1) --so not a good week for people with J names, huh?
I'm sorry. I don't--I spent the entire episode crying, pretty much, and there was a fight with my mother at THE WORST POSSIBLE MOMENT. This show is fucking exhausting.
2) "--all that, and you walk away without a scratch."
"I didn't let love get in the way."
"...Enjoy eternity alone, Katherine."
Which is sort of the point of the show, really. Being a vampire is a trade-off. It's safer if you don't feel anything, but you miss out as much as you're protected, and there's no one to watch your back when things get to that point.
3) As a sidebar, since Klaus isn't dead, Katherine's totally still stuck in Alaric's apartment, isn't she? Yeah, ten bucks says he moves in with Jeremy and Elena.
4) "He killed me." Yes? Technically? What, you got better.
5) I don't actually know if Greta got away. I hope not. I don't know that I want her dead; I could live with her powers being burnt out or something. Because you know what? When you start jabbering on about "the new world order" under Klaus, lady, you lost me, but grinning when you cut your arm and watched Jenna drink? Yeah, no, die in a lot of fires, bitch. Like Elena said, you're perverting what a witch is. And maybe you can explain a lot of what your dad and brother did away by them being frantic to find you, but if they found you now? I hope they'd kill you themselves. (I don't realistically think they would, because if there's one thing tonight cemented, it's that family makes you totally irrational in both good and bad ways.)
6) "I feel like myself. Only not." Aaaaaaand that's the entire point I was making last week, re: Caroline still being Caroline, in two very neat little lines.
7) "I've slowed your transformation. Your insides are trying to tear themselves free." Lucy! Please come back and KILL GRETA IF BONNIE DIDN'T ALREADY DO IT.
8) You could actually make a pretty interesting case for Greta working for Klaus vs. Lucy warning Bonnie not to start getting tangled up with vampires. I think the main point is that Lucy, when she realized what she was doing, did what she could to get out of it and tried to warn Bonnie away. Greta? Greta just did the devil's work.
9) "Do you think my mom wants to kill me?"
AAAAAAGH CAROLINE NO STOP MAKING ME CRY. I mean, realistically--yeah, probably, your mom has long-held vampire issues, but just. It's always Caroline, you guys. She's always the one telling people who either try to kill her or hate her or act like (sadly, realistic) dickholes about the whole thing. Just--how about next year we all stop doing that and let Caroline be prom queen? OH GOD CAROLINE FORBES VAMPIRE PROM QUEEN. I WOULD DIE.
10) Stefan, be honest: did you think volunteering to replace Jenna was gonna work? Points for effort, Littlest Salvatore, but no.
11) I have to admit, I admire the fact that the show just basically went "ha ha ha ha building the whole season to this blowing our wad the week before OH WAIT THERE'S STILL ANOTHER EPISODE". You know, like how we got through Founders' Day last year and there was still another act, and then Jeremy tried to kill himself and Bonnie and Stefan had their little "talk" and Damon made out with what he thought was Elena and OH SHIT KATHERINE. What I'm saying is: next week, my heart may literally burst! Fun times.
12) I think Matt gets it now--that Caroline's still Caroline and Tyler's still Tyler, even if things about them are changed--but that doesn't mean he can handle it, and if he can't, he can't. No shame in that. You should...maybe not stalk people with deer rifles loaded with wooden bullets, but bowing out isn't the worst thing in the world, Donovan.
13) ...yeah, Sheriff Forbes is gonna be a problem.
14) As soon as Jeremy mentioned the "resuscitative spell" in the grimoire, I thought OH SHIT NEXT WEEK--, but in retrospect he probably just meant that thing with the mom and the baby.
15) Jules: I never liked you. But you were worried about Tyler, in the end, and I guess that deserves a measure of respect. Also! If we could quit RIPPING OUT HEARTS on this show, it would be appreciated.
16) "No one has to die!"
"Except for Bonnie.
(And Damon, but I don't think you're supposed to know that, Ric.)
