“If Tessa kills Elena, guess who’s not gonna make it to Bonnie’s welcome home party?”
Last we saw Katherine, she had somehow avoided death yet again after Damon forced her to give Silas her blood. Now our favorite anti-hero is back and celebrating her survival with – what else – a hearty meal. After examining her reflection in the napkin dispenser, however, she makes a disturbing observation – there’s a strange white streak in her hair that she’s sure wasn’t there before.
In their home, Elena and Damon enjoy a rare few moments of peace. Emphasis on “few”. They’re promptly interrupted by Silas, who strides in brimming with fresh witchy power and fully prepped to die at last. Jeremy and Elena have a tough time believing that he’ll keep up his end of the deal, but they realize that they have little choice if they want to bring Bonnie back.
For those of you out of the loop, in the previous episode, Silas and Damon struck a deal to resurrect Bonnie. Because of the way nature works, you need to maintain balance of life and death – eye for an eye, if you will. Silas is sick of immortality and everyone is miserable without Bonnie, so it works out. In order for the resurrection to take place, Silas must return to his mortal witch-form – done, thanks to Katherine’s generous donation. If he is killed now, however, his spirit will go to the “other side”, a kind of witch purgatory created by his vengeful ex fiancée, Tessa. The other side, like all powerful spells, is anchored to the living world by some currently unidentified object. Silas must find that object and destroy it, thus getting rid of the other side and ensuring his soul’s safe journey to the beyond.
Meanwhile, Stefan has woken up in Tessa’s home and has just been briefed about the plan. Now that Silas is mortal again, Tessa can finally kill him (hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, indeed). Much to Stefan’s utter confusion, she explains that there is a group known as the travelers who have been guarding the anchor for two thousand years and constantly move it so that Silas can’t get ahold of it, though she doesn’t divulge any explicit details.
Silas prepares to head out with only Damon and Jeremy in tow, claiming that it’s a “men only” trip because the sight of Elena, a carbon copy of his beloved Amara and would prove too much of a distraction. Tessa attempts to leave her own headquarters, but finds herself trapped by a spell recognizable as one she taught Silas herself which confines her to the cabin until sunset.
Later, when what appears to be Elena gets out of the shower and is standing in her room in a towel, Caroline bursts in begins to pack up their things. She is quick to assert her complete indifference in regard to any communication Tyler (now her ex, as of the previous episode) may have attempted. Since Dr. Maxfield threatened Elena at the party and implied that he suspected them of being vampires, Caroline had decided it wise to leave the school. It’s then that she realizes the girl is not Elena but Katherine, who explains that she needs a place to crash and offers her experience to help eliminate the threat of Dr. Maxfield in exchange for their hospitality. The two girls sneak into his lab and successfully jam a hypodermic needle into the side of his neck.
Downstairs, Elena is trying to get in contact with Stefan. His phone, however, is answered by Tessa, who’s nothing but catty toward what she views as Amara’s doppelganger. When Elena relays the interaction to her boyfriend, she finds out about how he had to snap his brother’s neck a couple times in order to assist Silas, and once again, Damon’s rash but seemingly well-meaning actions have caused everyone for which he feels a semblance of affection to be angry with him.
Elena, disturbed by the sexual implications of her conversation with Tessa, heads over to the cabin to check on things and make sure Stefan hasn’t been magically seduced against his will. Tessa, spiteful woman she is, admits to embellishing a bit, and seems unashamed when Elena discovers that her being invited into the cabin means she’s trapped by the spell too.
Meanwhile, out in New Jersey, Damon and Silas exchange some witty banter before breaking into the warehouse that supposedly holds the anchor. Bonnie’s spirit, who has been following Jeremy for some time and can’t be physically touched but can be seen and spoken to by him, appears and expresses her doubts about the spell. Jeremy, however, vehemently insists that with faith, it will.
Back in the lab, Caroline and Katherine have tied Dr. Maxfield down and start to drain his blood. They question him about who suspects them of being vampires, and he claims that there is a meeting that night of a secret society whose purpose is to discover vampires in the community.
In the warehouse, the search for the anchor continues. Silas explains that the reason the travelers are so interested in keeping him from discovering its location is because they resent him for creating the immortality spell, and they know the other side is the final obstacle lying between him and Amara.
Damon receives a call from Tessa, and she describes to him her own itinerary. Since she has no intention of allowing Silas to destroy the anchor and move on to a peaceful afterlife, she urges Damon to kill him before the spell ends at sunset. To provide proper incentive, she threatens to kill Elena if he doesn’t comply.
On campus, Katherine, posing as Elena, manages to sneak her way into the supposed meeting for the secret society. She’s caught stuffing finger sandwiches into her purse by Aaron, childhood friend of Elena’s recently deceased roommate, and makes a not-so-subtle attempt to discover more about the society. As she’s chewing on her sandwich, however, she starts to gag, and removes her own slightly bloody tooth.
The tension in the cabin continues to increase. Tessa reveals to Elena that when Bonnie brought Jeremy back from the dead, the hole she opened allowed Tessa to walk right out of the other side. As Elena’s emotional state seems to grow more frantic and unbalanced, Stefan and Tessa joke and tease as if it’s any other normal day.
