In this week’s Vampiaries, Klaus takes Stefan on a bromantic trip to Chicago, closely followed by Damon and Elena; Caroline gets help to deal with her daddy issues; and Katherine is back, with her fingers in everyone’s pies as usual.
No word on Alaric/Bonnie/Jeremy/Matt. Presumably they’ve all moved into Elena’s house and are communicating with their dead loved ones via FaceTime.
This episode begins with Katherine, who out of the goodness of her heart (yeah, right) gives Damon a call and tells him where Klaus and Stefan have gone – Chicago. So Damon heads straight to Elena’s house, wakes her up in her bed, goes through her underwear drawer, and off they go to Chicago to try to “rescue” Stefan again. Damon has handily brought along Stefan’s diaries (geddit? Diaries? By a vampire?) from the last time he lived in Chicago, which was the 1920s. Elena nobly refuses to read them until Damon reads her a chilling/slutty extract, and then Elena doesn’t feel so noble any more.
Stefan, meanwhile, is puzzled by why Klaus is still keeping him around – his master plan to build a hybrid army didn’t work, after all. But Klaus wants to look up a witch he knows to find out why (Stefan, of course, knows why. Elena didn’t die). The witch, called Gloria, runs a bar, the same bar which we keep seeing in flashback to the 1920s. Stefan is there, as is Gloria, looking somewhat younger, as well as an intriguing blonde vampire.
Back in the present, Gloria tells Klaus that they need to contact the original witch who came up with the curse on him – and to do that, they need to find someone called Rebecca. Stefan finds an old photo behind the bar, it’s of him and Klaus in the 1920s. But why does Stefan not remember him, or most of his time in Chicago?
Damon brings Elena to Stefan’s old apartment in Chicago, complete with a secret cupboard with the names of all of Stefan’s victims written on the wall. Atmospheric. Damon leaves Elena there (with Stefan’s diary) while he goes out looking for him. Elena curls up with the diaries, which detail Lexi’s efforts to made Stefan feel human again after his ripper 1920s. Damon goes to the bar and gets Gloria (who also seems to know him) to tell him that Stefan and Klaus will be back there later.
Back in the 1920s (Are these Klaus’s memories? Stefan’s repressed memories? General narrative?) we finally find out who Rebecca is. She’s the blonde vampire from earlier, in lurrve with Stefan, and also happens to be Klaus’s sister, which means she’s another Original. Back then, the three of them had fun torturing humans and making them drink their spouse’s blood. What larks! Rebecca is still with us, in a coffin in a basement somewhere in Chicago, frozen by another one of those handy ash-imbued daggers that’s keeping dear brother Elijah out of commission somewhere else. A dagger that Klaus promptly removes. And while they wait for Rebecca to re-animate (with blood from the compelled guard), Klaus is going to prove all of what he’s been telling Stefan about their past by taking him to his old apartment. Dun dun DUN!
Elena hides in the cupboard, which is just what Klaus wants to show Stefan: his list of victims. Stefan pokes his head in, sees Elena, and there’s a looonng moment where they stare at each other, until Stefan says “Look what I found!” But luckily, he just means some old wine/scotch/alcohol, and manages to get Klaus out of the apartment. Once again he’s saved her ass.
Back in the 1920s, Klaus (also known to Rebecca as Nick, I’m presuming Nicklaus?) warns Stefan that Rebecca will break his heart, but Stefan is oblivious. Suddenly, the police raid the bar, but this is no normal raid; they’re using wooden bullets. Someone is on to them. Klaus grabs Rebecca and escapes from the bar. Rebecca, not knowing that Klaus has compelled Stefan to forget all about them, wants to wait for him. Klaus tells her she has to choose. She chooses Stefan, so this is when Klaus stabs her with the dagger. In the bar, Stefan finds a necklace, Rebecca’s, on the floor, and a policeman shows Stefan a drawing of Klaus and Rebecca, but of course, he’s easily able to say that he’s never seen them before in his life. That necklace, by the way, is the same one he gave Elena, which is currently around her neck.
Back at Gloria’s bar, Klaus and Stefan are still waiting for Rebecca to show up. Damon shows up and gestures Stefan outside, where Elena is waiting for him. She pleads with him to come home, hugs him, and tries to stab him with vervain. But he’s on to her, and he’s had enough of her trying to rescue him. It can never be the same between them. She insists that it can, that Lexi helped him before, but it took decades, and Stefan won’t have Elena wait half her life for him.
In the bar, Klaus toys with Damon, stabbing him with cocktail sticks, before Gloria spoils his fun by setting his stake on fire. Damon escapes to the car with Elena, and Klaus goes looking for Rebecca back at her coffin, where she stabs him with the dagger, but not in the heart. She was just hoping it would hurt. Stefan follows them, and Rebecca is delighted to see him again. Of course he doesn’t recognise her until Klaus compels him to remember. But they can’t have a reunion yet because Klaus wants to know why Gloria needs Rebecca. Rebecca knows it’s her necklace, which is now around Elena’s neck. Stefan knows that, but he’s not the only one. Katherine, it turns out, was also in the bar in the 1920’s, and saw Stefan take the necklace, and now she’s in Chicago as well.
Back in Mystic Falls, Caroline is still trapped in her chair with vervain gas coming in through the ventilation system. Her father, Bill, comes in, and gets her to tell him how she’s able to walk in the sunlight. Having removed her magical ring, he then tortures her with sunlight. He’s obviously seen A Clockwork Orange, and is trying to train his daughter out of her desire for human blood: it’s fix her, or kill her. Classic films notwithstanding, Tyler and Sheriff Forbes stage a rescue (can I get a FuckYeahSheriffForbes tumblr already?), bring Caroline home, feed her blood, and give her a cuddle while she cries about how her dad hates her.
I know things in TVD move at lightning pace, but Caroline’s rescue felt a bit anticlimactic to me. I love seeing the Sheriff and Tyler teaming up and kicking ass, but the rescue was a bit too easy. We would have liked to see it stretched out another week. Though Bill (the Actor Formerly Known As Mr. Bennett on Heroes) has the Benevolent But Evil Dad thing down pat [and I love seeing Tyler play the boyfriend – Dellbot].
Though a bit heavy-handed in parts, the focus on Stefan’s past this episode is shaping up to be very interesting. He now has another “brother” and (ex-)girlfriend to replace Damon and Elena, but will he put Elena at risk by revealing the location of the necklace? Will Klaus find out Stefan betrayed him? Why were Klaus and Elena running from a lowly human policeman, anyway? [possibly the same reason Klaus wanted to build an army…? – Dellbot]
And as always, whose side is Katherine on?
All screencaps from vampirediariesweb.com