My Review of The Vampire Diaries 6.12- Prayer for the Dying

The gang searches desperately for a way to save Sheriff Forbes with some interesting results, Stefan makes a promise, a twin is lost, and a Big Bad looms…

Is it totally wrong that I am happy that Kai emerged victorious from the merge with Luke?  Like I said last week, I find the twins to be annoying and boring, so getting rid of one of them is a good thing in my book.  The only downside is that Kai is now more powerful because he absorbed Luke.  I do have to wonder if the fact that he merged with a twin who is not his twin will make a difference in how things play out.  Honestly, I’d like Kai to stick around for a while because he makes a very interesting villain.

My feelings about Caroline and the whole situation with her mom are complicated.  Is Caroline at fault for her mom nearly dying?  Yes.  As Elena pointed out, Caroline rushed from seeing Colin (the patient from last week) for a brief period of time to giving her mom her blood.  While I totally get why Caroline did it, the whole thing was not thought through at all.  Fortunately for Caroline, Tyler actually did something smart and got Damon to realize that Kai could heal the Sheriff.  Since the magic in the vampire’s blood was what was causing the damage to accelerate, if Kai were to remove the magic, the problem would go away.  There is a potential issue here that I’ll deal with in a second.

The whole episode focused on a series of morally questionable choices.  Luke and Liv kept trying to sacrifice Jo in order to save each other, Damon was willing to sacrifice Jo (and did sacrifice Luke) to save Liz, and Caroline rushed to try and save her mom without understanding what it was that she was doing.  Each person was doing what he/she thought was best, but through questionable means.  The only people who did things that were truly good were Jo and Luke.  Jo when she was willing to sacrifice herself to merge with Kai and Luke when he did merge with Kai to save Jo.

Remember the problem I mentioned above?  What it boils down to is that Kai absorbed the magic from the vampire blood in Liz in order to save her.  The problem is that he could potentially use a similar method to kill any vampire he runs across.  After all, if he can pull the magic out of Liz’s blood, why can’t he do the same to vampires?  And if he can, why hasn’t he done so before now?  It is possible that he didn’t know he could, or it could be that the writers decided to use his powers as a plot device to save Liz.  I am interested to see how this plays out.

It will also be very interesting to see the fallout from the choices made this week.  I can practically guarantee that Liv will (hypocritically) blame Damon for what happened to Luke, ignoring the fact that she was perfectly willing to sacrifice her older sister to save herself and her twin and ignoring the fact that Luke made the choice to confront Kai because he thought that he was the stronger of the two.

One good (depending on where you land) result of what happened to Liz?  Elena and Damon are back together.  Also, Stefan made a promise to Liz to help Caroline out after Liz died.  Unfortunately, Caroline overheard this and was obviously upset by it.

Until next week!

My Review of The Originals 2.11- Brotherhood of the Damned

Klaus does something truly surprising, Hayley finds out more about the rituals she is to undergo, Finn continues to search for secrets, Elijah makes a confession, and Marcel repeats the past…

Klaus actually forgave someone?  Wow.  I never thought I would see the day when he honestly forgave someone.  The fact that the person was Elijah seems to have been the biggest reason for the forgiveness and that Elijah confessed to killing Tatia in order to free both he and Klaus from Finn’s spell seems to have been deemed inconsequential.  Klaus really has mellowed out, if only a little.  I think he was also impressed by the fact that noble and honorable Elijah freely confessed to the murder freely.

Unfortunately for Klaus and Hayley, Finn has figured out that they are hiding something and is bound and determined to figure out just what it is that they are hiding.  Finn’s idea of threatening the things which are the most important to Klaus was a smart idea.  By gauging Klaus’ reaction to each action, Finn hoped to figure out what mattered the most to Klaus.  What Finn did not count on is the fact that Klaus has really changed and grown because of Hope.  I suspect that Klaus is correct when he said that Finn cannot (or will not) change.  He hates vampires so much that he is blind to the fact that even someone like Klaus can change under the right circumstances.

