The Originals 2x02-06
Esther’s game plan is still unclear. The conversation between Kol and Finn opened up a potentially interesting development, when Kol specifically mentioned that Esther had cast “sire bond spells.” This might refer to the sire lines as whole groups, but the “sire bond” phrase, as we know, has different connotations in this ‘verse: for whatever reason, on purpose or not, Esther may have built in the weird involuntary compulsion which sometimes occurs between a regular vamp and their direct progeny. That is to say, Esther seems to have set up a system which replicates her unhealthy mentality toward her own children on random vampires throughout the ages. Esther being adamantly against Davina unlinking Klaus from his sire line suggests to me that she may not be quite so dedicated to ~curing Elijah. She may still be trying to scrub vampires from the earth. Even if she does decide to spare Elijah, this could still be her goal: Finn’s and Kol’s lines were extinguished back in MF, and neither Rebekah nor Elijah seems to have done a whole lot of siring, so a significant majority of the undead consists of descendants of Klaus. A matter of, perhaps, even more immediate concern is that her ability to manipulate Elijah’s mind may also come with the ability to read Elijah’s mind, which means she may end up stumbling onto the truth about Rebekah and baby Hope.
The role of outsiders in familial trauma is an interesting one in these past few episodes. There’s Davina, who gets involved with the expressed intent of making things worse and the true motivation of displacing all her anger at her own dysfunctional family. Because of the underlying issue, Mikael her tool gets into her head and starts manipulating her into fighting on his terms. In the grand tradition of vengeance quests, this has a potentially devastating ripple effect which she must now work to control. At the other end of the observer spectrum is Cami, who does get that revenge is in and of itself a destructive thing, but she focuses on that motivation and misses the way a desire for revenge can coexist with, even fuel, a powerful drive for survival. In an optimistic story about heroes, Camille would have been right; in a grimdark story about villains Camille would have been foolishly deluded; in this survivalist ‘verse, Cami has a point in the abstract, but when she gets a small taste of the situation she accepts the reality of it with ease. Like Marcel, Hayley, the new-come insider, sees flatly through the whole situation and is clear as a bell on her own stake in it.
But the head and the hand at the heart of it all are Klaus and Elijah, and just. HOW GREAT have these last few episodes been for our boys?
YMMV on how useful this framework is or how well the other characters fit into the “roles” here, but I do think that archetypally, Klaus and his lycanthropy are a great metaphor for what happens when families choose a scapegoat. Klaus bears the brunt of Mikael’s anger, he is the primary target of Esther’s head trips, and the other siblings have to learn to ignore it or Just World it away because they know on some level that if it’s not Klaus it could well be them.
As paranoid as Klaus is, it is not paranoid enough. All this time he’s been dating the problems with his mother back to the curse, and it turns out she was cursing him even before Henrick died. Which. DAAAAMN. Esther’s undermining is about her, not about Klaus. She disguises it as love, as a lifeline in times of trouble, and convinces him, even herself, that this is what it is. The other children know they’re all skating on thin ice, but they do at least have some deniability.
If you were Klaus, though. Imagine, if someone said to you what Elijah said to Klaus after that first transformation and then they turned on you, if they spent hundreds of years telling you they’d make it up to you and then let your first chance slip through your fingers and actively tried to sabotage you the next time around - you’d think daggering them was the merciful option too. It’s not Elijah’s fault, they were all terrified to resist Mikael, and now we know that he was mindfucked into it - but self-preservation has nothing to do with justice. As a fellow Problem Child ™ I’m only now realizing how much easier that role is if you’re older. If I’d had someone in my life who I thought might protect me and they did me like this…IDK if I’d be Klaus, lol, but I definitely would be a paranoid ragemonster too.
And is Klaus ever, as he now knows, his mother’s son. After Esther cursed him and he killed her…he turned around and lied to Elijah and Rebekah and pinned it all on Mikael, and would’ve kept that secret always and forever if Ric hadn’t stumbled onto that cave two years ago. His love, like hers, is desperate, even monstrous. I tried to kill you because I love you! I killed your boyfriend to protect you! (Rebekah too, for that matter: For all she had Esther sanctified, Rebekah has utilized exactly this torture strategy, allowing Damon to fantasize about being rescued.)
It’s stunning to watch someone try to use Klaus-logic on Klaus. Esther has a nasty habit of bending the world to her will, as does Klaus, and far surpasses him in her ability to rationalize it. She tries to make his anger at her be all about his character flaws, when she is the one who gave him damn good reason to be angry; she yells at him for killing her and just doesn’t let it occur to her that this had something to do with her having killed him and then cursed him. She claims to be offering him a way out of the “cycle of violence” - she drops the phrase, even! - and then offers him a lifetime as a werewolf. Only, the werewolf curse is the cycle of violence. She wishes to free him from nothing, only to set himself apart from (and indeed, remain vulnerable to) all of his siblings.