17) Damon telling Alaric he's fine made my stomach do awful things. Normally I'd get on him re: "we're friends, so you don't lie to me anymore", but this combined with what Bonnie did later sort of--I think Damon's heart is still a preemie, basically, but he knows, as a guy who's been destroying things for 145 years, how to minimize damage.
18) "145 years and no goodbye?" No one can argue whether or not Katherine loved Damon; she didn't. But I think she gets him now, or who he's become, in a way that she won't ever get Stefan. It's--not heartening, exactly, but I'd pay real money if Katherine started doing the same "oh my God I am developing human emotions THIS IS BULLSHIT" dance Damon started last year.
19) "I know what I have to do." And then Jenna...makes a run for Greta. Because Sommers ladies are the best ladies. (Except, of course, for Bennett ladies.)
20) I don't--I don't know, exactly, what to say about Jenna. She didn't deserve what happened, obviously. She would have been a pretty awesome vampire in the Caroline/Lexi mold, I think. It bugs me I'm not gonna know what the hell her thesis was about. She wasn't thrilled about being a guardian, and God knows Jeremy and Elena gave her rickets over the last little bit, but she was happy. She made terrible choices in men right up until the last one, which was a saving throw. She was, more than she'd have been comfortable with, a pawn of forces older than her, and scarier, and colder inside. But she freaked out for approximately two hours, then picked up a crossbow and held it at the man she loved just in case he was still possessed by something evil. She let vampires cook her dinner while she drank really good red wine and swung her feet. She was a person right up 'til the end, even when, by certain standards, she wasn't anymore, and she loved her niece and nephew more than anything else in the world.
Jenna Sommers died a hero. In terms of this show, you could do a lot worse.
21) Dear Klaus: fuck you forever for the whole "whoooooo, symmetry of the Triple Goddess/killing three ladies" thing. That just makes it worse, you asshole.
22) Ahahahahahaha Bonnie knocking out Jeremy so he can't leave. I actually had a whole speech planned out re: taking agency away from men is just as lousy as when you do it to women, and then I realized: that may be the first time in the history of the internet someone's actually had to have an opinion about taking agency away from men. Huh. Have I mentioned I love this show?
23) --and yeah, doing it to Ric was somehow shittier (because Ric can handle himself in a fight, JEREMY), but. I don't know. I sort of like that Bonnie and Damon were like "no, no, humans, we got this." Which also marks it as Damon protecting humans. If you told him he'd be doing that the night he shoved Stefan out a window and came back to Mystic Falls, he would have murdered you like Mr. Tanner.
(Also--and I'm projecting and tearing up, SHUT UP--part of me thinks he didn't want Ric to go out there and see Jenna dead, and maybe, if things had gone different, to see him die, too. Damon Salvatore with emotions is like a gruff old prospector, you guys. Or, wait, no, he's Dean Winchester.)
24) "Just turn it off, Jenna. You won't be scared." And that's Elena Gilbert, folks: trying to save other people right until she can't.
25) We all sort of knew Klaus draining Elena wasn't gonna take one way or the other, but it's still horrifying to watch.
26) AND THEN, OH SHIT: Bonnie and Damon, at the end of the world.
YOU GUYS, YOU GUYS, IT WAS FUCKING AMAZING. Obviously Greta had control of fire, so here come the two of them, with Bonnie summoning a storm and out-Latining Greta, looking like fucking demigods. Between the lighting and the strides and just--YOU GUYS, I TEARED UP WITH HAPPINESS. THAT IS SO WEIRD TO ME, ON THIS SHOW. "Back off, fuckers, we got this." FUCK YEAH YOU DO.
Endgame OTP, you guys. <333333333
27) "I need you to get her out of here." Because push comes to shove, Stefan will always, always trust his brother, at least where Elena's concerned. HAVE I MENTIONED I LIKE THE SALVATORES? I DON'T THINK I SAY IT ENOUGH.