I can’t blaming Hayley for being skittish about undergoing the rituals.  If she is going to have to reveal every secret to Jackson, that would mean revealing that Hope is alive and well.  Hayley wants to protect her daughter above everything else, so she is unwilling to reveal that secret to Jackson.  Also, if Klaus figures out that Jackson knows about Hope, it is entirely possible that Klaus would kill him in order to protect Hope, and Hayley doesn’t want that.  Klaus might not kill Jackson, but I don’t think Hayley is willing to risk it.

So, Marcel was in World War I and turned his men into vampires in order to save them and to fight the Germans.  That could not have been a pretty battle.  Unleashing a bunch of new vampires who were trained as soldiers when they were humans is a recipe for a disaster for the opposing side.  In the present, Marcel is dealing with famished vampires, a werewolf bite, and a directive from Klaus to protect Kol from said famished vampires.  Yeah, give Marcel the easy tasks.  Fortunately, Marcel has enough charisma and persuasive powers to persuade the other vampires to listen to him and not snack on either Kol or the humans in the streets.  That would have been a disaster of biblical proportions.

What exactly did Finn do to the vampires?  I assume he didn’t kill them all, but somehow he made them all disappear.  I guess he could have used magic to kidnap them all, but I don’t know if he has that sort of power, even if he is channeling Esther and Mikael.  Given the previews for next week, he has captured at least Marcel for questioning, so it is possible.  Guess we’ll just have to wait for next week to see what happened.

I am impressed that Davina is continuing to work with Klaus.  Granted, she is doing it to protect her friends, but I think this is one of the first times in a long time that she and Klaus have spoken civilly with each other.

Until next week!

My Review of The Vampire Diaries 6.11- Woke Up With a Monster

Elena deals with Kai while Damon searches for her, Caroline looks for a cure for her mom while Stefan accompanies her, and the twins and Jo deal with the possibility of merging…

Please raise your hand if you thought that Caroline had a chance of actually healing her mother.  If you raised your hand, consider yourself slapped across the back of the head.  If it wasn’t obvious enough from all of the warnings, a basic knowledge of cancer would explain why it can’t be cured by vampire blood.  Most injuries that have been healed using vampire blood deal with repairing damaged tissue or bones.  Cancer is entirely different.  Most (if not all) cancers are genetic mutations and thus not susceptible to normal healing.  Chemo and other cancer treatments that I am aware of (and I am not an oncologist) concentrate on killing or removing the cancer cells, thereby eradicating the disease.  Unlike the other injuries we have seen, there is no physical damage to be fixed, rather you have actual genetic or cellular damage that the vampire blood cannot fix.

That being said, I get why Caroline is looking for a cure.  Given the fact that they are immersed in magic, the gang is used to finding magical cheats that allow them to get around death.  In this case, there is nothing that can be done.  In fact, as we saw, Caroline just made the situation even worse.  She desperately wants to save her mom, so she is grasping at any straws that present themselves.  It is possible that there may be a magical cure, but I sort of doubt it.

Is it wrong that I find Kai alluring?  Granted, he is a complete sociopath, but there is just something about him.  I would love to have him stay on as a villain because Chris Wood is obviously having a lot of fun and is such a breath of fresh air.  I don’t see how they can have him stay on, but I would love it if he did.  Watching him talk about the magic he has done as if it was perfectly normal to kill someone with a spell was a little disturbing, but also sort of fun.

Honestly, aside from Kai, I am not fond of anyone else in his family.  Liv and Luke are just tedious and annoying and while I like Jo as a girlfriend for Alaric, there isn’t much else to her.  Speaking of new additions to this season, I can’t wait for Enzo to be gone because he is just annoying and not very fun.  And I feel the same way about Tyler.  If they all disappeared right now, it wouldn’t be too soon.