Just to acknowledge this before getting into it, it is possible that what Elijah sees and experiences is not necessarily true. Esther is not any more of a reliable narrator than she has ever been. She could just be manipulating Elijah, inventing a lurid story which is calculated to convince him to letting her do whatever she wants; she may even have convinced herself of his monstrosity in order to commit to her current ends. But I’m going to assume for the moment that it is true: it makes such perfect sense with everything we know about Elijah that I think it’s far more likely than not to be true, and even if it is not, the fact that this is the particular mental torment which Esther thinks is likely to work on Elijah means that it can still tell us a lot about Elijah. So. Let’s open the red door.
For Klaus, being a werewolf is all about a lack of control, and the hybrid curse is about externally-imposed controls. This, I think, is the core driving motivation for Elijah having been so invested in keeping Klaus cursed - whatever the pretexts, Katherine being too good to die or Klaus being too bad to live, what Elijah desperately needed was for Klaus to perform the role of controlled object, so that Elijah can feel control over himself as subject. Fittingly, the paradigm Esther proffers to Elijah is the opposite of Klaus and his various states of lycanthropy, in that it allows him the internal fiction of self-control, on top of all the benefits that accrue to him for being the ~moral brother. It’s a poison pill. Building himself around avoidance of the red door necessarily puts it at the center of his identity; shutting himself off from his past means that he cannot develop his better traits. Elijah’s dedicated self-deception fundamentally undermines his ability to read others or trust his own instincts. (Of course Elijah was shirtless in his nightmare, without his dapper suits, covered in blood. I cackled but I really appreciate how this ‘verse caters to the female gaze and also, like, science.)
And the red door hinges on his hangup on Tatia, and then Katerina, and then Elena - he is always trying to protect the doppelganger from everyone except himself. Tatia is another type of insider-outsider in this whole family drama, and not just any insider-outsider, but a character who by virtue of her ancestors and descendants exists as the unknown, the desirable, the feminine; even Esther seems to fall for the doppelganger magic, projecting her fantasies of grandbabies from the right son onto Tatia. It’s not clear how much we see of Tatia is Tatia, because even when forced to be honest about himself, Elijah will still see her the way men tend to see the doppelganger. (Hey, I wonder if that husband that died in battle was a Silasganger? Hahaha j/k you’d catch Gaius Baltar in a bar brawl before one of them anywhere near a battlefield.) But Elijah doesn’t just roll the Petrovas together, which would at least be kind of understandable given that the universe has set them up to do just that, he also thinks about Celeste and especially Hayley.
Elijah doesn't let people in, because it's all he can do to keep himself out.
And now there’s a lot of new parties in the mix, many of the Bigger Bads that Mikael was way back in MF. Esther’s sister, claiming her first daughter and perhaps coming for her first granddaughter. Klaus’ father may or may not have an agenda of his own - or maybe he is the wolf Esther plans to hand over for Klaus to possess. (I wonder if he isn’t also Henrick’s father? Maybe Klaus wasn’t the only one sneaking around with an instinctive fascination.)
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/337167.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
The role of outsiders in familial trauma is an interesting one in these past few episodes. There’s Davina, who gets involved with the expressed intent of making things worse and the true motivation of displacing all her anger at her own dysfunctional family. Because of the underlying issue, Mikael her tool gets into her head and starts manipulating her into fighting on his terms. In the grand tradition of vengeance quests, this has a potentially devastating ripple effect which she must now work to control. At the other end of the observer spectrum is Cami, who does get that revenge is in and of itself a destructive thing, but she focuses on that motivation and misses the way a desire for revenge can coexist with, even fuel, a powerful drive for survival. In an optimistic story about heroes, Camille would have been right; in a grimdark story about villains Camille would have been foolishly deluded; in this survivalist ‘verse, Cami has a point in the abstract, but when she gets a small taste of the situation she accepts the reality of it with ease. Like Marcel, Hayley, the new-come insider, sees flatly through the whole situation and is clear as a bell on her own stake in it.
But the head and the hand at the heart of it all are Klaus and Elijah, and just. HOW GREAT have these last few episodes been for our boys?
YMMV on how useful this framework is or how well the other characters fit into the “roles” here, but I do think that archetypally, Klaus and his lycanthropy are a great metaphor for what happens when families choose a scapegoat. Klaus bears the brunt of Mikael’s anger, he is the primary target of Esther’s head trips, and the other siblings have to learn to ignore it or Just World it away because they know on some level that if it’s not Klaus it could well be them.
As paranoid as Klaus is, it is not paranoid enough. All this time he’s been dating the problems with his mother back to the curse, and it turns out she was cursing him even before Henrick died. Which. DAAAAMN. Esther’s undermining is about her, not about Klaus. She disguises it as love, as a lifeline in times of trouble, and convinces him, even herself, that this is what it is. The other children know they’re all skating on thin ice, but they do at least have some deniability.