28) And then! Klaus busts out "I know where our family's bodies are" to Elijah, and Elijah totally spirits him away, thus making sure that all of this WAS FOR FUCKING NOTHING, because Klaus IS NOT FUCKING DEAD, and that the Salvatores are not the only idiots where family is concerned. NEGATIVE ONE MILLION POINTS, ELIJAH.
(Though, again: family makes you fucking stupid.)
29) Caroline, Tyler: whatever, just be together already, I need some goddamn happiness on this show already.
30) John Gilbert. I--you guys, I still think he's eleven kind of dick. He was smug and proud and he hated vampires, and never got over his first love, even after she became a vampire. (And never stopped needling her eventual husband, because, again: DICK.) He screwed all of them over like sixteen times. But he loved his brother, and his nephew, and his secret daughter: he loved her most of all, the extraordinary child of an ordinary parent, and didn't begrudge her her heart. He knew the price he'd have to pay, and he paid it gladly: alone, in the sun, eyes lifted to the sky, smiling a little, taking a breath and just--falling. Giving his life for his child, not so dissimiliar to the only woman he ever lived. He wasn't afraid.
So no, I still don't like John Gilbert; but he went out a hero too. That shit seems to run in families.
31) "If you come back as a vampire, I'll stake you myself, so don't do it. [quietly] Because I don't want you to hate me forever." I--you guys, I am as anti-Elena/Damon as you can be before it breaks the bounds of math, but I will never actually doubt how much he loves her.
32) OH JESUS AD HOC FUNERAL BRB CRYING FOREVER.
I just--the whole thing. The roses. "I compelled two gravediggers to go out [to the Gilbert plot]." ALL OF THEM WERE THERE. ALL OF THEM. (Except maybe Tyler, who's had a lousy day, and Matt, who's made his choice.) I've been saying to myself, and not on the internet--because it might sound crazy, with this show--that everything I watch is really about families, and how Ring Lardner said the family we come from isn't as important as the family we're going to have, and that's--you know what? That's what they are now. It was five families--Gilbert, Forbes, Fell, Lockwood, Salvatore--that founded Fell's Church, and I think it's this one--Gilbert, Forbes, Lockwood, Salvatore, plus Bennett and Saltzman--that's gonna save it, and each other.
33)![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eatsscissors made the point first, I think, that Damon's been on this road for a long time--really, since Katherine and Elena both said they didn't love him on the same night--but he is just pinballing towards it now, isn't he? He just wants to go quietly. He doesn't want Elena to mourn him, after everything else that happened. And he knows what's coming, he knows how bad it's going to get, and he's just...he's driftwood. He's been drifting for a long, long time.
And there is absolutely no fucking way Stefan's going to lose his brother. He's wanted to kill him a thousand times, remember, but he's never managed it. He doesn't want to. He loves him. Katherine made Damon, remember, because otherwise Stefan would be emo for eternity.
It's not the apocalypse anymore, you guys. Stefan is not losing anyone else unless he has to, and THAT IS NOT GONNA HAPPEN. OH GOD THIS SHOW.
Next week: Movie night! Picnics in the park! Damon GOING BUGFUCK LIKE ROSE. "As I Lay Dying", the season 2 finale, followed shortly thereafter by screaming for like a solid 3 months. SEE YOU THERE.
I'm sorry. I don't--I spent the entire episode crying, pretty much, and there was a fight with my mother at THE WORST POSSIBLE MOMENT. This show is fucking exhausting.
2) "--all that, and you walk away without a scratch."
"I didn't let love get in the way."
"...Enjoy eternity alone, Katherine."
Which is sort of the point of the show, really. Being a vampire is a trade-off. It's safer if you don't feel anything, but you miss out as much as you're protected, and there's no one to watch your back when things get to that point.
3) As a sidebar, since Klaus isn't dead, Katherine's totally still stuck in Alaric's apartment, isn't she? Yeah, ten bucks says he moves in with Jeremy and Elena.
