Saturday, October 31, 2015

Vampire Diaries, Season 7, Episode 4: I Carry My Heart with Me



It’s another flash to the future – 3 years from now when Rick is not dead but is instead making electronics for a doll with ominous music. He also seems to have 2 daughters and a shotgun in case of house guests – in this case Damon who is there to be ominous and threatening.

And to the present and Alaric all angsty over his Evil Rock and hanging around the morgue with the morgue tech telling him he can’t keep Jo’s body around because ewwie.

Just to prove how pointless evacuating Mystic Falls was there are now coach tours to the deserted town. Matt has to show them away and threaten Enzo randomly – Enzo wants access to the town CCTV (why why do they even have CCTV in the town? I mean who is paying for it?).

Damon and Lily are all prepared for their hostage swap with Lily all accusing Damon of being selfish for taking a hostage like she did. And Damon in trouble because Valerie killed Oscar last episode. Oops

Sefan and Damon argue about this – with Stefan blaming Damon for endless bad decisions. Actually, as far as Vampire Diaries goes, kidnapping Oscar wasn’t an entirely terrible decision

Nora and Mary Louise go to see Stefan and Damon looking for Oscar. Good line:
“You reak of blood”
Damon “I’ve been binging”
Stefan “I’ve been judging”

That pretty much sums up a lot of the last seven seasons – except when they swapped roles. Damon tries some desperate lies about Oscar having escaped while they hide his body out the window. That actually works. They also send an unpleasant message with a disposable Woman of Colour – for every hour that Oscar is missing, a student will die

Wait, I lost track – do Damon and Stefan care about civilian casualties at the moment? It’s not like Vampire Diaries is consistent here.

Caroline and Bonnie are all room-matey again (and remind us that Caroline’s skin is vervain which they’re all angsty about but is actually a kind of awesome super power). Bonnie tells Caroline of her trying to let Alaric down about his whole creepy resurrection thing.

Which means Caroline and Stefan’s relationship is still all tense with burny-ness an unresolved Valerie issues. Stefan has a solution to murderous witchpires – a school dance


I was thinking it has been a long time since Vampire Diaries had one of their endless parties/dances/celebrations.

Caroline uses her expert manipulative wiles to convince Nora and Mary-Louise to go to the party with some crafty psychology. She also asks Mary Louise to remove the vervain spell because not being able to show physical affection for her significant other is a pain – as points out Mary Louise, a lesbian from 1900. Bullseye Mary Louise. She won’t remove the spell because she has no wish to invoke Valerie’s vicious revenge.

Nora explains the same thing to Stefan – Valerie is far too vengeful to annoy. Mary Louise has her costume – but Nora declares it not sexy enough and lowers the neckline which throws Mary Louise into a tantrum and more human bodies fall.

The party begins with more Stefan and Elena flirting, and trying to stop the Witchpires killing people and Nora embracing the modern world and Mary Lou clearly out of her depth. Caroline helpfully vocalises their issues to Stefan before they discuss their issues with Valerie.

Mary Louise and Nora’s issues boil over (with another dead WOC) into a full on argument about jealousy and attention seeking and clingy-ness and Mary Lou’s inability to adapt.

Enzo has used that CCTV access to see Valerie going out of the town to get Oscar. He confronts her about it – and Valerie admits it and why. Of course Enzo, who loves Lily, is going to be super duper not happy about Julian coming back.

Enzo goes to ask Lily about Julian who describes him as a saint and the love of her life.

While they’re doing that, Damon drags Oscar’s body to Bonnie and Alaric for some unwise resurrection. I mean the Phoenix Stone causes evil scary visions, surely the best way to deal with this is to combine it with a witchpire, right? Time for unwise experimenting.

They do eventually resurrect Oscar. He also has ravenous hunger – which they’re all quite happy to overlook. Of course Bonnie is now going to resurrect Jo.

Mary Lou, charged up issues, starts to go on a rampage but Stefan stops her with proof that Oscar has been found. Now Stefan gets to play sounding board for Mary Lou’s issues of Nora growing apart while Stefan mopes about Caroline’s issues with Valerie. He then decides to drug Mary Lou in the hope this will help him de-vervain Caroline (technically since Witchpires can syphon, any of them can break the spell).

