Previously, on The Vampire Diaries
Elena and Rebekah, having embarked on their Tour For the Cure, arrive in some sleepy town having ditched Damon's convertible for a serious upgrade. Who'd they have to kill to get that? No seriously, who did they have to kill?
They've hit that stage in every road trip where they're both on each others' last nerve. Elena refuses to drive one more mile until she gets someone to eat. She spots a random townie getting into her car and zoops up to her. She vamps out right there in broad daylight but before she can sink her fangs in the townie exclaims, “Katherine, what are you doing?” Townie understands that most folks are fine with being fed on from the neck but she prefers it from the wrist.
Rebekah's impressed: “Conniving little bitch has compelled the entire town!” Title card!
Elena and Rebekah question the townie and quickly discover that she likes Elena's new 'do; and also Katherine is living under the name “Katherine Pierce” which is the name she's been using since at least 1864 so why all the false identities from Will over the years? They also discover that Katherine has compelled everyone to forget her unless she's speaking directly to them and that Katherine has a secret that the townspeople have also been compelled to forget.
The Brothers Salvatore arrive where the ladies abandoned Damon's ride. Stefan exposits that Sheriff Liz tracked the car. Damon snits, “Remind me to send her some mini-muffins.” He further exposits that Liz tracked the car they stole after stealing Damon's and it's in Willoughby, the “creamed corn capitol of Pennsylvania.” Damon upgrades Liz's gift basket from muffins to champagne. I'm sure she'd enjoy both, Damon, so don't skimp.
Damon bright sides that if Becks does take the cure she'll be human and he can kill her right away. Stefan dark clouds that if that happens then Elena's a vampire forever. Damon agrees that a non-human Elena isn't worth having (I so do not agree with that statement) so puts aside thoughts of revenge, for now.
Back in Mystic Falls Klaus is writhing around on the floor half naked. It's pretty sexy even with the bloody gaping wound in his back. He's trying to retrieve the super-stake tip that Silas left embedded in him last episode. He can't get it even after dislocating both shoulders to increase his reach.
Caroline arrives and Klaus tells her about the attack. He feels like he's dying. Caroline cradles his face and looks into his eyes with compassion and says, “As much as I would love to watch you die you still haven't found me that cure.”
Ah, so it is The First after all. They're not even trying to pretend this isn't a direct lift from Buffy and honestly, if you're going to lift from Buffy why on Earth would you lift from season seven? Klaus demands to see his real face but Silas swears unending misery until he has the cure and vanishes, leaving Klaus on his knees on the floor. Still half-naked.
Back in Hooterville the Rowdy Girls drop by the post office to see if there's any mail for Katherine. The postman comments on Elena's hair, wondering how she changed in in the last two minutes. Realizing Katherine must still be nearby, the girls split up. Elena spots a possible in her car but discovers it's not Katherine when Katherine takes her from behind, slamming her up against a mail truck.
Before she can kill Elena Rebekah takes her from behind and throws her to the pavement.
The Rowdy Girls and Katherine have found themselves a booth at Mel's Diner, where Elena demands the cure. Katherine wonders why Elena didn't preface her remarks with mention of Jeremy's death at her hands and from Elena's “shit happens” response deduces that Elena's pulled her emotion chip. “So sad for the boys, though, their precious snowflake of human frailty, gone.”
Katherine moves to “grab some menus” but Rebekah pins her hand to the table with a fork. They angry kitty at each other for a minute while Katherine compels a passing waitress to forget the honking big fork sticking out of Katherine's hand.
Elena's tired of the shilly-shallying, noting that the boys are on their tails. Becks tries to compel the cure out of Katherine but she's on vervain. Plan B is torture but before that can commence we waste more time explaining again some more that Katherine wants the cure to barter her freedom from Klaus.
Elena calls her a pathetic victim and wonders where in her plan is the part where she screws them over. She says she has no reason to screw them over, which is not the same thing as saying she isn't going to screw them over. She insists that she's changed. They believe her about as much as I do and snickersnag her phone. Katherine has a meeting with someone called “em” at 2:00.
The presumably real Caroline arrives at the Haus of Klaus, where he remains half-naked on the floor. Klaus roars at her to stop hounding him and Caroline's like I'm missing three prom committee meetings for this. Klaus drags himself onto a bench and tells this Caroline about the Silas attack. She's non-plussed that after all he's done he thinks she's interested in helping him but he reminds her that as the head of everyone's blood line if he dies, everyone dies. She agrees to cut the fragment out.
Damon and Stefan arrive in Hooterville and discover the Rowdy Girls' stolen car. Stefan wonders how they're going to get Elena back to Mystic Falls when they find her, and isn't that maybe a discussion you could have had before you left home? Damon's answer? Whatever it takes.
