TVD 5x3 - Original Sin
So this episode was basically tailor-made to push all my buttons in the best possible way?! Flashbacks! Doppelganger mythology! Unreliable narrators who frankly admit to their own instability!
QETZIYAH was everything I could have asked for and a ton more. She’s controlling and paranoid and a little crazy, but damn if she doesn’t get shit done. This is an extremely powerful woman who was used and cast aside. There’s a cruelty in Silas that lets him burn through people emotionally as much as Stefan does as the ripper. And she’s right, she and Damon are the spammers in the works, her by her powerful magic and forceful personality, and Damon by his sheer pigheadedness. INTO IT. (Though, like we see with the doppelgangers, there's an uncomfortable power discrepancy - a woman has to be an actual witch demi-goddess in order to have the amount of control over her own destiny as a man can gain by being an obstinate brat.)
There’s also something different with how the Salvatore line of doppelgangers seems to be passed on. The Petrova doppelgangers we’ve met so far have been only children within their generation of Petrovas. But, assuming Damon and Stefan have both of the same biological parents, the Silas line skipped the first son and held off for the second. Don’t yet know what it means, but it seems worth flagging. Also, I’m wondering is if Tessa fried Stefan’s brains along with Silas’s, or if she actually shoved another Salvatore doppelganger into him.
I’m not sure if Amara’s name was a mythological reference. I took it as a reference to the Latin word amare, which means to love - the doppelganger’s ultimate method of survival. I would actually not put money on Silas and Amara being the first pair of doppelgangers? Silas in particular has the “save my ass because I adore you so much” con down pat, even as a human. It’s possible they and the people around them thought they were independently drawn to vampirism and immortality as much as the current generation is. Possible evidence for this theory is just how Tatia fits into this - how she ~happened to accidentally land herself in a nest of witches and werewolves a continent and a half away from where the line appears to have started.
Silas’s MO of forcing people to self-harm, even, is really representative of the doppelganger survival strategy: to stay alive, the doppelganger needs to be able to get people to make themselves vulnerable for no benefit to themselves. Silas (the man, standing for hard power) can force people to do it; Amara’s line depends on soft power and has to actually do the convincing, but the Petrovas are no less deadly for it (“you can feed on me”).
I loved the interplay between Elena and Katherine, with Katherine now being the one whose only weapon is her words. Seriously, if I had to bring Katherine on a road trip, I’d compel her to shut the hell up. Driving around with her making those desperate power plays is about as safe as Russian roulette.
It looked to me like Delena shippers were upset about the doppelganger-fate thing added into the mythology but I am kind of baffled you guys because if she was actually metaphysically created to love Stefan but she chooses to love Damon don’t you guys kind of win this round? Like, yes, there appear to be magical forces getting the doppelgangers to cross each others’ paths time and again, but when in the world has destiny resulted in anything good?
The exploitation of bodies and experiences is a big part of the episode, with Nadia’s seizure of both Gregor and Matt and Tessa using the Silasganger main frame to destroy them both.
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