So Katherine is back and has Vicky ringing her doom bell.
Every time Damon kills her she just comes back because she’s already dead
So Damon just stays there killing her every 5 minutes, occasionally
switching off with Caroline when he gets bored until such time as she returns
to hell permanent because, as her mother has just shown. Hey they could do the
same for Katherine. Problem solved!
Except they don’t do that. They act like there’s
absolutely nothing they can do to stop Vicky ringing the hell bell. They even
get Matt and daddy matt (it’s the last episode of the last season, damned if I’m
going to remember this pointless character’s name) to appeal to her. Rather
than just, y’know, sit on her. This
whole scene is so bizarre. You literally half more than half a dozen people all
fretting because they can’t stop a normal human woman climbing a clock tower
and ringing a bell. Hell, Matt and Daddy Matt could just disable the bell?! This
makes zero sense.
Bonnie is nearly killed by using her magic to survive the
fire but the gang manages to revive her – but not before she has a near death
dream all about… Elena. In which she declares herself ready to die for the sake
of Elena waking up again. Of course she does.
She’s been gone for 2 seasons. Bonnie I still all about
precious Elena.
Oh and Katherine shows up (hi Nina Dobrev, you thought
you were free) to tell everyone that Cade was all her fault because even the
devil doesn’t get to actually have any agency outside the machinations of the
vapid denizens of Mystic Falls. She also intends to kill everyone and exchange
lots of really petty relationship barbs with Damon and Stefan and really, these
people are centuries old. Get. Over. It. She’s also run off with Elena’s body
Time for everyone to evacuate Mystic Falls, including
Alaric and the girls. Alaric insists that Caroline come with him so the girls
don’t lose their mother – which she eventually agrees to. She can’t stay with
Stefan – who insists on staying to try and convince Damon to leave but Damon
won’t leave without Elena. It’s all very emotional and messy
Thankfully Bonnie has a brainstorm with the help of some
research decides she can totally destroy hell – with hellfire (just don’t try
to analyse this too hard, it’s Vampire
Diaries and the last season) if they burn Katherine up with it; they just
have to make sure Katherine is caught up in it when Vicky rings the bell the
last time and Bonnie uses the magic she-doesn’t-have-but-does to direct the
unleashed hell fire
So who gets to hold Katherine? A Salvatore brother!
Stefan and Damon virtually mud wrestle to be the one to sacrifice themselves, each
demanding to be the martyr more because each needs the redemption more and
enoooooough of this damn theme. Damon resorts to compulsion and, after a fake
out, Stefan injects Damon with his blood turning Damon human (of course) and
knocking him in a side passage out of the path of the fire (because it works
that way and the radiated heat totally doesn’t kill him)
The epic moment comes from Bonnie’s spell in which she
invokes a gazillion Bennet ancestor and Oh dear gods WHY WASN’T THIS THE
STORYLINE ALL SEASON?! WHHHYYYYY?!
Yay Katherine is dead
Yay Stefan is dead.
Wait… oh, no – sorry scratch that, we’re sad about Stefan
being dead. My bad.
Boo Matt isn’t dead. How did he make it to the last
season?!
Elena wakes up because Bonnie has now broken Kai’s spell
which would have been interesting if anyone had even tried to do this at any
point in the last 2 seasons.
And we have the finale. The actual close of everything.
We have a reunion with a gazillion characters: Jeremy, Elena’s parents, Liz
Thorbes, Lexi: yes half of these are dead but to remove the sting of Stefan’s
sacrifice we also have a lot of afterlife scenes. The implication
And I can kind of get why they went there because they
didn’t want to end on a low note. But I think a solemn reflection over all of
those they’d lost would have been better than just “we were all reunited in the
afterlife!” to remove that poignancy in favour of fluffiness.
However, this does allow me my headcannon: Meteors fell
on Mystic Falls. Everyone died. Which is why they’re all the same age in the afterlife!
I’ve said from the beginning that this season was shaky.
The problem goes waaay back to Black Hole Elena. It was a running joke on this
show that everything revolved around Elena (behold this week). But when she
left she left a void which nothing really came close to filling. They could
have recovered it but centring someone else or another plot line – since all
the plot lines recently have orientated around magic rather than vampirism,
switching to Bonnie would have made sense – but they stripped Bonnie of their
powers and left us with a kind of gelatinous mess – like a person with all
their bones removed all kind of wobbly and structure-less. Sure Elena being the
centre of everything was annoying but they made her the major load bearing
character – and didn’t try to prop things up
Which left us with a season – well 2 seasons really – of the
show not really knowing what to do, just kind of throwing out plot lines
without the time to develop them. Take Cade – there’s a meaty plot line there
but it was completely undeveloped and lacked any and all potential or real
explanation
Caroline/Alaric/Children – another plot line kind of
flopping around. Bonnie and Enzo? More flopping around without foundation and development.
And these could have been meatier but
they weren’t because we just kept throwing more in, especially to drag in irrelevant
characters: Gemini coven, Matt (oh dear gods No-one cares so much about Matt
for the time spent on him), Alaric – and whose damn idea was it to bring Kai
back?! Or we had lots of plots revolving around everyone utterly worshipping
Mystic Falls and wanting to preserve it no matter what
The thing is the plot lines that could have been
developed – which had foundation: Stefan and Caroline, Damon and Bonnie, Bonnie
and magic. These were well established relationships
That ending scene where you had Bonni surrounded by her
ancestors – which would link so well to how the Covens have been developed in The Originals WHERE WAS THAT? There was
your storyline! There was two seasons of storyline right there – Bonnie and the
Bennet witches! Especially with the added motive of bringing Bonnie back by
breaking the spell. Add in Caroline and her magical off spring with Stefan and
Damon as SIDE CHARACTERS: Damon supporting his utter best friend Bonnie in her
journey of self-discovery, Stefan discovering where he rests in Caroline’s
life.
Instead we had a whole season – 2 whole seasons – with no
real direction, no real development and lots of. Vampire Diaries has ended – but in reality it ended two seasons ago
but the zombie of this show kept groaning forwards never able to find enough
brains to return to coherence
Inclusionwise, well – there was Bonnie (yes there was
Cade – the devil – but he wasn’t even developed enough to be a coherent enemy.
And then to have all his activity be put down to Katherine’s manipulations? How
utterly undermined! Throw in Dorian, the walking Stefan
Which leaves us for Bonnie… who has been so lost and
confused for so long and we’ve written post after post about her because she
deserves better, so much better.
We have no LGBTQ characters in this season
for which I am sincerely grateful.
This episode was appropriate for the end of not just the
season but the end of the entire show: it was full of sappiness and happy-dappy
reunions and closed everything down with so much fluffiness and joy and light
with every character coming back to wave at us. Which is an excellent way to
end a show, it acknowledges everything that has come before, and gives it a
send off. Sappy, but appropriate
And it is now over… it’s always a little sad to lose a
show after so many season, but I think everyone will agree it was time.
