The Originals 2x07-09
I used to be kind of doubtful about the PTBs assertion that Finn was older than Elijah, because, as much as birth order isn’t as informative about specifics as we’d like it to be, I really didn’t feel like Finn came across as an oldest sibling. Elijah’s sense of being responsible for his younger siblings struck me as indicative of him being older, while Finn’s looking up at his mother for validation struck me as a second-child thing. But with the backstory we’ve gotten in the past few episodes, it now works for me quite well? Because Finn, for those first few formative years, was the younger child, and then he ended up being Esther’s support network, and it would have fallen to Elijah to bond with their siblings.
Anyway, poor Finn. I didn’t particularly like or dislike the character before, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how much fleshing him out has added to the show. I think the scene in the jazz club was a very cool little peek into Finn’s perspective. The music is beautiful, but fast and anxious; the club is tasteful, but busy and lonely. He has a lot of very similar issues to Elijah, I think? He throws himself into trying to live up to some abstract notion of being The Noble Brother, and is completely unfazed by the pile of evidence to the contrary. Like, it’s not even on his mental radar that he threw their mother’s previous attempted genocide plot aside literally without a word from his old girlfriend? He laid eyes on Sage and that was enough for him to jump ship to his brothers’ faction - but now it’s all ooooooh, woe betide the vampire soul. He idealizes Esther and Cami as much as Elijah does the doppelgangers, and the more he idealizes the more willing he becomes to hurt them. Cami had him pegged, too, right down to what she wore on her seduction mission: hair scraped back, a baggy shirt over a modest-but-feminine dress, lol. And he pays her back with “I’m helping my mother violate you because I’m trying to help people like you; how do you not get it, CAMI?!” I also love how he was all dramatically like I WILL NOT BE LURED FROM THE PATH OF RIGHTEOUSNESS BY YOUR SANDWICHES, CAMILLE!!
Stepping back from Finn, the addition of the Dahlia backstory was fantastic. The cycles of crazy like this don’t usually happen out of nowhere. Klaus, I think, fell into the error that his siblings often do about him, in considering the most obvious threat to be the root issue. Not like Mikael was ever going to be Father of the Year, but he would have been a run-of-the-mill terror if he had partnered with someone who didn’t have this whole cloud of dysfunction around her. (Of course, crazy attracts crazy. People with Esther’s issues and Mikael’s damage do seem weirdly drawn to each other.)
And their problems date well before Esther’s fertility issues. Esther convinced herself that a strong husband and two loving children didn’t count as a family, and this is emblematic of both cause and effect of some frequent types of dysfunction: her sense of fulfillment is dependent on a family, she doesn’t feel fulfilled by her family, and so she’ll sell out parts of her family in order to get a bigger family. The fact that Dahlia was willing and able to demand the cruelest possible price speaks to something in her that we don’t know about yet; the fact that Esther was willing to pay it and then thought that running off to North America to bury her head in the sand would work fits with what we know about her. And it explains a great deal of the things that have happened since - I suspect Esther’s willingness to turn her children into vampires had a lot to do not only with keeping them in this world with her, but with trying to ensure that Dahlia couldn’t collect.
It’s a little chilling, now, Esther’s eagerness for Elijah and Rebekah to start making her grandbabies? Like, what, Hope was supposed to be Dahlia’s payment and so her supposed death meant that Dahlia was just too slow to collect out of this generation? Or maybe she was making the same calculation she made way back in the Old World, that one child is an acceptable price for the supposed normalcy of the others.
And the way she yanks around Bex and Elijah both is amazing. As she says to Koleb, the most important thing to her is that they are there by her grace. She seems to give Rebekah Achilles’ choice: along and unfulfilled life, or a short and brilliant one - and then she deliberately picks out a vessel for Rebekah who is not a witch, ensuring that Rebekah will be even more vulnerable to her than her sons. What Esther was offering Elijah earlier this season was ultimately no better than the red door solution she undermined: it was a chance to put up an artificial barrier between Me Then and Me Now, one that was dependent on her grace and would ultimately keep him from moving on. Put on a clean suit and bury it all down; when that stops working I’ll tell you how awful you are, and then let you put on a clean body and bury it all down again. And I get why it’s appealing for Elijah, his whole mental crisis since the Red Door episode has been fantastically done, and so painful and unsettlingly unpredictable because Esther meant for it to be that way. No wonder Kol jumped ship the first chance he got.
Her offer to Klaus went further than the others, and was another matter entirely. I’m not quite sure how I feel about putting the werewolf gene in Ansel’s context. No matter what, for Klaus to become a wolf, he would have had to become a killer. And maybe that would have set him apart less and that would have meant a lot to him. (I’D BE LESS CRAZY IF I WERE LITERALLY RAISED BY WOLVES: THE KLAUS MIKAESON STORY) But it still means some pretty fundamentally awful things. If he had been brought up by Ansel, or at least if Esther had spared him the change, he might well have been a much more functional person - but he’d also be long gone, and probably forgotten. Ultimately, Klaus has no issue choosing to be Klaus Mikaelson - maybe because of his siblings, maybe for Hope, maybe because he likes being immortal or because he’s afraid to admit he might not have been as satisfied with the last thousand years as he’d like.
So yeah. These have been great episodes. The mid-season finale would’ve been a good one whenever it aired, but it does work particularly well as a Christmas episode? The miracle child of the Most Powerful, driven from home by those who slaughter innocents to keep the child from changing the world. The pagan solstice fertility ritual invoked by the proposed alpha bonding ceremony. Klaus identifies the real reason for the season: going way out of your comfort zone to catch shade from your crazy relatives. I mean, even the score under that last scene with Esther! “This is Santa’s big scene,” we hear, as the not-so-saintly Nik delivers Esther the present he thinks she deserves.
And oooh, that last scene between Esther and Klaus was amazing. Lenore’s analysis that Esther’s love fuels her dangerousness is at least as applicable to Klaus. Killing her wasn’t enough, oh, no, they had to turn her. She tries to guilt him and he turns it back around to her misdeeds. She tries to make it about him alone and he throws it in her face that Rebekah was the one involved. Klaus may be Schrodinger’s Mikaelson, but he is without question the son of Esther.
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