Caroline has lapsed into a reverie about Tyler, but Dr. Maxfield jerks her out of it. When she questions him, she learns that the society is known as Augustine and its members are a mix of vampire hunting legacies and particularly brilliant and talented individuals. The doctor is on the verge of revealing something about the “Augustine vampire”, but they are interrupted by one of the society members who had let Katherine- who, again, had been pretending to be Elena- into the party. Caroline quickly wipes Maxfield’s memory and flees. The society member relays how “Elena” had been able to enter the building, and thus could not be a vampire.
Meanwhile, Damon has made the decision to kill Silas before he can resurrect Bonnie. Jeremy opposes the motion, naturally, but when Bonnie’s spirit tells him that she’s fine with staying dead for the sake of her friend, he goes along with the plan. Unfortunately, it looks like the travelers have finally decided to show up. Two of them corner Damon and render his daylight ring temporarily useless, but it isn’t long before he does away with them and continues to search for a way to kill Silas. A phone call from Tessa, however, soon throws him completely off guard.
In the cabin, Stefan and Tessa are getting pretty cozy, cooking over the stove together. When Tessa goes to the other side of the room to make a phone call, Stefan communicates to Elena that he doesn’t hate her and won’t let her get hurt. At the next opportunity,
Now comes the time for the big plot twist. (Might wanna be sitting down for this one.) Silas finally locates the anchor. Like Tessa had said, it was something that would last forever and that Silas would never be able to destroy. She’d never murdered Amara; Amara herself is the anchor. Locked away for two thousand years, dry and motionless from lack of sustenance but still very much alive, Silas discovers her.
He snatches up the body of one of the dead travelers and uses his blood to restore her sentience. He helps her out of the building and explains what has transpired. When he tells her that the cure for the immortality spell is now in his own veins, she stabs him with a shard of glass and drinks his blood.
Katherine returns to the lab and gives the doctor a storage device filled with audio recordings that she had snatched from him earlier. The device contains spoken records of Maxfield’s experiments concerning subjects with abnormal blood. She blackmails him into helping her figure out what’s going on with her body, proposing that she might be dying.
As the episode draws to a close, Stefan goes into his room to find Tessa there, waiting for him. She gives him back his memories, forcing him to relive every painful thing he’s ever experienced, from killing his own father and forcing his brother to become a vampire to drowning over and over again. Tessa leaves him with the reminder that it was she, not his brother nor his (ex) girlfriend, who came to rescue him.
So to wrap up- Bonnie is still trapped on the other side and the others are trying to come up with a plan to rescue her. Silas is not dead but has instead gone missing, and because Amara used his blood to cure herself, she is now fully human and much easier to kill. Damon, Jeremy, and Elena must look after her with the utmost caution. And since Stefan’s memories are back, it’s probably safe to assume that he hates Elena and Damon again.
It’s been a while since I’ve watched this show. I followed the first and second seasons religiously, but then my mother installed parental locks on the television, rendering me incapable of watching it. Now, I’m a legal adult (yikes) and the boss of my own darn television. I’ve found a website streaming every season online for free, so I’m planning on rewatching every season when I get a chance (boy, do I have some catching up to do).
From what I’ve seen of this fifth season so far, I’m not quite sure how to judge the future of the show. Part of me is wondering whether they’re carrying this out too far and should just let it die already. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a network that doesn’t know when to let go of a good program. The story still keeps me interested, though, so it seems to be doing its job well enough for the time being.
What really concerns me is the female characters, or more specifically, Tessa. I know pretty much every plot line in this show has its roots in romance, but I think they’re taking it just a liiiiittle too far with her. I can maybe understand her rendering Silas’s heart incapable of pumping blood for a little while, but is he really the cold, remorseless monster she wants to make him out to be? I mean, Amara obviously saw something redeemable in him. As far as the viewer is concerned, Tessa’s existence is defined by Silas. All her ambitions are tied to him. For what, though? Because he cheated on her? I can understand feeling betrayed, but she literally created a hellish dimension for the sole purpose of casting his soul into eternal damnation. I don’t know about anyone else, but that just sounds a tad overdramatic to me.
It also bothers me that Elena and Caroline’s roles in the story are so defined by the men they love. Don’t get me wrong, they’re both excellent characters. It just seems like they’re capable of so much more. Elena says herself that Stefan’s instincts were always to protect her, and Damon has always made her safety a priority. Perhaps I’m just looking into it too much, but that seems rather condescending to me. I mean, she’s what, nineteen? I’m sure she’s at least somewhat capable of taking care of herself without constantly relying on a male.
Caroline, as well, and her dependence on a man to validate herself has been a consistent theme that’s always bothered me. Throughout the past two episodes, she’s been whiny and dependent on Tyler, pushing him to stay at the college and commit to her, then not even bothering to try to sympathize with him when he tells her why they need to break up. She definitely has some pretty badass moments to be sure, but from what I’ve seen this season and what I recall from previous ones, she’s never been good at standing completely on her own.
Even Silas isn’t totally free from this pattern. His entire character is centered around becoming mortal and reuniting with Amara. At least he gets some witty dialogue, though. All in all, though I realize that this show is definitely not one that will go down in history books, I still have hope that the characters will experience more creative arcs and eventually boil down to a well-earned, satisfying conclusion.
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