Checking In (random thoughts on the season six so far)

I’m sorry I haven’t been checking in for a while.  I’ve still been watching and loving this show, but I’ve just kind of drifted away from writing about it.  Hopefully that will change, but I won’t make any promises for now.

But I didn’t want 2014 to end without writing at least once, so in the least edited entry I’ll ever produce (as in, I’ll only reread it three times instead of 9), let me comment on everyone’s favorite show about centuries-old vampires and the unemployed teenagers who love them.

• Kai is possibly one of the best villains the show has had in years.  The show often presents villains that are meant to be quite evil while also entertaining, but Kai is one of their biggest success stories.  I really really wish he could be there forever, maybe de-powered, but of course the center could not hold with someone that evil around and the plots/characters would suffer for it.
• Jo is possibly the worst girlfriend Alaric has ever had.  (No, she is the worst, I just wanted the parallelism with the first bullet point).  I still want her to stick around just because a) Alaric can’t have another dead girlfriend, please for all that’s holy, and b) Jo needs to win the epic good v. evil battle that’s approaching, because as much as I love Kai he is way too evil to keep living.  But seriously.  Meredeth was a near-nonentity.  Isobel eagerly turned into an evil vampire without so much as sharing her thoughts with him or leaving him any explanation.  And Jenna was…Jenna was pretty cool for him, actually.  But I can’t see any of these three women chastising him and storming off because he was momentarily distracted by a bloody accident victim while she was speaking.
• Luke needs to kiss a guy.  Seriously.  Since the show fetishizees straight romance far beyond (most) internet viewers’ tolerance, it’s pretty weird that there’s just no LGBT stuff going on.  We’ve had two gay characters, Luke and Bill Forbes, and both of them have a very active gay lifestyle offscreen with unseen men who, despite being life partners (in Bill’s case), have no impact on their decision making process.  So having the two sexless gay guys is like going for the progressive cred without the progressive work.  Kiss a guy, Luke.  They did it on The Originals a few weeks ago and it was quite lovely, actually.
• Kat Graham’s acting is just killing it this season.  I’ve always been on the “like-but-not-love” train of Bonnie fandom, but she’s really rocking everything she’s been given this year.
• I have no idea why the writers made Alaric human so quickly.  Beyond compelling Elena, did he do anything with his Original powers?  It just seems like a real squandering of potential stories.
• I would be excited to have Enzo on this show if he actually had a storyline.  Mostly he just has this fixation on Stefan (it works just like a crush except it comes out as hate) and interferes in Stefan’s life.  And it’s like, dude just got tortured for over fifty years, finally got freed, actually died and went to the other side and got back out again for a second chance at life which no vampire anywhere ever (until that night) gets, and he’s wasting his time vamping Stefan’s girlfriends and trying to talk Matt (Matt! of all people) into hating Stefan.  I like the actor.  I even like the character in the abstract, but there needs to be more here.
• Thanksgiving!  That episode was really fantastic.  Totally steals Pangs‘s place as my favorite vampire thanksgiving episode.  Also, Mr. Cuddles is my new favorite vampire-related teddy bear (though I have no idea what it was doing at the Salvatore house for Kai to even find).
• Am I into Caroline/Stefan?  Eh….kind of.  I found Caroline/Matt and (quite obviously) Caroline/Damon to be very toxic relationships, and I started off a big fan of Caroline/Tyler but it devolved into Tyler being all-consumed with Klaus and/or werewolf stuff and Caroline on the sidelines, mostly forgotten, missing him.  And I don’t anticipate any of that happening with Caroline/Stefan.  But I think with any successful ship there has to be a certain degree of excitement over whether the two will hook up, and I’m not feeling that.  I have more of a ‘it would be nice for them, I guess’ reaction.  However, with the characters on the show right now they make the most sense for each other.
• Let me give a word of warning to each of them, though.  Stefan, when Caroline cheated on Tyler it was with the man who murdered his mother.  Caroline, when Stefan had his rebound lay after breaking up with Elena he chose to do it with the woman who had just murdered Elena.  These are not the sexual choices that good partners make.
• I actually wouldn’t hate Caroline/Enzo.  They’ve got some good chemistry.  He’s what Caroline/Klaus was probably meant to be, you know, ingenue maturing into the world by getting with a snarky English bad boy who didn’t just graduate high school.  But unlike Klaus, Enzo doesn’t have a history of murdering everyone (or anyone) Caroline knows.  So there’s that.
• The 1994 stuff is kind of turning my mind to Bonnie/Damon as a good outcome.  Unlike lots of internet viewers, I never had a problem with Delena or Stelena (well, I had reservations, but I was able to turn my brain off to them because it’s a tv show), but I do think it would be an awesomely funny show’s end if, after all these years of Elena-love triangle related angst, Bamon and Steroline happened and Elena was left single.