4) "He killed me." Yes? Technically? What, you got better.
5) I don't actually know if Greta got away. I hope not. I don't know that I want her dead; I could live with her powers being burnt out or something. Because you know what? When you start jabbering on about "the new world order" under Klaus, lady, you lost me, but grinning when you cut your arm and watched Jenna drink? Yeah, no, die in a lot of fires, bitch. Like Elena said, you're perverting what a witch is. And maybe you can explain a lot of what your dad and brother did away by them being frantic to find you, but if they found you now? I hope they'd kill you themselves. (I don't realistically think they would, because if there's one thing tonight cemented, it's that family makes you totally irrational in both good and bad ways.)
6) "I feel like myself. Only not." Aaaaaaand that's the entire point I was making last week, re: Caroline still being Caroline, in two very neat little lines.
7) "I've slowed your transformation. Your insides are trying to tear themselves free." Lucy! Please come back and KILL GRETA IF BONNIE DIDN'T ALREADY DO IT.
8) You could actually make a pretty interesting case for Greta working for Klaus vs. Lucy warning Bonnie not to start getting tangled up with vampires. I think the main point is that Lucy, when she realized what she was doing, did what she could to get out of it and tried to warn Bonnie away. Greta? Greta just did the devil's work.
9) "Do you think my mom wants to kill me?"
AAAAAAGH CAROLINE NO STOP MAKING ME CRY. I mean, realistically--yeah, probably, your mom has long-held vampire issues, but just. It's always Caroline, you guys. She's always the one telling people who either try to kill her or hate her or act like (sadly, realistic) dickholes about the whole thing. Just--how about next year we all stop doing that and let Caroline be prom queen? OH GOD CAROLINE FORBES VAMPIRE PROM QUEEN. I WOULD DIE.
10) Stefan, be honest: did you think volunteering to replace Jenna was gonna work? Points for effort, Littlest Salvatore, but no.
11) I have to admit, I admire the fact that the show just basically went "ha ha ha ha building the whole season to this blowing our wad the week before OH WAIT THERE'S STILL ANOTHER EPISODE". You know, like how we got through Founders' Day last year and there was still another act, and then Jeremy tried to kill himself and Bonnie and Stefan had their little "talk" and Damon made out with what he thought was Elena and OH SHIT KATHERINE. What I'm saying is: next week, my heart may literally burst! Fun times.
12) I think Matt gets it now--that Caroline's still Caroline and Tyler's still Tyler, even if things about them are changed--but that doesn't mean he can handle it, and if he can't, he can't. No shame in that. You should...maybe not stalk people with deer rifles loaded with wooden bullets, but bowing out isn't the worst thing in the world, Donovan.
13) ...yeah, Sheriff Forbes is gonna be a problem.
14) As soon as Jeremy mentioned the "resuscitative spell" in the grimoire, I thought OH SHIT NEXT WEEK--, but in retrospect he probably just meant that thing with the mom and the baby.
15) Jules: I never liked you. But you were worried about Tyler, in the end, and I guess that deserves a measure of respect. Also! If we could quit RIPPING OUT HEARTS on this show, it would be appreciated.
16) "No one has to die!"
"Except for Bonnie.
(And Damon, but I don't think you're supposed to know that, Ric.)
17) Damon telling Alaric he's fine made my stomach do awful things. Normally I'd get on him re: "we're friends, so you don't lie to me anymore", but this combined with what Bonnie did later sort of--I think Damon's heart is still a preemie, basically, but he knows, as a guy who's been destroying things for 145 years, how to minimize damage.
18) "145 years and no goodbye?" No one can argue whether or not Katherine loved Damon; she didn't. But I think she gets him now, or who he's become, in a way that she won't ever get Stefan. It's--not heartening, exactly, but I'd pay real money if Katherine started doing the same "oh my God I am developing human emotions THIS IS BULLSHIT" dance Damon started last year.
