Episode 5×6, “Handle With Care.” Um…weird title. This sounds kind of like the name for a comfortfic. Anyway, on to the episode!
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Cold Open
- Shouldn’t Silas’s mass hypnosis of the town still be in effect? Why is everyone just chill with Katherine and not even recognizing her?
- Heh, a grey streak. And Elena’s still got her growing-out red ones (have I complimented the show on sticking to that subtle bit of continuity, by the way? Almost no show would). I wonder if this means that a third doppelganger is going to show up soon.
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Everything up until the first commercial break.
- Okay, so I had wondered last time why Damon would exclude Elena from the “bring Bonnie back” plan but include her in the “bring Silas back” plan, and now I have my answer: he did include her in the “bring Bonnie back” plan. New questions are when did that happen and why did he change his mind? I mean, considering how much the show wants us to care about this relationship, these are kind of important issues to show on screen.
- I don’t think I’ve complimented Paul Wesley as Silas yet and I really should have. He’s hamming it up with all he’s got, but it’s the best kind of ham, full of energy and verve. I’ve been enjoying it. He probably has the freshest energy of any actor this season.
- This is all going to go so, so badly. I don’t know how yet. But when both opposing sides of the plotline (let’s call them the Silas camp and the Qetsiyah camp) are cheerfully excited about the same exact outcome (mortal Silas dying that exact day) then someone somewhere is woefully overlooking some “oh shit” level of detail.
- What the crap, Damon? You told Elena about everything except for the Anchor? After murdering Katherine in front of her, and then watching her resurrected self walk out the front door, and then watching Silas’s regalvanized (now witchly) self do the same, what the hell did you two talk about all night?
- I want Silas to throw a fireball. No one on this show has thrown a fireball before. That would be awesome.
- Oh come on, Silas knows about Damon loving Katherine. There was that funny call back in “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
- And yes, by the way, I know that everyone in the show is suddenly calling Qetsiyah “Tessa” now, and it’s pissing me off, because I put off memorizing how to spell her stupid name for half a year until it looked like there was absolutely no way to avoid it and now the show wants to go ahead and take pity on me? Screw it, I’m writing “Qetsiyah.”
- Ah, I want Bonnie back and all but screw it, this actress is cute as a button and I think I’m going to half to be Team Qetsiyah for at least this episode.
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Everything up until the second commercial break.
- Heh, Katherine can’t retain the memory of Dr. Jesse-Killer’s name any better than I can. That makes me feel a little better.
- I find it strange that Caroline’s considering this. Not only does Katherine know nothing about the situation she’s assuring her she’ll protect her through, not only does Katherine have a history of abandoning and/or selling allies out when the going gets inconvenient, not only is Katherine now human and therefore unable to do much of anything anyway, but…Katherine is the person who killed her in the first place. This hurts more than when her murder victim Jeremy had to help her, because at least then there was a very understandable motive.
- Damon didn’t tell Elena about snapping Stefan’s neck either? I mean, after omitting the Anchor that admittedly seemed an even less likely revelation, but seriously, how was she so chill with what he did and with no followup questions when she knew, basically, nothing?
- Elena, um…you know that I am, by pure default, one of your bigger fans on the internet…but going to the cabin is pure idiocy. You’ll only make things worse with Stefan but who cares, but Qetsiyah clearly wants to murder you. If you’re that anxious to help out then start reading Bonnie’s grimoires or something. Lord knows why no one else has so far.
- I can’t help myself the mayor joke was funny. Paul Wesley can be awesome sometimes. And I’m very happy they didn’t show Ghost Bonnie right then because I already feel guilty for laughing.
- Forget being Team Qetsiyah. Not so much because she hurt Ewena’s feewings or anything banal like that, but because she engineered a situation where they’re mystically forced to sit in a single bedroom cabin for a whole episode and passive-aggressively snipe at each other for an entire episode. No one wants to watch that. Team Silas! Whoot! He may make casual jokes about people he’s recently murdered, but at least he does it to lighten my mood.
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Everything up until the third commercial break.
- “It’s called being secure. I’m sure you know a little bit about that by the way you wear your hair.” –Damon to Silas. Ha ha. I love how much this show makes funny of Stefan’s (or Stefan’s twin’s) hair.
- God help me, Caroline and Katherine together are kind of cute. Elena 2.0 and Rebekah were cute too. What’s with that?
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Everything up until the fourth commercial break.
- Katherine’s “Elena” dress is so pretty.
- I’m starting to love Human Katherine’s love of food.
- But shouldn’t Silas’s mortality also be making his teeth and hair…? No, whatever, it’s magic or something. Moving on.
- Crap, moving on means moving back to the cabin.
- So, is Silas just the least incurious master villain ever or something? He ignores phone calls that make Damon defensive and volatile and repeat Silas’s name a million times. He ignores when his two helpers leave the building for a private chat? Yeah, Damon, Silas is obviously about to chain you up because he’s not an idiot.