Well, I had more to say but it’s New Years Eve and I have a dinner to get to.  Happy 2015, y’all!  By god I still love this crazy show.  So I’ll just leave you with an image that sums a lot of it up right for me.

*totally wins as best paranormal heaven/afterlife/hell configuration on any show.  Especially the first time you see it and you don’t have any clue what the frick is going on.

Season Four Midway Analysis (Part Two: Everyone Else)

To reiterate, this is only meant to analyze the first half of the season (i.e. the first eleven episodes). I have not seen any episodes from this point on. If, in episode twelve, the main three perform a murder-murder-suicide in a Buddhist monastery while April collapses Mystic Falls into the Hellmouth, I don’t yet know anything about it. In other words, everything I analyze and speculate may roundly be defeated in as little as one episode.

Anyway, there’s no real distinction between Parts One and Two, except that they were way too long for one single entry, so I broke them up by category. Part One covered the heroes, Part Two is about everybody else. I was going to do the themes too, but I’m so far behind in current episodes that next episode up has already come back as a rerun. (Those who are sticking with me, you are awesome). So themes may or may not come later.

Season Four Midway Analysis (Part One: The Heroes)

Seeing as how I am exactly one half through the first season I’ve covered while running a blog, and I have no (official) idea of what is coming next, I thought that it would be fun to look back on the first eleven episodes and study how the season is working out so far. And of course, no one wants to read a million words of text at once, so I’m breaking this into two different posts. Part One, I’m discussing the heroes of the show (and by “hero” I mean people in the main cast who aren’t Originals). In part two I’ll talk about everybody else, and go over the overall themes. Then I’ll get back to regular reaction posts, where nothing I’ve guessed comes true.

So, Season Four.

This will also be remembered as the season that the people in charge of promotional images began mainlining crack.

“The Turning Point” and the Flux of Past and Future: Show at Large

“The Turning Point” is all about characters confronting their pasts and maybe…just a little…considering that they might contemplate their futures.  Consider that the big deal this week is a career fair, and what we learn about the characters’ interests are…what they used to want to be.  Elena used to want to be a writer, but then her mom died.  Stefan used to want to be a doctor, but can’t take being around the blood now.  Matt used to want to be an astronaut, but isn’t a little kid anymore.  The only character who expresses any ambition for the future is Caroline, who wants to be a broadcaster.  That dream dies a swift off-screen death when Logan, who laments that he used to be a newscaster and no longer can be, attacks her.

And the past returns this episode, big time.  Once again, there are diary voiceovers…but these aren’t even entries from the present.  Jeremy, whose mental ability to cope with death and move on has been mystically stripped away, turns backward.  He reverts to his old personality.  He reverts to recreational drawing (his used-to-want-to-be career choice?).  And, most structurally significant, he digs out the old heirloom journals from his ancestor and studies them for a paper he’s writing on the past.  Even Alaric (while technically this is his second episode), is introduced as a man who seems emotionally caught in his mysterious past, and symbolically, teaches history.  And then the big climactic moment.  Elena finds the picture of Katherine, a relic of Stefan’s past, and because of it changes her future intentions.

