December Talking Meme, 12/5
For wheatear, how TVD S2 Elijah and/or Klaus looks in light of The Originals S2
This ended up being more about The Originals through S2, than being S2-specific, but still, THERE'S SO MUCH GREAT SETUP. This was such a great excuse to rewatch some delicious episodes.
In retrospect, I don’t think it’s impossible that Elijah and Klaus weren’t running a long con by pretending to be at odds. Similarly to how they set the vampires and wolves against each other with the Sun and Moon Curse, Elijah setting himself up as the lead opponent to Klaus would engage not only people trying to curry favor with Klaus, but also his many enemies. I don’t have sufficient evidence to say I think that is the case, and there’s a lot working against this theory, but I think it’s worth pointing out as being possible because we don’t yet know about anything that happened in the 20th century between Elijah and Klaus to flip Elijah from standing up to Mikael for Klaus to plotting to kill Klaus himself, or for Elijah to think that Klaus started dropping their siblings in the ocean after 900 years of not doing that. I’m going to theorize under the assumption that it’s not true, though I might go into a few asides with the alternative theory.
Regardless of whether they’re in it together now, they’ve accomplished quite a bit. They did manage to convince the world that “the dagger will bring death to all demons who wield it,” which, unless that dagger is special even among the Mikaelson cutlery collection, is just flatly not true. Klaus sent Isobel who sent John, which means he wanted the kids to have that dagger.
Some of the lies don’t seem to have had any tactical value, just demonstrating Elijah’s compulsive desire to put on a show. His story about the Salem witches…may or may not be true, but he’s being quite misleading about how deep into the past the mysticism of the Falls reaches. Of course, he puffs himself up by reminiscing about what it was like before people had books. He won’t admit to their Viking origins, claiming to be wealthy Eastern Europeans.
LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIES!
A very pleasant surprise is how much Elijah’s behavior toward the doppelganger holds up in light of what we’ve learned lately. Elijah is really quite savage with Elena at first, manhandling and sniffing her. (Ew, Elijah.) He skillfully lies by omission, leading Elena and the viewer to believe that his falling-out with Klaus happened when Katherine died, because of course he is oh-so-chivalrous and would not stand for this threat to the doppelganger. He works hard to depersonalize her, but he still gets sucked into "negotiations" with this entity who should have exactly zero bargaining power with him. If he'd had an ounce of sense about his brother or his loves, he would've compelled her to shut up and tossed her in the dungeons until the sacrifice.
He is also naïve to a great deal, still under the impression that Ansel was Esther’s “darkest secret.”
The fact that Elijah does seem to have been trying to prevent Klaus breaking the curse is something that’s been kind of hanging around the edges of The Originals. (Again, taking Elijah’s plot at face value. None of the following has to be true for the relationship to make rock-solid sense.) This becomes something very different in light of the flashbacks in The Originals pilot, when we discover that Elijah was coerced into participating in the curse, which in turn has become more painful in light of the S2 flashback to the morning after Klaus first transformed. Now, this was not Elijah’s fault from an objective moral standpoint - standing up to Mikael was a life-threatening proposition for everyone except maybe Rebekah, nobody was in a particularly reasonable frame of mind in the couple of days after having their lives upended and Elijah specifically had apparently gone under some magical mind-warp earlier that day, and the success of the curse certainly did not depend on Elijah’s participation. And I think they both tend to operate under that framework. But on that deeper lizard-brain level, Klaus remembers Elijah holding him down and Elijah remembers doing it.
With that in mind, Elijah’s behavior in the flashbacks of course makes sense. Elijah would see helping Klaus break the curse as a way to redeem himself (in his own eyes and his brother’s) for having been forced to go back on his word, and probably would find no small amount of satisfaction in such a consequential defiance of Mikael. I suspect that Elijah was the one behind the more creative, big-picture aspects of the Sun and Moon Curse - Klaus is a ruthlessly concrete tactician, but Elijah is the one who comes up with the brilliant gambles like consecrating Esther to finish the harvest ritual and stripping away the Guerrera safehouses by creative use of eminent domain.
What looks a bit stranger this time around is why he’s against Klaus breaking the curse this time. It is not in vengeance for Katerina’s death, as he implies to Elena. Klaus grew no more violent in the latter half of the millennium, as far as we know; indeed, they’d spent several of the intervening centuries happily building a home together. And it is not just about Tatia underpinning so much of his personal narrative, because he behaved very differently toward Kat than Elena: he was very invested in saving Katherine, while he was quite indifferent toward Elena’s survival in any form. This isn’t a failure in characterization, as most people behave with such apparent inconsistency and Elijah more so than most, merely an opportunity to further texture the character.
But regardless of the why, he (apparently) did fully intend to kill Klaus, and damn near succeeded. Perhaps what is most remarkable about this, to the point where I wonder a bit if it wasn’t a charade, is the fact that it has never come up in 30 episodes of living in each other’s pockets. Elijah flouncing around like “NOBODY hurts my family and lives!! EXCEPT ME OBVS” or “I’ve WATCHED others try to stand against you NOT ME THOUGH, I HEARD IT FROM A GUY AT A PLACE” is pretty predictable. Elijah does want to think of himself as the devoted brother and certainly does not want to think of himself as someone who failed in his plan. But Klaus not playing that card once? No “oh, well, at least the daggers came out, YOU WOULDN’T’VE BEEN ABLE TO PUT MY HEART BACK IN, ELIJAH!” Not even a little bit of “maybe it’s your turn to deal with Mikael this time, since he’d be after you if you managed to FUCKING KILL ME, which you DIDN’T, HAHAHAHA LOSER!” That is a level of magnanimity which is well beyond…I’m gonna say 65-72% of canonized saints, okay. So there’s, you know, PROBABLY a reason beyond generosity of spirit that Klaus hasn’t brought it up.
Regardless of why the placing and breaking of the curse shook out the way they did, they happened and they are in the characters’ minds, perhaps all the more powerful for not being dragged into the open. There is a circularity to the bookends of the curse, out there in the woods of Mystic Falls. (This is neither here nor there with Klaus or Elijah, but I suspect that Klaus claiming the curse had to be performed at “the birthplace of the doppelganger” was not in reference to Elena? I think it was either Tatia’s birthplace, the birthplace of the one whose blood helped set the curse, or simply that it had to end where it began.) Klaus’ Achilles’ heel has been his family’s reaction to his lycanthropy, and these moments where his condition is at its most crucial are the only moments when his best-loved brother has the upper hand; Elijah’s understanding of Klaus’ lycanthropy is limited to his brother’s seeming invulnerability and so his experience of those moments is of his own vulnerabilities.
One last point about audience perception versus character experience is time frame. The events of S2 happened in spring of the kids’ junior year, and the news about the pregnancy dropped in the following spring. Even by human standards, one year is a very short amount of time to go from plotting someone’s death to “I will never give up.” Ego and anger, fair enough, but Elijah accusing Klaus of paranoia at that point is a bit rich. OH KLAUS, YOU SO CRAZY, IT’S BEEN MONTHS SINCE MY LAST ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT. Ha.
This post mainly ended up being about Elijah because there is so little to add about Klaus. It’s amazing how much Klaus is Klaus is Klaus. He’s laughably insecure, nakedly compliment-fishing through Ric - but damned if he doesn’t sniff out Bonnie as the only powerhouse threat to him. He could’ve used any random MF residents, but he compelled Isobel to turn on her daughter, snatched up Caroline and Tyler, and eventually sacrificed Jenna.
THIS IS SO LONG AND RAMBLY BUT THERE'S PROBABLY SO MUCH MORE, THEY ARE MY FAVES.
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