Sunday, December 4, 2016

The Vampire Diaries, Season 8, Episode 6: Detour on Some Random Backwoods Path to Hell



Last week Selene the siren kidnapped the twins for their arcane plot. She meets up with Sybil and Damon and everything starts to get a little less ideal for Seline

Firstly she’s had to accelerate her plans, she didn’t intend to run off with the kids while they were still kids, and certainly not with an Amber Alert to navigate: or to have her sister in tow snarking away and making it clear she’s really really really not over Seline being free for a century and not doing anything to rescue her. It’s not a happy family reunion

Seline’s master plan is basically to trade the twins to Cade in exchange for her and Sybil’s own service. They would get to run off, with a get-out-of-hell-free card and the twins would take their place. Something they have to do of their own free will – which would have been easier with a few more years of brainwashing the kiddies.

Damon starts playing his own game because she’s just given him light – after all, he had embraced this nihilism service to Sybil on the grounds that he was inevitably going to hell and there was absolutely no choice but to go to hell unless he served Sybil. Well, now here’s Seline talking about making a deal and finding a way out. Damon’s all about short cuts and easy options.

Everyone else is also chasing them – firstly we have Sybil further sabotaging them by tormenting Enzo’s brain meats because he dared to leave her, how very dare he. This allows Bonnie to wring her hands and do very little and Stefan to play around in Enzo’s brain to get clues to Selene and Sybil’s location.

Caroline and Alaric are focused ultimately on getting their kids back, to such a degree that Caroline puts her engagement to Stefan on hold because she can’t be distracted (especially if she has to kill Damon to get to the children) by Stefan’s angst and issues. While Alaric completely goes into full rage, openly frightening Seline over the phone with his threats, smashing things and planning to get his daughters away from all things supernatural. He even denies the children are Caroline’s children when she objects to this.

Eventually Seline leads her group to a motel where she plans to make the deal with Cade – but Damon and Sybil have out manouvered her. They lure Stefan in, alone (because he’s a damn noble fool. Beware the Stupid Good alignment) and force him to fight a motel full of angry humans who have been siren’d to kill him

Apparently Stefan lost his super speed and strength somewhere along the way? Did he drop it? Because these humans should have been a brief annoyance. Vampires literally move faster than the human eye can track. We’ve seen these multiple times. This is not a threatening experience for Stefan. And then to have the big show down be a big dude? A big dude. Stefan’s a vampire. I don’t care if he’s fighting the Mountain that Rides, any human relying on pure strength to win a fight will not end well.

Stefan kills the man and is duly angsty. Because this one man troubles him unlike the eleven gajillion people he’s already killed. But it’s ok Damon has an opt out. A get out of hell for free card


Because Damon and Stefan offer themselves to Cade as replacements for Seline and Sybil. Freeing the sirens and saving the children. They’re willing – Damon will do anything to avoid hell and Stefan loves to be a noble sacrifice for the kids – and powerful old vampires are more of a prize than siphoner babies anyway.

Cade accepts

Sybil revels in double crossing her sister

Stefan and Caroline have The Angst

Enzo and Bonnie can go on being all lovey dovey but I don’t believe it

And Caroline drags Alaric on the carpet for daring to say that she’s not the mother to two children she gave birth to and raised and loved just because they don’t share her genes. He rightly apologises. They both wrongly decide that to keep the kids safe they need to take them away from the vampires

Sorry Alaric we need a reality check here. Now I’d be the first to say all the humans in this series really really need to get away from the vampires who randomly kill people for funsies. But they need to get the girls away from vampires to keep them safe?

Seriously? There are two times to the best of my memory when these kids have been under threat. Firstly when they were in the womb and Jo was killed by her evil brother – who killed her because she was a witch and he was a witch and the twins were witches and ultimately no-one cared about vampireness. And now, when the siren Seline targeted them for being siphoners. Again, the presence or otherwise of vampires is irrelevant to this. These children have never ever been targeted because of vamprieness. In fact, since siphoning is both a) an excellent weapon against vampires and b) something the witches consider to be utterly horrendously awful, vampires are highly unlikely to be an issue but would make useful allies.

The whole “you need to get the kids away from the vampires who love them, care for them and will fight for them” to keep them safe makes no sense.


Oh and Matt and Alaric kill Damon. Yeah he goes all grey and staked but we know that’s not going to happen – he’s just made his immortality pact with Cade, so spare me the fake out