Because that’s the thing about vampires….by the very nature of their beings, they are of the past, and of a life that no longer can be.  And yet, because of immortality, they have an infinite future and can affect others’ as well.  I remember a lot of complaining in online forums about how Stefan and Elena get together and break up a million times in the last episode and this one, but I strongly disagree with that assessment.  They have not dated since Elena found out Stefan was a vampire, and so they cannot break up from a commitment they don’t share.  What I think all of those (admittedly quite repetitive) conversations were about was both of them unable to decide whether they should really really call it quits and make their possible relationship an abandoned ambition of the past, or if they should commit and reembark as a couple.  And by repeatedly deciding not to decide, they prolong the turning point of having to go one way or the other.  If Elena chooses to date Stefan while knowing he’s a vampire, she’s deliberately choosing to embrace both the past and future in one, which violates the future she would have wanted before her parents died and she was a very different person…choosing him would cement that difference as un-temporary, which is like a second death of her past self.

Vicki Donovan-A Case Study (Part 1): Show at Large

I’m also writing a more personality-specific character study on Vicki, but I wanted to do an entry more specifically focused on the function she served in the show.

This is Vicki Donovan…4-time best actor winner, 3-time sadsack of the week.

Two general points first:

1)  There’s an unwritten rule among Hollywood showrunners which states that your true pilot is not the pilot of the show; rather, the first six episodes should all be considered an extended pilot, and treated as such.  The actual pilot is made to show the bidding studios what your show will be like should they invest; the 6-episode pilot is to show viewers at home what the show is really really going to be like, now that they’ve worked out the kinks of characterization, atmosphere, pacing, etc (and if you’re watching a new show, are at episode 6, and it’s still not cohering….reconsider investing your time, btw).

2)  Evidently, the structure of The Vampire Diaries is broken into chapters, three for each season (I did not know this until I read it on a VD wikia, but it makes a lot of sense).  The first chapter of the first season is called “The Vicki Chapter” and spans from episodes 1-7.  (If you’re one of those people who simply must know, the other two are “The Tomb Chapter” and “The Lineage Chapter”).

Bringing these two points together, you’ve got to ask, why would the show shape its viewers’ pilot primarily following the trajectory of a character who was always planned to be killed off early on?

I know a big part of it was to show that nobody was safe, something Joss Whedon has often said he wished he could have done first season of Buffy.  And it worked.  Coach Tanner and Zach already established that recurring characters weren’t safe, which is rare enough, but killing Vicki off showed main characters were as disposable.  This doesn’t really answer the question though.  Caroline or Jeremy or whoever were just as main a character as Vicki at this point, their dying would show off the same uncertain universe, but it wouldn’t matter the way Vicki’s death mattered, because the first chapter wasn’t about them.  So why shape what (in terms of foundation) was the most pivotal chapter of the entire series on the arc of a single person who is not part of the main trio, and who left the show as soon as her arc ended?

So here’s where I make a bunch of unfounded guesses and assumptions.

A Season 3 Aspiring Writer’s Quiz- Show At Large

NOTE:  Everything below is hypothetical and parodic, but still, major season three spoilers if you haven’t seen it yet.  Also, re-reading it it’s also a little meaner than I’d intended…but I just want the awesome to come back!  [selfish pout]

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Are you an aspiring writer?  Congratulations!  You have a unique opportunity to write for the third season of The Vampire Diaries.  As we all know, the show’s second season was the best developed so far, and the surprising events of “As I Lay Dying” have ensured a solid and compelling foundation upon which the third season can be built.  So let’s see if you have what it takes to be in the writer’s room making the (scriptural) life and death decisions these writers make every day.  Just take this quiz below, and scroll down to discover if you should pack your bags for Hollywood or just bag a different employment opportunity.  Ready?….Begin!