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Everything up until the fifth commercial break.
- Dude, that knife is the anchor. I feel like I’m Ghost Bonnie screaming at people who won’t hear me. Damon, you were just holding the freaking thing. Anyway, where the hell is Matt anyway? He was in charge of the knife last I saw. Maybe he’s still making creepy movies of himself sleeping.
- The “Augustine” vampire of the “Augustine” secret society. There’s the Biblical connotation that I’m not appreciating because I’ve never studied that, but I’m immensely pleased all the same. I went to college in a city called St. Augustine and so suddenly I can pretend like this secret society during their college years is an unwitting shoutout to me.
- I am curious though, why did Dr. Jesse-killer think that Elena was a vampire? Other than she and Caroline repeatedly hissing the word “vampire” in every conversation they had, they really didn’t do anything all that suspicious.
- How did non-fatally stabbing Qetsiyah allow Stefan and Elena to leave the cabin? I thought you had to kill the witch who cast the spell. And way to go Stefan, Qetsiyah’s hold on sanity was hanging by a wisp of a frayed cobweb already. Maybe she’ll be the one to go all Dark Willow.
- Amara’s still alive! (called it last week). But now Silas jumped the gun and is mortal and will die of heart disease in another 50 years if he’s lucky enough to live that long so sucks to be him.
- Meanwhile, I really wish they (the writers) had chosen the Silas/Amara stuff to have happened like 3,000 years ago or 1,500 years ago or any other number you want, because they keep talking about immortals and resurrection and the Other Side from these people from 2,000 years ago and every time they do I get that involuntary flinch of ‘oh crap is it Jesus oh yeah it absolutely isn’t.’ And I’d rather watch my vampire melodrama without that going on in my brain.
- I call foul. Amara’s clothes are made from natural fibers. They would, at best, have decomposed right off of her. No way would they have ossified into stone along with her skin and hair. Or, for that matter, un-ossified like new when the rest of her did.
- Anyway, yay! a new Nina Dobrev role.
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Everything before the end.
- You know what will happen soon is that this show will have sixteen characters and half of them will be played by the same two actors. Do you think Ian Somerhalder ever gets jealous and tries to push for a Damon android plotline or something?
- Damon just left her tied up and gagged in the car until it would have the most dramatic interest? Poor crazy Amara. So far all we know about you is you’ve backstabbed two people and been insane (hell, you’ve been in a box for 2,000 years; lacking catatonia speaks to mental brilliance) but now I’m Team Amara. Screw you, Damon.
- Stefan gets his memories back in the most painful way possible. He really is the whipping boy of the season, isn’t he.
- Oh, Qetsiyah’s parting shot….right. Qetsiyah’s been so badly damaged by the people she loved that she thinks everyone else also has a hair trigger willingness to believe their loved ones have fucked them over irrevocably and should be hated! Which…Delena didn’t find an extremely well-concealed box they didn’t know they were supposed to be looking for anyway, because they were respecting Stefan’s right to be off by himself, because when they didn’t do that last year he went all Butthurt Wangsty. Qetsiyah found the box (after knowing it was there and choosing to let it sit for the whole summer, thousands of drownings included) because she has magic. Big whoop. All she proved just now was she could have restored his memories at any point and has just chosen not to until it was convenient for her.
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Some Final Thoughts
- I can’t keep track of who we’re supposed to root for anymore. Like, seriously. You can’t go by who the good guys are siding with because in this show they often side with the villain of the week for their own reasons (or are the villain of the week, but that’s a whole other thing). And wanting Bonnie back is a great goal, but 1) moving heaven and hell for one person’s life isn’t really in keeping with the balance of nature, which is supposed to be an important thing, and 2) these people seem to think that only Witch Silas is capable of doing the s-witch-aroo spell to get Bonnie back. So anyway, them siding with Silas (for now) doesn’t tell me I’m supposed to root for Silas. I’m more talking about the big agenda items. Is it vital that the Other Side stays in place for some reason, giving me a reason to root for Qetsiyah? Is the Other Side an unfair prison and Silas is some Moses figure who will help thousands of people if he wins? I know both of them are working from purely selfish standpoints, but I think for me, as a viewer, the storyline would benefit from some character reiterating what the actual cosmic stakes are should either character “win.” Right now, the only real guidepost is who’s amusing me more from week to week.
- I would also like to get our resident vampires’ perspectives. And Jeremy’s too, since he’s actually been to the Other Side. Don’t they have any sort of opinion on knowing that, when they eventually die no matter how many days or centuries later, they’re going to end up in this mystical purgatory? Will they want to be there? I’d like to hear someone chime in on that.
- Where’s Nadia this week? They were very unclear last week about the note they ended the Kat/Nadia relationship (e.g. did she still intend to kill Kat, is there now love there, etc) but unless Katherine literally ran away, I don’t know why she’d be apart from Nadia after that bombshell. And if she ran away, why is she hanging out with the same people where expert tracker Nadia would be most likely to check first?