It was definitely nice to see Stefan and Caroline rebonding.  It’s nice to see him be interested in someone other than Elena, so that is nice.  And he is being such a rock for and a voice of reason to Caroline.  Admittedly, she doesn’t listen to him very often, but he is still there for her.  I do hope he tells Damon about Sarah because I do think Damon deserves to know about her.  I think that Damon could handle what he did at this point and I think it would be nice for him to learn that he has more family.

Am I the only one who saw a flash of Katherine in Elena when she pretended that there was wood working its way to her heart?  That just seemed a little cruel for her.  A little funny, but crueler than she normally is.

Until next week!

My Review of The Originals 2.10- Gonna Set Your Flag on Fire

Finn strikes out on his own and comes close to creating a metaphorical explosion, Klaus finds out what Kol has done, Cami is brought into the Hope loop, Rebekah makes a discovery more shocking than she knows, and Hayley is all over the place…

I am beginning to suspect that Finn on his lonesome is going to be more dangerous than when he was teamed up with Esther. He is so fanatical about killing vampires that he managed to place both Esther and Mikael out of commission while using their power to augment his own. On top of that, he also sealed the vampires and wolves up in Klaus’ house just to see what would happen. That is one twisted person. I know that the Mikaelsons are a seriously dysfunctional family, but Finn is taking it to extremes.

Not that Klaus is too terribly much better. While I can’t blame him for being pissed that Kol placed Rebekah in a different body, he has (as Kol pointed out) done worse to his family. The problem with Kol is that he never seems to have figured out what Elijah has, namely that Klaus craves a family and is overly sensitive to any perceived slights or betrayals. Kol is just too damn impulsive for his own good. Klaus barely trusts him because every time Klaus does, Kol does something stupid to make Klaus regret it.

Rebekah unwittingly discovered the body(?) of her eldest sister, Freya. I so want to know how exactly Freya ended up in that house. Also, is she still alive and in stasis of some sort, or is she actually dead. I am willing to bet that she is in a magically induced slumber of some sort. When Rebekah gets out and gets her hands on Kol, he is so going to regret what he did. Placing his sister in a magical prison is not going to endear him to anybody.

I am glad that Klaus brought Cami into the Hope loop. She really needed to know that Hope is still alive. She is also present to help Elijah, who desperately needs the help himself. His goal has always been to protect his family and he is now in a position where he can’t do anything because of what Esther did to him. He seemed to get a little bit better tonight, but he still has a distance to go, especially now that Hayley is going to marry Jackson.

Speaking of Hayley, she did the right thing when she told Jackson that she slept with Elijah. Jackson was surprisingly cool about the whole thing. I think he gets that he is never going to really have her love. Rather, their marriage is more in the nature of a political alliance to free the wolves from the grip of the witches. While he does truly care about Hayley, her heart and mind are all over the place. She obviously has deep feelings for Elijah while she has Hope with Klaus, who was also surprisingly cool about her and Elijah. Then again, I don’t think that Klaus has ever truly cared too much for Hayley except for the fact that she is the mother of his child.

Watching the wolves and vampires being forced to stay together was akin to watching a train wreck in *EXTREMELY* slow motion. Finn’s spell to magnify the vampires’ hunger was a particularly cruel twist, particularly for Josh and Aiden. The two of them have enough against them without Josh being forced to have a serious hankering for Aiden’s blood, and I don’t mean in a sexy way. If those two can actually manage to make their relationship work, I will be quite happy. Josh was totally adorable when he realized that he called Aiden his boyfriend only to have Finn’s spell hit him almost immediately after that declaration. Yet another reason to despise Finn.

Until next week!

