Klaus is trying to help his evil daughter Hope, deal with the evil
darkness inside her. By slapping him around with magic
While I generally approve of this, it’s not enough because Hope is the
only person in the world who doesn’t want to hurt Klaus. She wants to hurt
Roman
Hey I’m all for hurting Nazis
Klaus grabs Roman and brings him back to the Originals mansion so she can
torture him horribly to death. I’m all in favour of this. Bring on the Nazi
torture! And then by killing him they will purge all the darkness inside her at
least for a little while.
Elijah disapproves of this - he wants to get Vincent to help with Hope
and her massive shadow problem but Vincent is, for once, far more involved in
half of his coven being dead and all that and not the Mikkaelson’s endless
drama.
Elijah is concerned that letting Hope torture someone to death may be
deleterious to her innocence and all. Also Antoinette isn’t thrilled to hear
that little brother is going to get all murdered. Waaaaah the poor kid.
Yeah can everyone please stop whining about this kid - this “kid” was
around before world war 2. He’s a grown, adult, nazi. Not a child with mummy
issues. Make with the killing already.
Hope begins zapping him and Nazi boy keeps whining about how his mother
is totally dead as well and he didn’t know what he was doing with his naziness.
Alas, Hope doesn’t want to kill him because she’s too nice which is a problem
because she’s being consumed by darkness and evil and nasty whispering which is
going to be bad
While Klaus doesn’t trust Elijah, thinking that he’s maybe adopted
Antoinette’s viewpoints a bit too much and may not entirely be loyal to the
Mikkaelsons any more. But he doesn’t have a great deal of choice in the matter.
Meanwhile Vincent is surprised by all the dead witches waking up again -
because they’ve all been fed vampire blood and poison. Which means they can now
drink blood and become vampires… which is not an easy choice, apparently. Well
not for Ivy, we don’t really check in with the others. She was born a witch,
intends to die a witch and has absolutely no intention in becoming a vampire
especially since she’s had lots and lots of pretty visions of the afterlife
which seems like a pretty nice place.
Unfortunately it’s all a lie. Vincent reveals the Afterlife is a
terrible place where all the ancestors kind of hang around the well of power -
because all that New Orleans ancestor magic is created by imprisoning the dead
in a kind of limbo (ignore the numerous examples of Ancestors outright
dictating to the living for the past 4 seasons). And he doesn’t want that for
Ivy
So he gathers the witches together to tell them this thing they’ve been
doing for generations is totally unjustified and wrong when it’s going to
affect someone he loves. And they should really stop it… and everyone agrees. I
mean we cut from Vincent making a big dramatic point about how unjust it is to
everyone casting the spell to delete the well of power. Welp I guess he was
very very very very convincing. This means Ivy can now shuffle off her mortal
coil and hopefully whatever afterlife she ends up in will give her at least one
plot line. I assume all the other vampire witches die as well. I guess? It’s
not really explained.
Declan is getting all angsty and deciding to research his dead clergy
relatives (they died back in season 1? Or possibly 2? Honestly I don’t care
enough to click links to find out. They’re dead anyway) and Josh has to play
supporter for a brief moment before actually flirting with a guy. Oh my gods
the show remembered he was gay. Oh my gods the show remembered he has a life
outside of serving others. And oh my god the show remembered Aidan who is dead…
but only so Josh can push the other guy away. Yeah way to remember grief that
had been forgotten for several seasons just so you can nip any possibility of a
storyline with this guy
But it’s worse! Yep - this is for pathos. See Marcel has been lured into
an ambush by the Nazi vampires and despite being super powerful awesome he’s
easily captured because they have a witch and on this show the relative power
of witches and vampires and originals all changes every 5 minutes depending on
what the plot needs
Why does a witch want to capture Marcel and help the Nazi vampires
establish vampire supremacy? Who even knows, it’s The Originals no-one’s
motive has to make sense. Especially not nameless Black cannon foddder!