Over at Mel's Diner Elena emerges from the ladies' room, having changed her makeup to impersonate Katherine. Becky's verdict: “Not slutty enough. Maybe more eyeliner.” Elena demands Katherine's accessories. And her jacket. And shoes.
As Elena waits in a gazebo for “em” to show, Rebekah taunts Katherine back at Mel's Diner for having to compel the townspeople into liking her. Katherine shoots back that once Rebekah takes the cure she'll still be as messed up as she is now and won't even being able to compel herself a friend. Becky's witty retort is to start twisting Katherine's hand off but before she can the Salvatore boys break it up. Stefan asks after Elena.
She's still in the gazebo when a voice behind her says “Katerina.” She turns and see Elijah. My god that man can wear a suit.
I assume they exchange some words but I'm too busy staring and sighing and doodling “Elijah Elijah Elijah” on my notebook in sparkly pen to pay attention. He kisses her and Elena goes from WTF to I'm OK with this in about four seconds. They kiss all the way through the commercial break and after about three more sentences Elijah twigs that it's Elena and demands to know where Katherine is.
She's at Mel's Diner with the rest of the gang, where Rebekah is imagining a scenario in which the brothers force the cure down Elena's throat and then lock Becky in a box until the Sun explodes. Katherine first suggests checking the morgue for Elena then spills that she's off to meet Elijah who will instantly figure out the switch and yank out Elena's heart. When she tells them that she's banging Elijah the table goes “ew!” in unison. I agree; Elijah could do so much better.
Stefan explains to Becky that if Elena dies she'll have no chance of finding the cure and further deduces that Katherine is going to broker her deal with Klaus through Elijah. Somehow this exchange persuades Katherine to take them to the cure.
Back at the Haus of Klaus Caroline is digging around in Klaus's gaping wound with, Jesus, are those gardening shears? She can't find anything and he thinks she's not digging deep enough. “You killed a dozen witches for your friend Bonnie; you can't even get your hands a little dirty for me. Here I thought we were becoming friends.” That...makes no sense.
She twists the shears in the wound and Klaus screams in pain. She apologizes, then retracts it immediately, saying he deserves to suffer for what he's done. Then she tries to change the deal. She'll only help if he lets Tyler come home.
Having checked the gazebo and finding no one there, Stefan calls Elijah from Katherine's phone.
They spit and snarl and hurl threats back and forth until Elijah hangs up and Elena pronounces them both idiots. They go back and forth some more and Elijah is distressed to learn that Katherine killed Jeremy and lied to him about it. Elena: “I hate to say I told you so...but duh!”
Katherine leads Damon and Becky to a modestly appointed home where they mock her design sense. She opens a hidden safe and gasps that the cure is gone. Damon and Becks are like, pull the other one, sister. Katherine refuses to give up the location and, after stopping Rebekah from killing her, Damon suggests they search the house.
He tries to think like a paranoid sociopath, which is not even a little bit of a stretch, to figure out where she's hiding it. He spots an ornate treasure chest in her fish tank, which is curiously devoid of fish. He reaches for it but his hand burns because the tank is laced with vervain. Damon picks up a net but before he can dip out the box Katherine takes him from behind, plunging his head in the tank and burning his pretty, pretty face.
With him incapacitated she snatches the chest (and I guess doesn't burn because she's dosed?) and makes for the door. Becky blocks her and demands the cure, or she's dead. Katherine, rightly thinking she's dead either way, throws the cure into the air and when Becks dives for it makes her escape.
Damon, still sizzling like a shrimp at Benihana, implores Rebekah not to take the cure. She tells him not to even bother since she knows as well as he does that he doesn't want Elena to take it. He has no response and, as Stefan arrives a moment too late, she downs it and collapses.
Klaus can feel the splinters moving closer to his heart and begs Caroline to help. She is implacable, insisting on his word before she moves. They fight about trust issues and how everybody's tried to kill everybody else and he tellingly roars “I will not have my hand forced by you or anyone else!” She turns from him and he zoops in front of her and demands that she not turn her back on him. She screams, “I should have turned my back on you ages ago!”
Klaus's face softens and he realizes that his pain is gone. Silas got inside his head and placed the pain there but Caroline was able to take his mind off it and end it. Caroline wonders, if Silas can inflict that kind of mind game on Klaus, what he can do to the rest of them.
As Rebekah lies passed out the brothers fight over whether Damon could have kept her from taking it. Becky revives with a gasp.
Elijah reminds Elena that he knows what it's like to lose a brother and that he hopes one day she will find her way back to herself. Just like he hopes Katherine will find her way back to herself, she asks? He understands that it's possible the sweet girl he fell in love with centuries ago may be gone but that he has to believe she's in Katherine somewhere. Elena says that he is making the same mistake that Damon and Stefan are with her, thinking that the former Elena is coming back when she's not. Elijah hopes she's wrong since the world needs compassionate soul like hers.
