Episode 4×19, “Pictures of You.” I know this is a Cure song. Although, if this show had to do a Cure song for a title I’d think “Just Like Heaven” would be more suitable, and they could do it for the inevitable episode where the wall between worlds gets torn down and all the monsters are returned from the afterlife, and it would be horribly dark and ironic and bitter. But, “Pictures of You”… Um…Caroline did mention a prom a bunch last episode, so maybe this is connected to that. And if it is prom, I really hope that none of these people win king or queen, since they all attend school maybe once or twice a month.
The first picture is the dress Rebekah wore in Season Three’s “The End of the Affair,” back when Klaus daggered her for the first time and kept her in a coffin since the twenties. The second picture shows the dress Klaus willingly loaned Caroline from his “private collection” (wtf?) so she’d have a nice dress at prom. Now, I’m not suggesting that Klaus, on undaggering his sister in Season Three, somehow obtained her dress, used his mad tailor-try skills to remove the sleeves in order to have enough excess of the antique material to create a rosette to cover up where Rebekah’s bloodied stab wound once was, and saved it, finally giving it to Caroline to wear in a weird, pseudo-incestuous but certainly douchey move to see his crush in his sister’s murder dress. And I’m not suggesting that Rebekah, who consistently gets the short end of every stick in life, not only had to deal with not winning prom queen at the only school dance she’s ever successfully not been dead for, but also had to see Caroline wearing the stolen dress because Klaus loves Caroline as much as he emotionally abuses Rebekah. The same dress he once murdered Rebekah in because she grew a backbone for ten seconds. I’m not suggesting any of this. I’m just saying…I’m not seeing anything that directly disproves my theory.
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Cold Open
- When you know for a fact that you live in a world with ghosts, is there even a need to actually visit a grave site?
- “Jeremy Gilbert: Brother and Friend.” Was anyone else bothered by how…banal this headstone is? Very sparse. Also, given the colorful ways everyone dies on this show, I kind of imagined it would be like one of those “comical” couplets you see at The Haunted Mansion‘s headstones, like: ‘Jeremy Gilbert, great friend in a pinch/ Ye’ve died eight times, but the ninth was the cinch” or something tasteless like that. I mean, not that that would actually happen in the show. Although, come to think of it Switch-Turned-Off Elena (who I will call STO Elena from this point forward) would have been the person who commissioned the headstone, so after she requested ‘Jeremy Gilbert: he was annoying sometimes, but overall it was pretty easy for me to forget he was there’ Stefan or Damon probably swooped in and corrected the request, but didn’t really remember anything about Jeremy beyond his being a brother and friend.
- Okay, so I can’t tell now if that was meant to be a prophetic dream, a regular dream that ghost Jeremy entered to warn her, or just her subconscious telling Bonnie that there’s a freaking fire in the room. But hey, at least we got to see Steven R. McQueen again.
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Everything up until the first commercial break.
- Hey, Salvatore football! That’s been a thing since Season One. And hey, looks like STO Elena has gotten her 8-day sobriety from killing people chip. Good for her too.
- They really waited eight days to have this conversation? On the bright side, I just saw Daniel Gillies’ name in the credits which is awesomesauce because it means my Elijah is back yet again.
- Heh, Klaus remembers that they’ll get their dead brothers back while somehow forgetting that his parents, who have both repeatedly tried to murder him, will be back too.
- Rebekah only has to last one day without vamp privileges? That’s not exactly hard. Just get a few bags of Snickers, do the Game of Thrones marathon challenge, and the day’s already over.
- Damn this is one incestuous inner circle. Since by now everyone has dated and broken up with everyone else they’re all going to the prom as friends.
- Sucks for Caroline, but that dress actually does look much better on Nina Dobrev anyway. And also, I can’t believe it’s taken only 8 1/2 minutes to go from the end of last episode, where STO Elena casually murdered a waitress to punctuate a point, to now, where badass STO Elena backstabs a friend over prom wardrobe choices. Has any other villain gone from bad to meh so quickly?