- Why did Qetsiyah care if Silas went to the Other Side or the original afterlife or wherever else whatever when, secretly, she knew that Amara was on Earth anyway, couldn’t join him no matter what (there being only one Cure) and so Silas would still be screwed out of an eternity with Amara? Seems like a perfect solution.
- I reiterate my objections from a few episodes ago, with regards to all the lab experimentation stuff. I speculated that they already had or had once had a vampire in their cages, so to speak, and I’ve been proven right (yay!). But that being the case, then what does it matter that Jesse had vamp blood in his veins? They already had a steady supply available if they wanted to make more vamps.
- What do you want to bet that the Augustine Vampire was once a Legacy?
- I was wrong about the knife being the Anchor. (Boo!). And I was so sure, too. I mean, why does it keep being showcased so much, then?
- This really does seem to be the season of the superhuman-strength humans. First tiny human Katherine has dropkicked liked…maybe five attackers already (once while exhausted, hungry, barefoot and coming down with a sinus infection), but then there’s Qetsiyah. Something like an hour after being brutally stabbed in the stomach she’s able to crawl up the outside of a building through the window so quietly that even vampire Damon, inside the house, can’t hear her do it? (Stefan definitely lives on the second floor, that’s confirmed in the Pilot). How is she not dead already, because it ain’t like witches are hard to kill in this universe.
- Qetsiyah said that she was able to come back from the Other Side when Bonnie lifted the veil. Sure, that’s when Alaric and everyone else did it too. But how did she stay when everyone else who returned poofed into thin air again, is the proper followup question.
- I feel bad for Amara. She quite clearly is broken from being locked in a claustrophobic casket for 2,000 years (I kind of get the feeling vindictive Qetsiyah ordered periodic auditory taunts through the cracks as part of her accommodations too). And then, after feeling driven to drain the love of her eternity, she once again is bound and gagged and shoved into a confined space. Screw you, Damon. Not only can that not be good for her mentally, by the way, but since she’s the rare, precious and mortal Anchor to the other side that you must protect at all costs you’d think you could do better than leave her sitting in your driveway, unable to shout or run, when you yourself don’t even have the extrasensory prowess to hear or smell the the severely bleeding woman who’s dragging herself up your drainpipe.
- That’s pretty funny, actually. If Qetsiyah wasn’t so determined to give Stefan revenge memory restoration, she could have just scouted out the place, found her truest true enemy, and dealt with the important situation then and there.
- Even though we’ve only seen Amara in four very short scenes, and she’s only even said (a very few) words in two of them, I feel like I already have a pretty good sense of her personality. I’m not going to say, because I have a way of being horribly wrong and I don’t want to be captured in print. But I do get a sense.
- Bonnie’s a great person and all but how come, this year, she’s suddenly turned into Beth from Little Women? You died at 18 years old, for pete’s sake. It’s not selfish to wish you were alive again, just for a single minute.
- Lots of little nitpicks/plotholes. I’ve already mentioned these but I just wanted to do a quick itemized list all in one place. 1) Silas has no idea that Damon loved Katherine even though he read it out of Damon’s brain five episodes ago, 2) without calling off his mass brainwashing, no one in town is on the mob lookout for Katherine Pierce, or even remembers her anymore, 3) spells can only be involuntarily broken when the witch who cast them dies, and yet, in spite of Qetsiyah not being the witch who cast the binding spell or dying, Stefan and Elena are able to escape as soon as she is stabbed, 4) Distrustful and clever Silas doesn’t pay attention to Damon’s “kill Silas or I’ll kill Elena” phone call, 5) Distrustful and clever Silas doesn’t pay attention to Damon and Jeremy (literally the only other two people in that quiet warehouse) going to the back ally for a quiet discussion where they discuss, quite naturally, killing him, 5) Silas didn’t notice two gypsies coming into the storage warehouse, lying in wait for Damon, and chanting long enough for joo joo to be happening, 6) Amara speaks conversational American. Normally that’s something I’d ignore but in light of everything else…and it works with the other vamps, because they’ve been around to learn for the last million years or, in Silas’s case, he can lift it out of people’s heads. But Amara? 7) Though she’s human and stabbed in the gut, Qetsiyah crawled up the side of the house and through the window so that she could take Stefan by surprise, and she didn’t even lose color, 8) Damon the vampire didn’t hear this happening, 9) Damon left Amara unguarded in the car in spite of her being vulnerable and the most essential cargo on Earth right then, 10) the travelers left Amara unguarded (both physically and mystically) in the storage room. So that’s ten, just off the top of my head
Conclusion: I really like the episode itself, but it had so many very unnecessary plotholes that were there, basically, because of lazy writing and just didn’t need to be. So “Handle With Care,” which would be an A+ episode, ends up with nine lost molars out of fifteen.