Episode 5×4, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Is this a play on the John Donne or the Ernest Hemingway? Either way, somebody’s dying. That, or maybe we’ll get a war flashback.
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Cold Open
- And diaries are relevant yet again! Whoot! (not that I love the diaries on this show, I’m just a fan of titles making sense).
- “You are a vampire, not a caveman.”—Damon. I don’t know why, Damon’s fastidiousness about prohibiting Stefan from littering during their casual discussion of his mass murders is really cute. He’s always been houseproud, who knew he was road proud as well.
- Vampire Diaries trope: car crash! This time Damon’s car (damn, I’ll miss that pretty car, and it’s outlived most of the humans on this show).
- “I get it, you’re the fun brother.” Aw, I like when the writers allow Paul Wesley to smile.
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Everything up until the first commercial break.
- Is that bell story true? Not that it couldn’t be, it’s just that I know a different origin story for bell strings at grave sites.
- Amnesia Stefan is so cute.
- Vampire Diaries trope: back room of the Mystic Grill only exists for people to get attacked in.
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Everything up until the second commercial break.
- “What kind of name is Honoria Fell?”-Stefan “Shh, you’re kind of the one who killed her” -Damon. “oh.” [shrug].–Stefan. I hope Stefan doesn’t get his memory back for awhile. It is just so much fun to revisit the show’s history (while mispronouncing it) with a Stefan who is so easygoing about everything.
- “On the bright side our mother died of consumption” “Oh good” (both sincere). Screw it, I can’t start quoting everything in the episode. From this point on, just pretend there’s a transcription here of the memory lane with my big lulz beside it because this is awesome.
- The Stamon bromance was so much more fun than the flirty Stelena romance. In the words of Jesse Pinkman, boo, bitch! It is pretty funny to watch Stefan put his moves on her like she’s just some girl he finds hot instead of the specialist girl in the world though. Nicely done difference.
- Did she just go splat on the sidewalk in broad daylight just to prove she could? We’ve found that line between hardcore and badass, people; she’s firmly and only on one side of it.
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Everything up until the third commercial break.
- So, I assume Michael Trevino’s just never coming back then? bummer.
- Loved: that Damon cared about Elena’s feelings, that he didn’t care about losing Bonnie because he’d lose out on her magic, that he didn’t want to have to lie to Elena, and that he cared about Jeremy. Hated: that Damon didn’t actually seem to care about losing Bonnie herself. Still, it ended with Damon giving Jeremy a hug, and that fixes so many things for me.
- The first time Elena saw Stefan’s vamp face she held it and told him not to hide? Um..nope. Or, depends what you mean by vamp face. First time she saw it kind of veiny it was in the reflection of her kitchen window and she thought he was having contact lens problems until he willed the veins away. When she found out he was a vampire (and thus had a vamp face, but no veiny face) she confronted him on his doorstep but was terrified and wanted the truth but nothing else to do with him. Without actually going back to doublecheck, I think the first time Elena saw him in full on veiny face after knowing he was a vampire was probably when he was staking Vicki to death in front of her while she lay bruised and bleeding with a sobbing Jeremy in her arms, so I don’t think at that point she was about to tell him not to hide. So anyway, this scene, bullshit. Current day Elena, it’s okay to say you loved Stefan far beyond the point of self-preservation (with full accuracy!) without having to resort to false YA romance cliches. And you’re emotionally cheating on your boyfriend. Cut it out.
- I’ve really enjoyed the writing of this whole episode until this one single scene. It wasn’t abysmal, but…could have used a few more rewrites. Like, a million more.
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Everything up until the fourth commercial break.
- Paranormal Activity conventions! And to highlight just how isolated Matt is on this show, Matt’s immediate plotline consists of him alone, watching a video of himself sleeping alone, until he’s spoken to via camera by another character who’s inhabiting his own body. Alone.
- I love Caroline’s resigned ‘for fuck’s sake’ kind of sigh and slouch. It must really be exhausting sometimes to be the perky friend in this group.
- What I like about Jesse in the crypt? It shows that he’s not secretly anything secretly supernatural or Council-like. Or at least, if he is (a là Season One Tyler) he’s unaware of it at this point. Yay for a human seeming character just being a human now and then.
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Everything up until the fifth commercial break.
- I literally do not understand why amnesiac Stefan is this worked up over his brother he doesn’t remember dating his ex-girlfriend who he also doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember the intimacy of the relationship, he doesn’t remember the reasons for the relationship…please don’t make me long for Post-Break Up Butthurt Wangsty Stefan™ of Season Four because he was annoying as hell but he at least made reasonable sense. This is just freaking weird. I mean, no reaction to learning he murdered a father he doesn’t remember, but willing to go apeshit over not currently dating Elena? Okay, whatever.