Question 1) There’s Bonnie Bennett, a very powerful–though very preliminary–teenage witch, who in the season two finale watched her boyfriend die in front of her, performed the most immense magic she’s ever performed, and violated all balance of nature in the process of resurrecting him.  In Season 3, she will discover that there were severe consequences for the spell she performed.  What does Bonnie spend all her time dwelling on?  Does she:

• A) Worry that the spell she did was so unforgivable that it has earned her the disapprobation of her hundreds of dead relatives, who heretofore have helped magically and been communicative, but now cut her off and shun her in lockstep.
• B) Worry, in and of itself, about the imbalance of nature she’s performed, which is a violation of the main tenet of witch-dom on this show.
• C) Worry that she needs more practice and research because she did something huge and she wants to ensure she’ll always be able to control her ever-exponential power.
• D) Feel guilty that the spell she performed is getting so many people hurt.
• E) Feel unhappy because her boyfriend spontaneously kissed his ex-girlfriend.

Question 2) Thematically and narratively, Elena Gilbert has been the heart of the show for two seasons.  Her love has been deep and her compassion consistent.  She shares close friendships with her two bffs which nearly always passed the bechdel test.  She could see the best even in bad people and work with them to grow or return to good.  Season two even had her attempting to sacrifice her life every other episode (rather than try to fight) because with her death she would save the lives of her friends and family.  She never has a bad word to say about people.  She even is friendly in relationship dynamics that should be fraught with tension (ex-boyfriend Matt and Vicki).  Symbolically, we know that a new character is good when they’re nice to Elena, and know that they’re bad when they don’t like her.  Now it’s time to write season 3.  Do you:

• A) show her maintaining her close friendships with her girlfriends, including multiple scenes together on screen where they’re enjoying each other’s company.
• B) show her having conversations with her two best friends, commiserating or comforting them when they each have a parent die, or are cheated on, or are violently tortured for days.
• C) not magically violate her brother’s mental will, particularly when she’s well aware how much it hurts him.
• D) give a damn that her boyfriend has tortured and killed men and women across the country, and deal with the moral consequences of that fact that, even if she saves him now, more potential blood binges in future centuries will again result in untold carnage.
• E) maintain her friendships by habit only, not miss her aunt who just died, not miss her brother who she sent away for months, and have no concern whatsoever for the countless number of victims at Stefan’s hands, except for how their pain and passing affect Stefan.

Question 3)  Seasons 1 & 2 have been known for introducing some fabulous new secondary characters who were well-acted, fleshed-out, engaging, and missed once they left, with only a few clunkers (sorry Jules).  Now you’re set to write season 3, and as part of the editing process, you want to work on the new character who isn’t yet up to par.  Is it:

• A) Bill Forbes, who shows up as part of a very offensive gay metaphor, viciously tortures his own daughter for days, leaves soon after, and shows up again just to be killed….and is supposed to be a moral-though-misguided good guy throughout it all.
• B) Mikael Mikaelson, who is given a tremendous amount of dialogue build-up, and who spectacularly is the Big Bad that the season’s Big Bad is scared of, and who then dies roughly half a minute after he finally joins the action.
• B) Rebekah, whose relationship with every character consists either of bratty hatred or whiny, needy self-pity, and who (beyond being quite able to toss a decent one-liner every now and then) adds little to the scenes she’s in because she makes all action stop and makes it all about her and her feelings.
• C) Abby Bennett, who could mentor Bonnie in the philosophy of magic, or work through abandonment issues, or….do something interesting given her interesting back story, or could…only be an undeveloped plot device who is literally disposed of as soon as she’s no longer needed.
• D) Jaimie of-no-last-name, who seems pleasant, and very very bland, and is attractive to Bonnie for some undisclosed reason since most of his personality took place off screen.
• E) Meredith Fell, who was one of the most important and likable characters from the book series this show is founded from, but on the show is only there to string along the tepid mystery of who’s-killing-the-Founding-families until the show’s ready to admit it’s Alaric, be a plot contrivance via blood-dispersal, and otherwise be completely forgettable whenever you’re not looking directly at her face.
• F) Sage, who, in two of her three episodes convinces Damon (the main love interest of the season, remember), that the best way to live is to compel, feed off of and rape the women who most pretend not to want it but really do, and to sexually exploit emotionally insecure girls he’s not even courteous to in order to use them for information.  She fits the “Strong Woman” cliche of engaging in foxy boxing, and has an out of character obsession with the most nondescript Original who everybody also doesn’t care about, and then dies only to demonstrate a plot point.
• G) all of the characters are great!  Not potentially-interesting-but-terribly-mishandled at all.