19) "I know what I have to do." And then Jenna...makes a run for Greta. Because Sommers ladies are the best ladies. (Except, of course, for Bennett ladies.)
20) I don't--I don't know, exactly, what to say about Jenna. She didn't deserve what happened, obviously. She would have been a pretty awesome vampire in the Caroline/Lexi mold, I think. It bugs me I'm not gonna know what the hell her thesis was about. She wasn't thrilled about being a guardian, and God knows Jeremy and Elena gave her rickets over the last little bit, but she was happy. She made terrible choices in men right up until the last one, which was a saving throw. She was, more than she'd have been comfortable with, a pawn of forces older than her, and scarier, and colder inside. But she freaked out for approximately two hours, then picked up a crossbow and held it at the man she loved just in case he was still possessed by something evil. She let vampires cook her dinner while she drank really good red wine and swung her feet. She was a person right up 'til the end, even when, by certain standards, she wasn't anymore, and she loved her niece and nephew more than anything else in the world.
Jenna Sommers died a hero. In terms of this show, you could do a lot worse.
21) Dear Klaus: fuck you forever for the whole "whoooooo, symmetry of the Triple Goddess/killing three ladies" thing. That just makes it worse, you asshole.
22) Ahahahahahaha Bonnie knocking out Jeremy so he can't leave. I actually had a whole speech planned out re: taking agency away from men is just as lousy as when you do it to women, and then I realized: that may be the first time in the history of the internet someone's actually had to have an opinion about taking agency away from men. Huh. Have I mentioned I love this show?
23) --and yeah, doing it to Ric was somehow shittier (because Ric can handle himself in a fight, JEREMY), but. I don't know. I sort of like that Bonnie and Damon were like "no, no, humans, we got this." Which also marks it as Damon protecting humans. If you told him he'd be doing that the night he shoved Stefan out a window and came back to Mystic Falls, he would have murdered you like Mr. Tanner.
(Also--and I'm projecting and tearing up, SHUT UP--part of me thinks he didn't want Ric to go out there and see Jenna dead, and maybe, if things had gone different, to see him die, too. Damon Salvatore with emotions is like a gruff old prospector, you guys. Or, wait, no, he's Dean Winchester.)
24) "Just turn it off, Jenna. You won't be scared." And that's Elena Gilbert, folks: trying to save other people right until she can't.
25) We all sort of knew Klaus draining Elena wasn't gonna take one way or the other, but it's still horrifying to watch.
26) AND THEN, OH SHIT: Bonnie and Damon, at the end of the world.
YOU GUYS, YOU GUYS, IT WAS FUCKING AMAZING. Obviously Greta had control of fire, so here come the two of them, with Bonnie summoning a storm and out-Latining Greta, looking like fucking demigods. Between the lighting and the strides and just--YOU GUYS, I TEARED UP WITH HAPPINESS. THAT IS SO WEIRD TO ME, ON THIS SHOW. "Back off, fuckers, we got this." FUCK YEAH YOU DO.
Endgame OTP, you guys. <333333333
27) "I need you to get her out of here." Because push comes to shove, Stefan will always, always trust his brother, at least where Elena's concerned. HAVE I MENTIONED I LIKE THE SALVATORES? I DON'T THINK I SAY IT ENOUGH.
28) And then! Klaus busts out "I know where our family's bodies are" to Elijah, and Elijah totally spirits him away, thus making sure that all of this WAS FOR FUCKING NOTHING, because Klaus IS NOT FUCKING DEAD, and that the Salvatores are not the only idiots where family is concerned. NEGATIVE ONE MILLION POINTS, ELIJAH.
(Though, again: family makes you fucking stupid.)
29) Caroline, Tyler: whatever, just be together already, I need some goddamn happiness on this show already.