- Elena burned all of her diaries last Season. Now Stefan’s burning his. Soon Alaric’s forgotten hard drive will be the only diary still existent on The Vampire Diaries.
- “I think we just got dumped.” -Damon. Hee. I said I wasn’t going to quote every line I liked because that would be all the lines, but a lot of the lines since then have kind of sucked, so props for this one.
- Damon, I 100% would have led with “I only learned this an hour ago and knew nothing about it before then” before telling her the news. Especially since you’ve been withholding stuff and pissing her off because of it just a few episodes ago.
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Everything before the end.
- At least Bonnie got to see one person cry over her. I know not everyone is a crier and some people were told off screen but the lack of tears was starting to get weird.
- I’m so glad there’s more crying.
- Is there some significance to the tree stump I’m forgetting? Aside from Caroline and Jesse flirting near it earlier?
- Oh my god, feathers. this leads to arguably my very Bonnie moment of all time, definitely my favorite Bonnie magic related moment, which is this one. It was so innocent and full of beauty and friendship and fun secrets revealed. Bonnie looks lovely, and magic was something fun for her, and unrelated to death or power games or manipulation or anything else. It was just a new thing that she could do and she was just a young girl on the brink of discovering her power. Oh my god, the feathers do so much more for me now than all that cheerleading memorabilia that never (to me) authentically felt like Bonnie’s backstory can.
- And Damon has her grimoire. And that’s also so sad…all that he had to go through to get to it in Season One for his own monomaniacal purposes, never caring about stepping all over Bonnie, and now (I choose to believe) caring about her and having the grimoire coming to serve as a reminder that had he killed her then he never would have gotten to know her.
- Bonnie feels a lot more dead to me now that she has in all the episodes since her death. They wouldn’t actually, really kill off Bonnie for good, would they?
- They had a Birdy song play at Aunt Jenna’s funeral too. I kind of love Birdy’s voice, you know?
- Hm, I finally accept that Michael Trevino must be gone for good from this show and then he appears. The writers played me like a fiddle. It’s really nice to see him, though I’d like a follow up convo in the next..let’s see….two minutes before the episode ends. Crap. Next week then. I hope they explain what’s going on, and I hope it’s not more generic werewolf emancipation activism.
- um…..I’ve said it in episodes past but Whitmore College really is the crappiest school in the world.
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Some Final Thoughts
- Nina Dobrev was among the weaker actors in Season One (especially the first half)…and I feel okay saying that because I think she was arguably the strongest actor in Season Two, but I have to say, grading on a Nina Dobrev curve, that her acting sucked in this episode. What I mean is, mannerisms and voice-wise, she was mostly indistinguishable from her switch-turned-off acting from Season Four, and the writing really wasn’t helping the problem. “Hey, you have amnesia so I get to flirt with you again without any consequences at all. See that bridge? My parents died there two years ago while I was in the car with them. Then you tried to kill me there half a year ago. Then I actually did die there a few months after that. Let’s make out. Oh wait, I’m dating the only other person you currently trust. Wait, why are you upset? I’m beautiful?” I mean, that scene was so fucking weird and her performance was so fucking weird and that setting was so fucking weird and that romantic song choice was so fucking weird and the only thing that made sense was amnesiac Stefan’s reaction except that that was way too much of an overreaction for some girl he just met and so even that was just so fucking weird. This episode was so fucking weird.
- I get that the writers wanted to demonstrate how much Bonnie meant to everyone by showing how important she was in their lives: “I wish Bonnie was here…” et cetera, and so they peppered the episode with it so that news of her death would have this emotional punch. I just wish that 99% of these wishes hadn’t come out as “I wish Bonnie was around so she could use her magic to help me with my problems” following a however-many-month dry spell of no one noticing she wasn’t around.
- But a lot of that was made up for by the funeral. (I know it was technically a wake, but that word sounds weird to me). That was pretty lovely, as was everyone’s reactions. I also love Bonnie’s self-eulogy (and the town of Mystic Falls where a ghost can conceivably give his/her own eulogy). Bonnie’s a bit more angelic every year, but this speech was all about loving everyone else and wanting them to have a great life. Bit by bit Bonnie’s really become the heart of the group. It also makes a nice bookend for last year’s “Memorial,” which was all about looking back at fallen loved ones through comemoration, and here the eulogizing was about honoring them through living well.
- I’m of two minds about Bonnie’s tree stump burial site. On the one hand, I find it so sad that so many friends and allies fall that this group has to resort to secret burials in unmarked places so the authorities don’t catch on. On the other hand, as a great witch Bonnie was all about ties to nature and the elements, so it is very right that her resting place is in such a pretty nature setting.
