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Vampire Diaries: Live Through This

“And then maybe I’ll go meet a guy.”

I have learned many important life lessons from TV: Never believe anybody is dead unless you see the body. Don’t tease fear demons; it’s tacky. Life is pain, and anyone who tells me differently is selling something. This week, TVD reminded me what I already knew: when raising the dead, use caution. Or, even better: just don’t.

Jo isn’t Jo. This makes me sad, since I want Alaric to be happy. But I’m interested in the idea of souls crammed into the wrong body, especially because of all the questions it raises: if you put a vampire in a human body, does the vampire still crave blood? (Jo didn’t seem to be all that interested in licking Alaric’s hand, but maybe she didn’t want to mix blood with Thai food.) Whoever is inhabiting Oscar’s body seems to have Oscar’s witchy powers, so maybe the powers stay with the body, and the new soul inhabiting the body just has to come to terms with what it can and can’t do.

That leaves Alaric in an interesting place: living with a vampire of indeterminate gender who exists within his wife’s body. Their handholding at the end of the episode was sweet, but also creepy. Is Alaric going to fall for this JoVamp? Is she going to bear the children we saw in the flashforward?

Speaking of flashforwards: Bonnie and Enzo. (I’m going to call them Benzo.) This is an incredibly odd pairing. I wonder if the writers decided to do it simply because they needed to give Enzo something to do and Bonnie someone to do. Their banter felt a bit forced to me, but that might be due to me struggling to remember any interactions they’d had before. Wasn’t there a lot of hatred between them last season?

Oh, well. Sometimes TVD seems to want us to forget, other times it wants us to believe in the astonishing power of long-term memory. Take Valerie and Stefan, for instance. TVD still wants to create drama over Stefan’s ex-girlfriend. I’m just not buying the idea of Caroline really, really caring about a girl Stefan used to date in the nineteenth century. Wouldn’t it make more sense for her to grapple with the specter of Elena? It was nice to see Damon being a snarky asshole by poking holes in Stefan’s sangfroid though, although Valerie’s revelation about her miscarriage did that job nicely.

Despite the body-snatcher zombie madness and depressing flashforward, “Live Through This” had a bit more vim than the past few episodes have had, as though Damon’s decision to “keep [Elena] in his heart” and live with more joy has infected all of the other characters. I’m not complaining; it’s nice to see people having a bit more fun with their very odd lives, at least until Julian causes whatever sort of trouble he will inevitably cause.

Bites and Pieces:

• Damon claims Stefan’s bad at hiding things. This from a guy who hid the moonstone in his soap dish.

• What on earth is going on with Enzo’s hair?

• So, if Oscar isn’t Oscar, does that mean we won’t get any more of the fun laidback Heretic we met in Myrtle Beach?

• Damon’s joke about Julian being more attractive than Papa Salvatore emphasized just how incestuous this show has gotten.

I don’t know... three out of four Benzos? Three out of four casket warehouses?

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

1 comment:

  1. Caroline is so annoying this season and it's getting so out of hand. Her relationship with Stefan is stupid, and all their scenes together just annoy me. Thankfully, this episode had a lot more Stefan scenes sans-Caroline than they have all season, and I loved that.

    Oh and I also loved that they used "Girl Crush" by New Politics in the scene when Stefan, Valerie and Damon are driving together on their way to track down Julian, what a great tune.

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