So the Nazi vampires are extracting Marcel’s hybrid venom because they
think it can kill Hope - I mean, there’s absolutely no indication that a bullet
won’t kill hope - but why not. Josh comes to the rescue, killing the nameless
witch and allowing Marcel to slaughter the others. But Josh gets stabbed with a
syringe of venom they just happened to have ready. In the heart.
And I’m not. I’m not going to even pretend to recount the attempts of
Marcel to pretend to be sad about this. I’m not going to even pretend this
death is meaningful or touching or emotional or any fecking thing but part of
the ongoing pattern of homophobia on this show. Collateral damage on a random
fight that was pointless and unnecessary - this meant nothing. It added
nothing. It doesn’t support the plot or character development or any damn
thing. They just killed Josh off for gaydeath drama
Because next to this Antoinette and Elijah rally all the Nazi vampires
telling them to go to war because it was time and they have their own Original
and RAAWR NAZIS. And when they’re all gathered together Hope arrives and
magically nukes them all
All Elijah’s arguments about removing her humanity over torturing one Nazi vampire to death seem to go out the window when it involves mass murdering a whole room full of them.
But hey it defeats the darkness in Hope at least for some time and hey
I’m not going to argue against slaughtering the nazis. I even said they should
have done this like 6 episodes ago and saved a lot of time and am bemused why
they didn’t. But it does make Josh’s death even more pointless - the whole
kidnapping of Marcel et al did nothing to the plot line because the Nazis are
now dead. Josh was just thrown away. For no good reason
For some reason the church where Hope did the murdering also had Declan
in it -Klaus swoops in with vampire blood to save him from dying and forcing his
pointless self on us for the rest of the season. But he came with some other
guy as well who was crushed by Hope’s magic
That means she just killed someone
Which means she’s activated her werewolf genes...
Oh fuck this.
How many LGBTQ characters do you have to kill, The Originals? But
not just kill - this series and The Vampire Diaries has a legacy of
dropping LGBTQ people into the closet, reducing them to bit parts, devaluing
them compared to straight characters and dismissing their relationships -
Keelin and Freya need to run, but since they’re baltedly introduced and on
shaky foundations maybe they’ll be the ones who lived
What’s more galling than the death is the scene. They belatedly remember
Josh is gay - something that has barely been remembered for this characters
since Aiden died because his life and his relationships have never mattered.
They invoked Aiden - a man whose death no-one gave a shit about - only to
establish some belated pathos. Or maybe they’re playing the Star Trek Discovery
game where it’s totally not GayDeath if their ghosts have a moment after death.
And then having remember “oh shit, Aiden exists, someone pull him out of the
pile of gay corpses) they decide to have Josh bond with Marcel. He calls Marcel
friend and family and talks about how he’s super loyal and he knows loyalty is
Marcel’s thing ever since Marcel kidnapped him and murdered his friend in front
of him. LOYALTY
Let’s be clear, in five seasons of Originals, Marcel has done nothing
for Josh. Never once has Marcel treated Josh as a friend or family. Josh
doesn’t even exist when he has his own life going on - he exists in the plot
box, ignored by everyone until they need stuff: whether that’s playing grossly
stereotyped Gay Best Friend to Davina (someone else who Josh served faithfully
in a one way relationship without any friendship or getting anything back) or
just being Klaus’s and Marcel’s lacky - not because either valued him or were
“friends” or “family” but because he was useful and servile. This sad goodbye
scene is a blatant attempt to retcon what has been a pretty appallingly treated
character since the beginning
I’m also really unhappy with Ivy’s continued death - again, nice
afterlife does not change the fact she’s been killed off nor does it change
that she has been so poorly used. She was parachuted in in this series to give
Vincent a love interest to fridge - and extending that fridging for an episode
doesn’t change that. Ivy will never be more than a love interest with some
convenient foresight
Even the whole well of ancestors thing now seems quite ridiculous and
utterly self serving. Like Vincent didn’t give a shit about all those Ancestors
in the Well until Ivy was dying. Before then he’s totally cool about turning
the dead into his own personal battery. And what happened to previous seasons
when they sacrificed to the Ancestors, when the Ancestors regularly tortured
people to make them do their will etc etc etc?