“Your compassion is a gift, Elena. Carry it with you, always and forever” Elena quotes, from the letter Elijah wrote her in season three. She tells him she enjoyed watching that letter burn along with everything else from her old life, including her brother's body. Before he can respond, Katherine takes Elena from behind, snapping her neck. “Sorry. I got held up.”
Stefan asks Becks how she's feeling but before she can bust out a chorus of “I'm Alive” from Xanadu Damon flings a letter opener at her face. She catches it and watches in horror as the cut on her hand heals. The cure was a fake, which we knew since this isn't the season finale.
Katherine cracks wise about Elena's temporary dirt nap but Elijah confronts her about killing Jeremy.
She calls Jeremy “collateral damage” and a means of survival and he wonders if that's all he is to her, a means of survival. To quote Elena, duh! She swears up and down that of course he isn't like every other man she's used over the last 500 years because she lurves him. There isn't a playwright in the world who could make him believe this would happen between two adult people and he turns to go. She catches him, begging him to keep his word about interceding with Klaus. This suddenly makes the whole thing believable. He tells her goodbye.
Later that evening Katherine goes to the home of the random townie from earlier. She retrieves the cure she'd stashed there.
Katherine catches up with Elijah and tells him that he's right. She spent so long lying to survive that she believes them herself. She wants him to help her find out who she is. She produces the cure and hands it to him. She says she could try to feed it to Klaus and kill him but if she does she'll lose Elijah. He suspects this is another lie but she insists she meant what she said about her feelings and she needs him to trust her like she trusts him. She hands him the cure and says he owes her nothing. It's up to him to decide where they go from there. She walks away.
As does Elijah, and he runs into Rebekah.
She chides him about his involvement with Katherine, which is not a great strategy for getting what only he can give her, then asks for the cure so she can “silently judge” him somewhere else (another poor choice). He asks why she wants it and she tells him she wants to live a simple life as a human and when that life ends, it ends. She wants to live her life as she wants to live it, not as Klaus and Elijah want her too. She implores him for the cure.
Before he can respond her phone rings. Let it go to voice mail! It's Klaus asking for an update. She says that it's become complicated and offers to let him talk to one of the complications. She hands the phone to Elijah, who says, “Complication speaking.” Heh.
Klaus is delighted. Elijah tells him he's bringing the cure back to Mystic Falls and that his list of demands is surprisingly short. They hang up and Caroline pops back in, informing Klaus she's used up all of his bleach. He thanks her for her help. She tells him not to call if he needs more help because she has a prom to plan. She turns to leave and he says, “Friends, then?” She asks if he'll let Tyler come home and he points out that he's not really looking for Tyler all that much. Well no, because you told us a couple episodes ago that Tyler's punishment was the banishment.
Damon fesses up that he let Rebekah take the fake cure because he couldn't think of a single reason to give it to Elena. Then when Rebekah took it he realized how colossal a mistake it was and he's sorry. Stefan replies that they're doing the same thing Katherine's been doing, repeating their same mistakes over and over. He can't keep doing it. He's going to take a shot at getting Elena the cure and then he's going to cut her out of his life to make a life of his own.
They join Elena at Mel's Diner. She tells them that they have to accept that she does not now and will never want the cure. Damon's like hell no and Elena says that if they don't accept this there will be consequences. Stefan reminds her that he was in the same place she was and she didn't give up until she pulled him back from the edge.
The waitress stops by to top off Elena's coffee. Elena snaps her neck. This is the first consequence of refusing to accept her decision. If they keep it up there will be bodies on top of bodies on top of bodies and it will be all their fault. She departs and Damon wonders if Stefan still thinks cutting and running is his best option.
Question: If Daniel Gillies challenged Matt Bomer to a suit-wearing contest, who would win?
Answer: We all would.
Another really solid episode. The parallels between Klaus and Caroline's situation and Elijah and Katherine's were well drawn and considering they involved not one but two Originals quite compelling. As always Nina Dobrev demands praise for her work, bringing the distinctions between Katherine and Elena and working very well in an episode that from a production standpoint offered her some pretty big challenges. And both Candice Accola and Joseph Morgan deserve kudos for their scenes together, even though I can barely bring myself to care about their storyline.
I am a little confused by a couple of things. Are we to believe that, despite seeing the super-stake breaking off in Klaus's back from an angle that Klaus could not have seen, Klaus was simply tricked into thinking that the tip had actually broken off? And, since he's no longer a witch, how does Silas make himself appear as other people?
The Vampire Diaries is taking a break and will return April 18. Which is my birthday, so you all have plenty of time to shop!