My Review of The Vampire Diaries 6.10- Christmas Through Your Eyes

Caroline finds out some shocking news, Matt obsesses, Liv shows her true colors, Kai continues to be a psychopath, and Elena makes a decision…

Poor Caroline.  Her mother has a glioblastoma that has potentially metastized to her spine.  In case you are wondering, that is really bad.  Glioblastomas are highly aggressive tumors that have a relatively low survival rate.  I am not sure about tumors, but when cancer metastizes, there is not a whole lot that can be done.  I think the only thing that might save her mom is to turn her into a vampire and I don’t really see that happening.

I have to say that as much as I want to hate Liv for helping Kai, I find it hard to fault her.  While I definitely think Jo did the right thing to protect Liv and Luke, I get why Liv decided to help Kai.  Was it the wrong thing to do?  Absolutely, but she was protecting herself and Luke from one of them dying.  The issue is that in doing so, she was potentially empowering Kai, who is insane and would not do any good with the power he might get.  Balancing the amount of harm he could do versus her potential loss would make an objective person choose to have her do the merge.  Basically, the whole situation was a no-win scenario.  Doesn’t make me like her, but it does make her choice understandable.

I was glad when Jeremy told Matt that he needed to stop what he was doing before he destroyed himself.  While Jeremy is all for protecting people, what Matt wanted was revenge and when it is a human versus a vampire, that revenge is rarely going to work out, as Matt found out.  Granted, he couldn’t have predicted that Kai would absorb the magic from the anti-magic spell the Travelers cast, so his plan was not that bad, but it was still dangerous.  As I said last week, he let Tripp and Enzo get into his head and now he is paying the piper.

Now that Kai has absorbed the magic from the anti-magic shield, he has got to be powerful.  I honestly don’t know if Jo stands a chance when they go to merge.  I actually don’t think she stood a chance before he absorbed the magic.  Since Kai can absorb magic, I don’t see how she could have beat him, which sucks because I like her.  Hopefully the gang will figure out something to do about Kai.

You had to feel for Bonnie.  She was stuck in Kai’s hell during Christmas.  It was nice to see that she was doing her best to keep traditions up.  It was also fun seeing the flashbacks to the early days of the show when Bonnie, Elena, and Caroline were basically carefree and didn’t have the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Elena (apparently) finally decides to be with Damon and she is kidnapped by Kai.  Talk about bad timing.  I wonder why he kidnapped her because it’s not like Damon has anything that Kai needs anymore.  Maybe he just wants to hurt Damon by taking her.

See you when we return in January!

My Review of The Originals 2.09- The Map of Moments

There’s revenge galore, a family reunited, passion consummated, wishes granted, and motivations revealed…

Well, Rebekah got the one thing that she’s wanted for a long time.  Only problem?  Her wish was granted as revenge by her brother Kol.  Rebekah has always wanted to live a normal human life.  Well, now she has the chance to do so except for the fact that she is trapped in a witch’s body in a house that cannot be escaped from.  Yeah, talk about being careful what you wish for.  That, my friends, is what you call a double edged sword.  She betrayed Kol’s plot to make a dagger that could hurt Klaus 100 years ago, so Kol betrayed her by trapping her in the house.  Lovely family here…

It was interesting to finally see how Kol views his place in the Mikaelson family.  Finn is a mama’s boy who hates everything that he and his siblings are; his father is out to kill them all; Elijah, Klaus, and Rebekah are a singular unit; and his mother is a twisted witch.  Given all that, it is not hard to see why he came out all twisted.  He has been mostly cut out of his own family and Klaus has systematically done what he can to keep his siblings under his thumb.  Kol seems to have honestly loved being a witch and his mother took that way from him.  So he is on his own in the world.  To make it even worse, Klaus, Elijah, and Rebekah have taken Marcel into their circle while excluding him.  Yeah, there is definitely some bitterness there.

