! And I think the episode did a good job with showing us that Elijah was never that Noble Elijah-construct, but without trying to imply he was axiomatically *the opposite* of that. Elijah's dream is to be a broker of peace between the bad and the worse, his drive to love and be loved is certainly genuine and hardly villainous. But we live in a fucked-up world, Elijah for much longer than most, and those impulses became warped and nasty under the power structures we all live under. It is totally believable, it is damaging without being dismissed and othered as some intrinsic evil. That shows up most starkly in his treatment of the doppelganger (doesn't matter which one, and that's the problem).
his "respect" for Elena is (as is the case for her interactions with almost every man on the show) dependent on her instinctively presenting in the right way to evoke the right response from him (and in Elena's case, when it comes to Elijah, it means being someone he can relate to, in whom he sees himself reflected, but in a positive light.)
This, exactly. His "respect" for Elena - lol - comes from the end of S2, when he was convinced she was beneath notice as a threat, and his crap at the end of S3, where he knew that he stood the best chance of getting what he wanted if he could appeal just to her and not to the whole group (many of whom had just as much if not more right than Elena to make that decision).
That's the tragedy of both Katherine and Elena, I don't think anyone knows the whole of them, who they really are as people.
I think it's actually the very rare person who is fully known by anyone else. Elena clearly doesn't know the people closest to her very well; she had to actually restructure Jeremy's mind in order to figure out her way around it. But doppelgangering is about being more conscious than most of the performance, of the gap between perception and reality, and that takes a toll.
a part of her *wanted* to find herself through Elijah's image of her...in short, she slipped into Elena-esque tactics (though not quite the same, but shades of similarity) almost by accident, and that's why she got to Elijah emotionally when her previous approach failed.
yes! I think it's the power player skills coming into the picture, too. Katherine is only very rarely picking on someone her own size, let alone so much more powerful. There's maybe Klaus, but for whatever reason she never tried doppelganger methods on him. So this is kind of new territory for her.
he's pretending to Caroline that he's doing it for ~her or whatever, but he still gets to make Tyler suffer an eternity of paranoia
I mean, sure. But that's part of what "family" means to Klaus, is being able to torment someone through their own thoughts.
Caroline's downward spiral and crisis of conscience and Klaus shaming her for it in the last episode was not brought up at all, which I disliked
But Caroline's calling him out for stuff she's sure about in this episode. She's not sure how she feels yet about having killed the witches and completed the sacrifice, I don't think. And giving him that in to her head would have been a weird thing with Caroline's characterization. It would've introduced some way for Klaus and people who woobify him to shift the conversation from what is wrong with what he does. I think it was a purposeful move to distance from the "everyone's morally grey at best" usual tone of the show, specifically in order to make sure Caroline got a chance to call him out.
I don't think Care getting the whole episode to present her POV honestly and Klaus getting *a reaction shot* after the ordeal of thinking he was dying is a prioritization of his POV? (I mean, surely if there's one time to prioritize a character, it's when they're about to die? But those scenes were deliberately set up to give Care the spotlight.) It might still be more than you care about, which is 100% cool, obviously, but I'm uncomfortable saying that somehow outweighs Caroline spending several scenes narrating her life as she sees it.
his "respect" for Elena is (as is the case for her interactions with almost every man on the show) dependent on her instinctively presenting in the right way to evoke the right response from him (and in Elena's case, when it comes to Elijah, it means being someone he can relate to, in whom he sees himself reflected, but in a positive light.)
This, exactly. His "respect" for Elena - lol - comes from the end of S2, when he was convinced she was beneath notice as a threat, and his crap at the end of S3, where he knew that he stood the best chance of getting what he wanted if he could appeal just to her and not to the whole group (many of whom had just as much if not more right than Elena to make that decision).
That's the tragedy of both Katherine and Elena, I don't think anyone knows the whole of them, who they really are as people.
I think it's actually the very rare person who is fully known by anyone else. Elena clearly doesn't know the people closest to her very well; she had to actually restructure Jeremy's mind in order to figure out her way around it. But doppelgangering is about being more conscious than most of the performance, of the gap between perception and reality, and that takes a toll.
a part of her *wanted* to find herself through Elijah's image of her...in short, she slipped into Elena-esque tactics (though not quite the same, but shades of similarity) almost by accident, and that's why she got to Elijah emotionally when her previous approach failed.
yes! I think it's the power player skills coming into the picture, too. Katherine is only very rarely picking on someone her own size, let alone so much more powerful. There's maybe Klaus, but for whatever reason she never tried doppelganger methods on him. So this is kind of new territory for her.
he's pretending to Caroline that he's doing it for ~her or whatever, but he still gets to make Tyler suffer an eternity of paranoia
I mean, sure. But that's part of what "family" means to Klaus, is being able to torment someone through their own thoughts.
Caroline's downward spiral and crisis of conscience and Klaus shaming her for it in the last episode was not brought up at all, which I disliked
But Caroline's calling him out for stuff she's sure about in this episode. She's not sure how she feels yet about having killed the witches and completed the sacrifice, I don't think. And giving him that in to her head would have been a weird thing with Caroline's characterization. It would've introduced some way for Klaus and people who woobify him to shift the conversation from what is wrong with what he does. I think it was a purposeful move to distance from the "everyone's morally grey at best" usual tone of the show, specifically in order to make sure Caroline got a chance to call him out.
I don't think Care getting the whole episode to present her POV honestly and Klaus getting *a reaction shot* after the ordeal of thinking he was dying is a prioritization of his POV? (I mean, surely if there's one time to prioritize a character, it's when they're about to die? But those scenes were deliberately set up to give Care the spotlight.) It might still be more than you care about, which is 100% cool, obviously, but I'm uncomfortable saying that somehow outweighs Caroline spending several scenes narrating her life as she sees it.
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