TVD 5x4 - For Whom the Bell Tolls
So...is there any reason the doppelganger blood needed to break the curse that Esther put on Klaus had to come from Tatia's line? Or was it just, like, a member of the doppelganger species? Did Klaus have a candidate for the sacrifice right under his nose the whole time?!?
Amnesiac dickbag Stefan might be my favorite performance of PW’s to date. Stefan’s doppelganger manipulation skills were out in full force. And the episode did a neat job contextualizing that with his newfound vulnerability - he asks if he has a choice in trusting Damon; he asks Elena “why don’t you close your eyes?” - he’s still got power but he’s got no footing, and so he’s taking sloppy swings. It ends up deflating the temptation to woobify him just by having him enumerate his ~grievances and have even the legitimate ones come off sounding petty as hell.
And I really enjoyed how ambiguous it was on the whole ripper thing. Stefan’s hypothesis that his turning being particularly traumatic was the root cause is legitimate - and what if he was right? What if his next ripper binge is psychosomatic, brought on by the fact that he expects to lose control, or he mistakes normal vampire urges for insatiable blood lust? I err on the side of thinking they had to tell him, but it’s possible, and this is a thing they’re all going to be wondering when (not if, because lol) it goes down. (ofc, there’s also the possibility that his memories being buried down that much more deeply makes him that much more susceptible to ripperdom.
I quite enjoyed the touch that Elena magnanimously soothed his ~guilt for ruining their relationship with his rippering without sharing the salient fact that this particular pecan in the rocky road of their love appeared when the second biggest scary they’ve ever met was dangling Damon’s life over his head. Like, if she was going to tell him what he did and decide she didn’t feel safe around him, that is totally her prerogative, but what she did here was calculated to maximize her capital with him. And then he ups the ante by making her as responsible for his hunger as she’s trying to make herself for his humanity.
(and pffft, Bonnie gave up her life so ELENA could have her brother, not so JEREMY could live. I totally believe her grief, but girlfriend could find a spotlight in the densest thicket of the Amazon.)
Bonnie’s memorial service was really moving even though, as she said, she’s not going anywhere. Also, as hinky as the whole thing is of Bonnie’s power being considered a group resource, I think it was woven in really beautifully with how they all felt about their friend. Isn’t that the kind of legacy we’d all like to leave our loved ones, that not only did they love us back, but that they knew they could depend on us to make their lives better, or even just bearable? Idk, maybe I’ll be singing a different song if Tessa doesn’t bring Bonnie back by the midseason finale.
Caroline still doesn’t get that if it’s her way or the highway, Tyler is perfectly capable of choosing the highway. It’s terrible to behold the extent to which Damon and even - especially - Klaus have rubbed off on her. Tyler declining to drop everything he wants to do in his life in order to limit himself to exactly what she wants to do with her life is not just a disappointment or a hurt, but a lack of INTEREST and RESPECT, ie, a betrayal. And she's posed to go to some interesting places with those tendencies, because Stefan is the same manipulative bastard he’s always been, he really does not have anyone but her. And now Jesse, who already liked her, has been turned by HER blood, so siring is an issue. Jesse being experimented on like this is, yes, horrifying both psychologically and in terms of historical context. I do like him and hope he sticks around for a while longer, though.
I think that also brings us back around to the question of what really separates the kids from the Originals or the Salvatores. I mean, right now, at this moment in time, they're obviously less culpable and for fewer bad acts. But is that really about innate character? Is it formative, as Stefan hypothesized early last season when he mentioned "family we can trust"? Or is it just, as I'm more and more suspecting, that a function of time, that a century or more of bloodlust and ennui can and will drag everyone down into the mud?
I really enjoyed Damon throughout the episode, though he was mostly the straight man to everyone else’s emotional journeys. I actually thought that was kind of weirdly cute in a vampire way that he was like “yeah you killed dad but HE WAS AWFUL AND I DID UNCLE ZACH SO IT’S OK BRO!!” It looks like Damon failed to mention not just Elena but Katherine. On the one hand, sparing Stefan that nightmare is arguably a mercy; on the other hand, the worst of Kat’s games was that she would make him forget things, and so compounding that seems spectacularly unethical.
In conclusion, I don’t think those cholera patients were actually all that paranoid. Matt setting up cameras all around his own house could also be misconstrued as paranoid, but this is Mystic Falls. THE NIGHTMARE IS REAL. I did get a kick out of Roering’s turn as Gregor.
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