If you were Klaus, though. Imagine, if someone said to you what Elijah said to Klaus after that first transformation and then they turned on you, if they spent hundreds of years telling you they’d make it up to you and then let your first chance slip through your fingers and actively tried to sabotage you the next time around - you’d think daggering them was the merciful option too. It’s not Elijah’s fault, they were all terrified to resist Mikael, and now we know that he was mindfucked into it - but self-preservation has nothing to do with justice. As a fellow Problem Child ™ I’m only now realizing how much easier that role is if you’re older. If I’d had someone in my life who I thought might protect me and they did me like this…IDK if I’d be Klaus, lol, but I definitely would be a paranoid ragemonster too.
And is Klaus ever, as he now knows, his mother’s son. After Esther cursed him and he killed her…he turned around and lied to Elijah and Rebekah and pinned it all on Mikael, and would’ve kept that secret always and forever if Ric hadn’t stumbled onto that cave two years ago. His love, like hers, is desperate, even monstrous. I tried to kill you because I love you! I killed your boyfriend to protect you! (Rebekah too, for that matter: For all she had Esther sanctified, Rebekah has utilized exactly this torture strategy, allowing Damon to fantasize about being rescued.)
It’s stunning to watch someone try to use Klaus-logic on Klaus. Esther has a nasty habit of bending the world to her will, as does Klaus, and far surpasses him in her ability to rationalize it. She tries to make his anger at her be all about his character flaws, when she is the one who gave him damn good reason to be angry; she yells at him for killing her and just doesn’t let it occur to her that this had something to do with her having killed him and then cursed him. She claims to be offering him a way out of the “cycle of violence” - she drops the phrase, even! - and then offers him a lifetime as a werewolf. Only, the werewolf curse is the cycle of violence. She wishes to free him from nothing, only to set himself apart from (and indeed, remain vulnerable to) all of his siblings.
Just to acknowledge this before getting into it, it is possible that what Elijah sees and experiences is not necessarily true. Esther is not any more of a reliable narrator than she has ever been. She could just be manipulating Elijah, inventing a lurid story which is calculated to convince him to letting her do whatever she wants; she may even have convinced herself of his monstrosity in order to commit to her current ends. But I’m going to assume for the moment that it is true: it makes such perfect sense with everything we know about Elijah that I think it’s far more likely than not to be true, and even if it is not, the fact that this is the particular mental torment which Esther thinks is likely to work on Elijah means that it can still tell us a lot about Elijah. So. Let’s open the red door.
For Klaus, being a werewolf is all about a lack of control, and the hybrid curse is about externally-imposed controls. This, I think, is the core driving motivation for Elijah having been so invested in keeping Klaus cursed - whatever the pretexts, Katherine being too good to die or Klaus being too bad to live, what Elijah desperately needed was for Klaus to perform the role of controlled object, so that Elijah can feel control over himself as subject. Fittingly, the paradigm Esther proffers to Elijah is the opposite of Klaus and his various states of lycanthropy, in that it allows him the internal fiction of self-control, on top of all the benefits that accrue to him for being the ~moral brother. It’s a poison pill. Building himself around avoidance of the red door necessarily puts it at the center of his identity; shutting himself off from his past means that he cannot develop his better traits. Elijah’s dedicated self-deception fundamentally undermines his ability to read others or trust his own instincts. (Of course Elijah was shirtless in his nightmare, without his dapper suits, covered in blood. I cackled but I really appreciate how this ‘verse caters to the female gaze and also, like, science.)
And the red door hinges on his hangup on Tatia, and then Katerina, and then Elena - he is always trying to protect the doppelganger from everyone except himself. Tatia is another type of insider-outsider in this whole family drama, and not just any insider-outsider, but a character who by virtue of her ancestors and descendants exists as the unknown, the desirable, the feminine; even Esther seems to fall for the doppelganger magic, projecting her fantasies of grandbabies from the right son onto Tatia. It’s not clear how much we see of Tatia is Tatia, because even when forced to be honest about himself, Elijah will still see her the way men tend to see the doppelganger. (Hey, I wonder if that husband that died in battle was a Silasganger? Hahaha j/k you’d catch Gaius Baltar in a bar brawl before one of them anywhere near a battlefield.) But Elijah doesn’t just roll the Petrovas together, which would at least be kind of understandable given that the universe has set them up to do just that, he also thinks about Celeste and especially Hayley.
Elijah doesn't let people in, because it's all he can do to keep himself out.
And now there’s a lot of new parties in the mix, many of the Bigger Bads that Mikael was way back in MF. Esther’s sister, claiming her first daughter and perhaps coming for her first granddaughter. Klaus’ father may or may not have an agenda of his own - or maybe he is the wolf Esther plans to hand over for Klaus to possess. (I wonder if he isn’t also Henrick’s father? Maybe Klaus wasn’t the only one sneaking around with an instinctive fascination.)
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/337167.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.