“My sin was falling in love, and I learned my lesson.”
This episode, we start out with Silas sitting on a bench on the side of an isolated rural road beside a young couple. Not too long ago, he was on top of the world- mortal and powerful once again and reunited with the love of his life. Now he’s sitting at a bus stop, a wound in his neck from where his lover stabbed him and his heart smashed into a million pieces. In his anger, he liquefies the internal organs of one member of the couple sharing the bench. Good old Silas.
Back at the Salvatores’ place, Elena wakes Stefan with a cup o’ joe and they discuss the subject of his memory loss. He reveals to her that the previous night, Tessa had shown up and given back all his memories. Damon quizzes him on various memories, and he appears to have something of an emotional flashback. A ruckus somewhere else in the house interrupts the conversation. They go to see Amara, who is distraught and appears to be screaming at nothing as she thrashes about in her cell. Now that she’s mortal, it’s going to be much harder to keep her alive and the other side intact.
In another part of the house, Jeremy and Bonnie have an emotional moment where Jeremy reveals to her the new complications in their plan to resurrect her. He promises that they’ll never give up trying to find a way.
Now, I’m sure you’re all wondering what our dear friend Katherine has been up to. Last episode, she had confronted Dr. Maxwell about the strange things happening to her body. He tells her that the reason her hair is turning gray and her teeth are falling out is because she’s aging. Five hundred years previous, she had been turned into a vampire; now that she’s human, her body is catching up. She only has a couple more months to live.
Silas seems to be enjoying the bus, observing other human life. He’s in no rush, as he explains to Damon over the phone, to get back to Mystic Falls. He’s come to the decision that since Amara is so miserable in her mortal form, he might as well let her die. He knows that if he refuses to comply with the plan to resurrect Bonnie, Damon’s promise to Elena would be unfulfilled and it would ruin their relationship, which would bring Silas undeniable joy.
Let’s take a moment to catch up with Caroline. Nadia intercepts her at school looking for Katherine, who appears right in the nick of time to keep Caroline from finding out the truth about her relationship with Nadia.
Elena and the Salvatore brothers, meanwhile, are trying to come up with a way to convince Silas to keep up his promise. Elena is holding onto the hope that they will succeed, but tensions arise when Stefan reminds her of the harsh reality of the situation.
When Jeremy brings dinner to Amara, she recognizes his face from the period of time when he was dead. They then discover that not only can she see Bonnie, they can also have physical contact. They bring it up with Elena, who suggests that if they can find a witch to do the spell, they can make Bonnie the anchor and she can exist with a foot on both sides. You know what that means- it’s time to find Tessa.
Naturally, when Damon addresses her with the plan, she’s less than thrilled. She tells him that in order to perform a spell of that magnitude, she’s going to need an enormous source of power. She believes doppelgangers will suffice.
Elena speaks to Stefan about the dangers of killing a doppelganger. He recounts to her the moments he spent in the safe after Silas stabbed him, when he died time after time only to come back to life and go through the pain all over again. He tells her that the only thing keeping him from completely losing his grip on his humanity was remembering things that gave him hope- heavily implying that his time with Elena was among those memories. He has no choice; either he kills Silas, or he will go completely insane.
Meanwhile, Nadia attempts to have a genuine heart to heart with her mother, but Katherine won’t hear of it. She’s never been one for mushy emotional moments, and separation is a far preferable method for dealing with her family drama.
Tessa is brought back to the mansion and has a chilling encounter with Amara, telling her that once Bonnie is the anchor, Amara will be killed and go on to the human afterlife while Silas spends his death in the other side. Katherine has shown up to provide the doppelganger blood necessary for the spell, and makes a deal with Tessa to secure for herself some way of stopping her body from aging.
The ceremony begins, and the girls spill their blood on Bonnie’s grimoire. Right as the chanting begins, however, the room is filled with a violent wind that wreaks chaos on the room, and then everything goes black. Damon comes in with a flashlight and discovers that only Elena and Katherine are present. He and Elena go to search for the others while Katherine takes a rest. Caroline finds her nursing the wound from Tessa’s ceremony. She offers some of her vampire blood in an attempt to heal her, but Katherine can’t keep it down.
Tessa finds Silas in another part of the mansion. He implores her to leave him and Amara alone, pointing out how wasteful it’s been for her to spend her entire existence torturing them. Just as he has her pinned to the wall with a sword through her torso, he gets a call from Stefan, who has Amara outside. He threatens to keep her alive for as long as possible if Silas doesn’t come find them.
When Silas reaches them, he frees Amara from her bonds and she pleads with him to kill her. He tries, but Stefan intercepts him and pins him against a tree. They engage in a battle of psychological manipulation, ending with Stefan throwing a knife into Silas’s chest. Amara moves to help him, but some unknown physical ailment brings her to her knees.
Meanwhile, Elena has discovered Tessa, rips the sword out of her body, and drags her along to help them (which, I have to say, was pretty badass). She finds Damon and reminds him that they were supposed to rescue Stefan from the safe and that they can’t let him go again. While Tessa resumes the spell, Damon goes to the woods and finds the little group. He arrives moments after Amara has taken the knife from her lover’s dead body and plunged it into her own gut. He pleads with her to try and hold on just a little bit longer, but she at last lapses into silence.
Bonnie finds Jeremy and starts to give him her goodbyes. He reaches out to touch her, and to his surprise, he can feel her. Elena and Caroline arrive, and they can see and hear her as well. The spell was a success; Bonnie is now the anchor. She and Jeremy have a heartwarming romantic moment, and all seems right with the world.
Katherine hasn’t forgotten the anti-aging spell she was promised. When she finds Tessa, however, she sees that the witch has slashed her wrists and is quickly bleeding out. She appears to Bonnie as a ghost and explains that every paranormal being who dies will pass through her, which hurts like hell.
In the woods, Elena seeks out Stefan and asks him if killing Silas helped alleviate the constant suffering he’s felt. His answer is vague; he only says that when the safe was opened at last, he wished that it was Damon and Elena who had rescued him. Later, when he’s alone and burying Silas’s body, he begins to reflect on the terrible memories of the previous summer and experiences violent flashbacks. He collapses, the memories overwhelming him.
Now that Bonnie is back, she’ll be rooming with Elena and Caroline, so Katherine has to go. Nadia comes to her and tries one more time to convince her to travel back to Bulgaria together. Katherine stonily refuses and tells her that it’s the last Nadia will ever see her.
In my personal estimation, this was an excellent episode that had me covering my mouth in horror and practically in tears through most of it. These poor kids just can’t get a break. I was especially upset near the end, when Katherine outright refused to join her daughter. I mean, the least she could do is explain why she can’t be there for her. Now Nadia is just going to wander around for a couple hundred years, wondering how she could have let her mother slip away like that, why she didn’t try harder to make her stay and believing that it was some fault of her own, when truly Katherine just didn’t want her to witness her rapid aging process. At least, I’m assuming that’s her reasoning. But with a girl like Katherine, who knows?
I feel like this episode saw some really nice character development in many areas, and truthfully, though I’m relieved to have Tessa and her annoyingly vengeful attitude out of the picture, I’m sad to see Silas go. I know I’m supposed to hate him for what he’s done, but I’m a sucker for a character who knows how to make satire work. All in all, I’m really happy with the way the story is progressing and it doesn’t feel as strained or forced as I feared it would. I’m psyched for the next episode.
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