Klaus’ revenge of Esther was absolutely delicious and completely fitting.  He used Davina to block Rebekah’s being moved into Cami and then forced his mother into a position that is beyond untenable.  Since he killed her after she had unwittingly ingested Rebekah’s blood, she is in transition.  So she either becomes that which she despises above all else or she dies.  And with no Other Side, she will be gone forever.  That revenge was absolutely perfect and a wonderful thing of absolute beauty.   While you may hate Klaus for what he does, he does revenge like no one’s business.

Unfortunately, Esther managed to team up with Mikael before she died and he freed Finn.  Finn revealed to Cami tonight that he sees his siblings as irredeemable, which makes him more dangerous than Esther.  Finn will not be content with merely moving his siblings into new bodies, he will want to destroy them, particularly after what they did to Esther.  Putting him together with Mikael is going to be dangerous.  Both of them are exceedingly unbalanced and powerful.  Fortunately, Klaus does have a protector in the form of Davina because he has sired her friends.  And I suspect that she can drag Kol along with her.  Between the two of them, I suspect that they can handle Finn.  Mikael may be a different story.  And if Dalia and/or Freya come back, hands will be full.

Hayley and Elijah have consummated their passion for each other right after he told her to marry Jackson in order to help her people and bring peace to New Orleans.  Can’t say I’m surprised at either development.  Things have been building to a head between those two for a while now and Elijah is noble enough to urge Hayley to do what is best for her people even if it hurts him.  As for that scene…YOWZA!

We’ll be back with new episodes on January 19th, so I’ll see you then!

My Review of Vampire Diaries 6.09- I Alone

Damon and Elena secure help (both witting and unwitting) to get Bonnie back, a truth is revealed, Matt and Jeremy leap to conclusions, and Tyler meets the devil...

Somehow I can't bring myself to be mad at Damon for compelling Alaric to help him.  He is obviously feeling guilty about Bonnie still being stuck in the hell dimension and he desperately wants to help everyone out by bringing her back.  Compelling Alaric was not the best option, but I do think it was the only viable option.  In spite of how much he has changed, Damon is ruled by expediency and will take all sorts of shortcuts in order to do the right thing.  And that is part of the reason I love him.  I don't always like or agree with him, but he does have a moral compass (of sorts) and he does follow it.  Granted, part of the reason he did what he did was to help Elena, but that is always part of the reason he does what he does now.  Her happiness and love are two of the most important things to him and he will do what he must to ensure that she is happy.

I'm not sure telling Jeremy what they were going to do was smart on Elena's part.  He has just gotten to the point where he is able to function without Bonnie and then Elena drags him right back into the pit.  What she should have done was gone through with the plan and then present Bonnie to Jeremy once she was back.  That way she wouldn't risk Jeremy slipping back into the funk he just got out of.  Also, he wouldn't have assumed that she left Bonnie behind to save Damon instead of finding out that Live pulled them out of the dimension because of Kai's return. 

At least Matt has something constructive for Jeremy to do: kill Enzo.  Despite his protestations, Enzo couldn't be more different from Stefan.  I always get annoyed when people look at the surface similarities between an hero and a villain and then assume that they are the same.  Enzo relishes killing and will do it without a second's hesitation.  Stefan, on the other hand, will only kill if needed or, like tonight, allow a death in the name of a greater good- in this case protecting the real Sarah Salvatore from Enzo.  Enzo is a master at coming up with rationalizations for why he does what he does, but the real reason is that he is a sociopathic vampire and needs to be put down.  He babbles on about looking for the truth, but he is really just looking for an excuse to kill people.  And the fact that Matt bought into Enzo and Tripp's lies is just sad.  He should know Stefan better than that.

You have to feel for Bonnie.  She was *THIS* close to returning home, but Kai ruined it again, this time by finding Liv and attacking her and then destroying the Ascendent.  The one thing I did not get is that he didn't seem to recognize Liv at first (basing this on his "Isn't this ironic?" line) but he figured it out somehow.  That was more than a little jarring and should have been explained better. And Tyler gets home and discovers Kai in his house.  That is not good...

Until next week!