- One other thought on Bonnie’s funeral. Well actually two thoughts, and they’re about the funeral attendance. First of all, why didn’t amnesiac Stefan come? He seemed a) like he wanted to pay his respects in that conversation with Caroline, B) like he didn’t have anything better to do, and C) like he really enjoyed making Damon and Elena feel awkward and uncomfortable. Come to think of it, I guess it was writerly intervention more than character discretion (or no one let him know). Second thought. It really drives home how much loss and tragedy these people have suffered when you see they’re at a wake, you look up, and you realize that there are only five living people standing there. Six, once the exiled Tyler shows up. This show is really dark, y’all. Come to think of it even more, of the six left standing, every one of them have died at least once. Freaking dark, I tell you.
- Okay, so then the title. Does the bell toll for Bonnie, or for Jesse? I guess that’s the philosophical question. On the one hand, Bonnie’s death gets some production and fanfare, some tears, she gets to extend her love and people remember her. Jesse dies in a lab, murdered, and no one but his murderer even knows of it. And that’s the thing, in Mystic Falls, every one dies (truer there than any other town anywhere ever because it is a god-forsaken hell on earth) and some deaths just go quietly unremarked and some don’t. So when the bells tolls for some it is tolling for all the ones it doesn’t actually toll for, just like in the Donne poem. That’s what I think the episode was saying. On the other hand, Bonnie actually died months earlier in a subterranean tunnel without any of her friends or family even realizing it so I guess some other bell for someone else had to toll for her first. hmm…
- Wes Maxfield injected Jesse with a serum that (presumably) killed him after learning that he had vampire blood in his system. It’s too soon to say too much about a plotline that’s barely begun, but just about the only things I like about it so far are: 1) I assume this is a part of a secret Cabal Elena’s dad was once a part of, and I want to learn more about Elena’s parents, 2) this means there’s a better chance that Jesse will be sticking around, and I like Jesse so far, and 3) this means that maybe their roommate (whose name I can’t remember) might still be around after all, and I thought she was pretty cool too. Otherwise, there’s enough I dislike that I will actually make a list.
- killing a youthful man who’s already stronger than you, knowing he’s going to be coming back from the dead with superhuman powers, is a surefire way to get yourself killed.
- (If we’re to assume that the poison he used to kill Jesse with also contains some “Obey us” serum in it so there would be no murdering) I also get the sense that the Cabal is familiar enough, lab experiment-wise, with vampires, so I don’t get why coming upon Jesse with vamp blood in his system is such an opportunity. You’d think they’d already have access to blood whenever they want it, either because they’d already have vamps working for them, or vamps contained in cages, because otherwise how else would they know enough about it to know what it looks like under microscopes (or to, theoretically, make an effective “Obey us” serum.). So really, can’t they just make new vamps whenever they want to?
- Shane found all these free range vampires for Connor to kill last year. How did he not know about this Cabal in his own back yard?
- I’m getting uncomfortable Season Four Buffy vibes. And the Walsh-Riley-Adam thing was just the absolute worst thing you could possibly ripoff if you had to rip something off. Seriously.
- Students don’t go to their microbiology teachers for health checkups when they feel whoozy. They’d get even more suspicious if they were hooked up to a million electrodes before a simple blood draw was analyzed. Either Jesse is dumber than we’ve been led to believe or he’s already been experimented on just a bit.
- I said this already so I won’t be too repetitive, but I don’t get why Amnesiac Stefan is reacting so strongly to Delena’s “betrayal.” And why he trusts Caroline so completely when all she’s done, essentially, is told him not to eat her friend and then called him compassionate. Unless they’re establishing a love square between Caroline, Tyler, Jesse, and Stefan, which on the one hand is strange but on the other hand, refreshingly, ends the black hole of on-again off-again Stelena.
- Re: Stefan’s reaction. The only other thing I can think of, is that maybe it does go back to what Qetsiyah was saying last week. That the blood link between Amara/Silas doppelgangers is so strong that, even once all context and memory is stripped away, a doppelganger just can’t bear beyond all anguish to not be with the other one. But if that’s the case, then I don’t really get why Stefan gave up Katherine so easily in the first place once her original compulsion of him wore off, since he’s never looked back. And he’s initiated a respectful break up with Elena a few different times too. So…this is some weird wangst.
- So Silas and Qetsiyah just took the week off after their Edward Albee attempts last week? Or, even more strangely, our heroes didn’t even worry over them? Even a little? I’m glad they’re not dominating every single episode but considering that the two big issues this week are Bonnie’s death and Stefan’s amnesia, and they’re essentially the reason for both, you’d think their names would at least pop up in a sentence.
Conclusion: I had more fun with the opening few acts than any other opening this Season. And then Bonnie’s wake and on was pretty great. But everything in between….not the greatest. Squandered most of my good will. I’d even nominate Stelena’s flirty scene by the bridge as worst scene of the year because that was so freaking inappropriate. Mostly out of tribute to poor Bonnie I will elevate “For Whom The Bell Tolls”‘s grade to fourteen destroyed diaries out of twenty.