The Originals 1x8 - The River in Reverse
This was just such a delicious, amoral exploration of the whole (super)natural phenomenon of Being Klaus.
I really enjoyed his sloppy, graceless rambling early in the episode. He’s always a bundle of live nerves, and his general discomfort with his vulnerabilities was amped up by seeing what Rebekah and Elijah think of him. All that can disappear in a second, as soon as he has a task at hand - get the dagger, slaughter an army, whatever - and come roaring back as soon as it’s accomplished. I don’t actually think we’d heard ever him use the word “bastard” until the end of the last episode, and then again here. It’s a strong word, one he throws around with huge amounts of emotion behind both meanings. The way he bites it out, it’s harsh and personal, an admission that he hates how much he doesn’t fit, that his assholishness and his difference are not always extricable.
Klaus has ultimate defensive endurance. He can fight his way out of any corner. But people don’t trust someone with no vulnerabilities, because as much as people want to believe emotions are our main motivations, we do calculate a lot of things subconsciously, and whether or not a situation is going to leave us entirely powerless is something we worry about. A vamp who throws in with Klaus may or may not get payback, but they will have no recourse when things go south. Marcel inspires loyalty because he’s good at the game, but he’s also reaping the pragmatic benefits of the consent of the governed: the vamps feel they’ve chosen their loyalty to him so they want to bolster and justify that choice, and (at least theoretically) should he start dropping the ball, they can drop him.
Marcel is also really good at consolidating power by picking enemies: the witches, the werewolves, and now Klaus. The vamps get in line not just because they’re soldiers (and both Klaus and Marcel treat them as such) but because there are rewards to bonding against the adversary. And as much as Klaus gave much, much worse than he could possibly get, it’s a pretty powerful image, so many so angry against just one, and one who, when you get right down to it, didn’t do much more than give one of them a runny nose for a couple of days and move into one of Marcel’s many properties. But if Klaus wanted to cause any of the vampires who attacked him tonight problems, he obviously would have done so. They get so pressed about the fact that he could be a danger to them, that they end up making sure he will have to become a danger to them - which, as Cami and Rebekah both point out, is exactly how Klaus himself operates.
Cami keeps telling him how he’s too scared to trust, and that sounds good because she’s obviously right that he’s exploiting her to fill an emotional need, but. WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD KLAUS TRUST PEOPLE? It’s not like they haven’t plotted his downfall. It wasn’t too long ago that Elijah was on a century-long stalking spree. It’s not like Rebekah isn’t plotting against him now. And it’s not like they didn’t show him they couldn’t be trusted when they stood by and let Mikael torture him all those years ago when he hadn’t done anything wrong. Klaus absolutely keeps compounding the problems at every turn, but it all started somewhere.
I really enjoyed his final confrontation with Rebekah and Elijah. They’re not wrong that they have to keep Klaus in line and that takes some work. Where they go wrong is assuming that their own relative weakness is moral superiority. They’re all in this thing for largely selfish reasons, mixed in with some real affection, and that’s fine. But they crab on him, he’s selfish, he’s awful, he’s awful just to be awful, because they forget to think of his actions/motivations in terms of what he has the means to do.
Cami is SO GREAT. Her snarking on Klaus about his Hemingway thing (hahaha, KLAUS WOULD) was delicious, and her resourcefulness in getting notes out with the pictograph was fantastic. And now she’s aware that two of the three men she’s closest to at the moment are seriously fucking with her sense of reality, and it’s only a matter of time before she finds out about Kieran too, and then she’ll have trust issues to match the ones she sees in Klaus. It got to the point where I was wondering if Kieran was the one defacing the brother’s headstone? Like, he’s been attempting to push her out for a while now, and he only made his move when Klaus came forward.
I was kind of in that sympathy/awe place with Marcel this episode. He’s…not quite playing Rebekah, I think he does really care for her (and certainly wants to keep on the good side of at least one Original), but he was turning on the charm full-force in order to get her on board against Klaus. Marcel is one of them - you just don’t get this invested in people you don’t care about, and if Klaus hasn’t ripped his heart out yet it’s because that investment goes both ways.
Rebekah’s only concept of sinning is against her family, and even then, her bid for absolution comes only after her strike against her brother fails. She’s also just…confused, I think, in that it’s probably never occurred to her before that she could hurt her brother. Although she’s not free of him (granted, I don’t think she really wants to be free of him so much as she wants to be with him in a way that’s not miserable for her), she did make him acknowledge her as something of a player in her own right - manageable, but a player - which will help her in her dealings with him. (Not that he calls her “sibling” when he sees her with Marcel, rather than the more individualized/affectionate/condescending “sister.”)
Elijah can paint a picture, can tell a story, can let people into his thoughts. And that’s kind of a debatably useful talent - he can frame a story and present himself in the best possible light, but on the downside, it illustrates how Elijah is so emotionally transparent, and that’s a big part of why he gets played like he does. I kind of rolled my eyes at Elijah’s hallucinations - he would dwell on the ~poor sainted love who happens to provide him a righteous justification for anger at his brother besides his own hurt - but I do think it’s telling that he’s able to confuse Hayley with both Celeste and Klaus. He sees her as desirable and beautiful and in need of protection, but also as being quite dangerous, if not as dangerous as Klaus in terms of hard power then at least as skilled at the manipulation that Klaus used to set the Faction against Celeste. But he won’t admit any of this consciously, so it comes out violently in the fever. I already regret jinxing it, but Hayley/Elijah is really shaping up to be a dark ship done right THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
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