TVD - She's Come Undone
More and more Bonnie, Caroline, and Elena are my favorite triangle of this show, and I think that came across here in their separate but parallel stories in the episode. It felt very Head, Hand, and Heart to me. Bonnie's dependent on her brain-power, her strategy and magic. Caroline is the busy bee Doer, who's clueless about the actions she's taking. And Elena is Heart, struggling with the treacherous and grief-filled sides of love.
Bonnie is quickly becoming reckless and arrogant, because she learned a long time ago not to trust anyone else over her own instincts. I don't have as much on her because I don't get her plan yet, though I did really like that she's the one to start conspiring with Katherine - rather than abhorring Elena's dark side after almost dying for it, Bonnie doubles down and offers it permanence.
This was a great episode for Caroline. Caroline's social default, where she works very hard to be a part of things for a lot of people but doesn't really know them, is exploited by Silas, who torments her by appearing as the people who are important to her (in good ways and bad ways) but with ulterior motives she can't understand. It's not even like she can take refuge in the ugly - Not!Klaus headfucks with her out in the woods, where Not!Tyler messed with her at the beginning of the season. Caroline is always Caroline, but she's very aware of and insecure due to her acknowledged uncertain understanding of the people around her. I can't...get my arms around it to express it, quite? I still don't 100% get how to Caroline. But I thought the episode did really well by her.
One last defense of switched-off Elena before the whole thing becomes moot: I actually think turning it off is a valid response to the whole thing. That period of numbness is...like an emotional medically-induced coma. Depression, as hard as it is to believe if you've experienced it because your brain has gone haywire for some reason, isn't always a total neurochemistry fail. It's the natural response to grief. It keeps people on autopilot, just getting through the day until they have enough distance from the pain to face it. It lets you survive, and Elena always survives. She put her grief on ice until it really hit her that she hadn't actually given up on her world - or she would've left, or she would've fried herself, or she would've really killed Bonnie or Caroline or Matt, she wouldn't have even stuck around long enough to bother to try. But, as he was in The Memorial, Matt is her acceptance. She sees Matt come back from the dead and she realizes it's worthwhile to feel again. It still hurts like hell to come back to the surface.
Everyone's focused on whether or not Elena is becoming Katherine, to the point where it slides right under the radar that Katherine is becoming more and more human in that need to think well of herself, reverting to her own experience as the Petrova doppelganger. We've never seen Kat lie to herself before. Have some very wrong ideas about what the truth is, sure, but when she claimed she'd "had to" do horrible things to survive, my jaw just about hit the floor; when she went on to say that her grossly false rationalizations constitute "deal[ing] with it," I did actually drop an out-loud flat WHAT. (However else you can tangentially frame her literal demonization of Caroline and Tyler as strategic, her abuse of Stefan was completely gratuitous.) As Elena's trying to accept her sins, Katherine is working over-time to frame herself as being more sinned-against.
Matt Donovan: hustler! And honestly, Rebekah's right. Of course he shouldn't be in such a bad spot right now; of course everyone should have access to an education. But we don't live in a world where that right exists and Rebekah understands that. Everyone needs an advantage in life, I could be yours. And I think this episode was a neat summation of Matt's life, really: he doesn't think he's entitled to any of thse things, or even to life itself, which is why he's so resigned to Damon's plan.
Though that was also a pretty good plan! A much better plan than torture, ethically and strategically. In fairness to Story Integrity, I actually think it rings very true that Stefan would leap to and rationalize the idea of bringing someone back from the brink with torture because that is what he knows. I'm not saying that's an excuse, I'm saying - cycle of abuse, goes around and around. Leaving is hard enough, but it's much easier than breaking those patterns.
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