30) John Gilbert. I--you guys, I still think he's eleven kind of dick. He was smug and proud and he hated vampires, and never got over his first love, even after she became a vampire. (And never stopped needling her eventual husband, because, again: DICK.) He screwed all of them over like sixteen times. But he loved his brother, and his nephew, and his secret daughter: he loved her most of all, the extraordinary child of an ordinary parent, and didn't begrudge her her heart. He knew the price he'd have to pay, and he paid it gladly: alone, in the sun, eyes lifted to the sky, smiling a little, taking a breath and just--falling. Giving his life for his child, not so dissimiliar to the only woman he ever lived. He wasn't afraid.
So no, I still don't like John Gilbert; but he went out a hero too. That shit seems to run in families.
31) "If you come back as a vampire, I'll stake you myself, so don't do it. [quietly] Because I don't want you to hate me forever." I--you guys, I am as anti-Elena/Damon as you can be before it breaks the bounds of math, but I will never actually doubt how much he loves her.
32) OH JESUS AD HOC FUNERAL BRB CRYING FOREVER.
I just--the whole thing. The roses. "I compelled two gravediggers to go out [to the Gilbert plot]." ALL OF THEM WERE THERE. ALL OF THEM. (Except maybe Tyler, who's had a lousy day, and Matt, who's made his choice.) I've been saying to myself, and not on the internet--because it might sound crazy, with this show--that everything I watch is really about families, and how Ring Lardner said the family we come from isn't as important as the family we're going to have, and that's--you know what? That's what they are now. It was five families--Gilbert, Forbes, Fell, Lockwood, Salvatore--that founded Fell's Church, and I think it's this one--Gilbert, Forbes, Lockwood, Salvatore, plus Bennett and Saltzman--that's gonna save it, and each other.
33)
eatsscissors made the point first, I think, that Damon's been on this road for a long time--really, since Katherine and Elena both said they didn't love him on the same night--but he is just pinballing towards it now, isn't he? He just wants to go quietly. He doesn't want Elena to mourn him, after everything else that happened. And he knows what's coming, he knows how bad it's going to get, and he's just...he's driftwood. He's been drifting for a long, long time.And there is absolutely no fucking way Stefan's going to lose his brother. He's wanted to kill him a thousand times, remember, but he's never managed it. He doesn't want to. He loves him. Katherine made Damon, remember, because otherwise Stefan would be emo for eternity.
It's not the apocalypse anymore, you guys. Stefan is not losing anyone else unless he has to, and THAT IS NOT GONNA HAPPEN. OH GOD THIS SHOW.
Next week: Movie night! Picnics in the park! Damon GOING BUGFUCK LIKE ROSE. "As I Lay Dying", the season 2 finale, followed shortly thereafter by screaming for like a solid 3 months. SEE YOU THERE.
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What I want to know is if "As I Lay Dying" in fact is referencing Damon and what that says about the POV of the show.
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(I still like my plan, wherein everyone in town repeatedly kicks him in the dick until something kicks in and he starts growing as a person. I don't hate him, but I don't always like him a hell of a lot.)
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Gaaawd, this is why he's given me so much trouble this season, because I think that he had that moment as of the S1 finale and has just been kicking his feet and being a shit about it for the past nine months because he doesn't want to deal. It's kind funny in a mean way that his big chance for a redemptive death (it wouldn't have stuck, because Williamson and Plec are not stupid, but still) was taken from him, and now he really does have to deal with the possibility of dying for nothing whatsoever. Maybe it will finally kick into his head the lesson that Stefan has gotten for the past century and a half*: this is hard. Being a good person often is. Step up and do it, anyway, because the other option is an eternity alone.
*Or half-got, anyway: he at least stopped actively doing harm after Lexi slapped him repeatedly, even if it did take him a bit longer to step up and into heroism.
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(From a non-shipper perspective, that's why he looks fairly gobsmacked when Alaric tells him they're friends: he's not used to that.)
I don't know. I trust Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec to write badass ladies, and for Damon to eventually realize he's a boy and not a shark; and I trust Ian Somerhalder to make it work. Even if there's a lot of wincing in the translation between the two.