He then threatens her with death if Nora doesn’t de-spell Caroline. Like everyone else he has, for some reason, forgotten that witchpires are WITCHES so she just steals the stake. Caroline has a better idea, she grabs Nora and makes her suffer Vervain burn until she syphons the spell off. They then break the necks and incapacitate the two witchpires

Do I point out now that they could have left Lily with just two Witchpires at this point?

When they wake up Nora and Mary Lou are all happy and romantic and can now reconcile some of their issues.

Caroline and Stefan can now get it one which they start to do but Caroline actually wants to explain and work through her emotional reactions to Valerie while Stefan is not only clearly not listening but continually ignoring her wish to wait. Speed talking their way through the issues, they then have sex.

At Witchpire House, Valerie is making breakfast and fully planning for Oscar’s return to keep up the charade of not killing him. Lily also wants to talk all about Valerie’s crush on Stefan – Lily wants Valerie to spill any secrets she has – Valerie decides not to.

Oscar’s resurrection isn’t going well – he can’t remember where he was and he is out of control with hunger and he goes on the run. Matt comes and finds Damon explaining that Oscar is going on a rampage – and Damon actually cares whether Matt dies or not. Which is more than I do.

Oscar catches up with the coach full of tourists and eats all of them. Lily finds him and scolds him (it sounds like Oscar is a ripper when he feeds though he wasn’t last episode) and only Damon intervening and breaking Oscar’s neck saves Lily (why save her? Whyyyyy?) so Damon can snark about Lily loving Ripper kids.

Damon can now get Elena and lays down the law to Lily that he’s moving back to Mystic Falls because he now has a conscience about the bodies the witchpires are piling up. Lily also tells him to let Elena go for a little time – and he gets to diary writing. He now decides to find out who he is without Elena

I mean it’s not like he lived for centuries without her?

Anyway they get Elena’s corpse well away from the town and the firing ine.

Matt finds Valerie and points a shotgun at her – and gives her a convenient countdown rather than shooting her – Enzo stops Matt shooting her. Enzo wants to collaborate with Valerie to keep Julian out of the picture

Bonnie resurrects Jo. Honestly of every single character this show has ever had, I can’t think of one I’m less interested in






Hey, the witchpires are down 2 members for no loss on the other side. Chalk this up for a win and look for another one to take out. If I were Bo (POC, silent so the writers have decided to characterise him – because people who can’t talk can’t be fully developed for them it seems) I’d be watching my back, he has disposable written all over him.

For that matter, Stefan and Caroline had two witchpires at their mercy as well. Honestly this episode could have ended with Lily having only two of her “family” left alive. They set the witchpires up to be this major threat (seriously, the original family didn’t prompt them to evacuate the town) but the only reason they’re not all slaughtered is the forbearance of the main cast. And we go from terrified of them to the point of evacuating a town to Stefan and Caroline happily threatening two of them and not caring about the consequences.

So the witchpires will kill innocent humans until they get Oscar back. You know they could kill every human on campus and still not match Damon and Stefan’s kill count – yet this is a threat to them.

Valerie/Stefan/Caroline – do not want. Not only is the whole love triangle thing done to death but no-one is calling out the obvious unhealthiness of this. Stefan and Valerie had sex over a century ago… and Caroline is jealous? This whole idea that having dated in the past is a source of major angst is really creepy. Your romantic partner will probably have had previous romantic partners. Deal with it. Especially if they haven’t seen each other for a century.

Oh poor Bonnie is YET AGAIN doing woo-woo shit she knows is a bad idea.


Mary Lou and Nora – I quite like them so far. They have their own storyline (which is a lot more than any LGBT character has had on the show so far) they are in love, they have addressed and commented on homophobia (albeit with some dubious dismissal of modern homophobia still being a thing) and they have real relationship issues that are not based on clichés or stereotypes – but the honest difficulty of adapting to a new world, to having different boundaries and dependencies. No they’re not the most prominent of major of characters, they’re not going to have scenes near as overt as Stefan and Caroline and I’m certainly not adding Vampire Diaries to my list of shows with major LGBT characters because of it, but so far there’s no real problems with them (even their willingness to kill and slaughter kind of just makes them on par with EVERYONE on this show). Except, of course, they are villains and highly likely to die…