“Vicariously’s” Thoughts on 3×22 “The Departed”

Season 3 is easily the Ted Kennedy of The Vampire Diaries to Seasons 1 & 2’s Bobby and Jack.  (See, because Ted’s the lousy one; also, Chappaquiddick vs. the drowning at Wickery Bridge.  All jokes and analogies are improved by explanation, of course).  And I really want to write about it, particularly as it’s all so fresh in my mind.  The hundreds of ways it frustrates and irritates me and the few solid ways it pleases me.  But, as I’ve said before, I still have 118 116 posts to go before I can look back on season 3 with the leisure and detail I’d like to.  In particular I want to look over “The Departed,” simply because it’s one of the few beautiful episodes of this faltering season.  And it will happen.  Eventually.

In the meanwhile, other bloggers have, of course, already covered it.  And I just read a review that was so insightfully written that I want to do what I can to send people to read it.  So go read it here.  Here’s a brief excerpt:

………….That’s why for over a year I have wanted the show to flash back to the night her parents died in order to reveal that it was Damon, not Stefan, who saved her life. I can’t tell you how much I wanted this. Nothing could have been a more perfect deconstruction of the two of them as characters — Stefan, who needs people to see him as a hero more than he needs to be a hero; Damon, who needs people to see him as a villain more than he needs to be a villain — or the way they function as a duality and construct their identities in relation to (1) each other, and (2) Elena than the revelation that Stefan’s telling of this most pivotal moment in the show’s history and Elena’s life is flat-out wrong. It would have been the glorious, transcendent pay-off to all the times when Stefan chose to curry favour with Elena rather than pursue the actual most morally defensible course of action — and all the times when Damon actively took on the mantle of villain in order to preserve Stefan’s status as hero (notably in “All My Children” when he chose to kill Abby rather than allow Stefan to fall from grace in Elena’s eyes). It would have been the pay-off to repeated instances in the past few episodes of Stefan unambiguously implying that the only reason he has stopped killing people is in order to redeem himself in Elena’s eyes. It would have been the pay-off to the conversation Elena and Damon had in “Heart of Darkness” when Elena first began to realise that Damon was hiding his ‘light’ (to the limited extent that he even has one) under a bushel and Damon explicitly told her that he doesn’t want her or anyone else to think of him as a good person.

If Elena becoming a vampire is supposed to catalyse her re-examination of Stefan versus Damon — and apparently it is — then this revelation could have been the only thing that really changed the state of play in that respect. Elena has had chance after chance to realise that Stefan is not who he says he is as he rips his way across state lines; — only the revelation that the foundation on which their relationship was built is a lie could rock it. Nothing else is powerful enough to do it: not the revelation in “Blood Brothers” that Stefan killed their father and forced Damon to transition; certainly not the revelation that Damon once told her he loved her and immediately took away her memory of the event (as if anyone, including Elena, is under any illusions about Damon’s feelings for Elena at this point). It has to be something which challenges the very framework through which Elena views Stefan, Damon, and their brotherhood.

For this episode to reveal that it was Damon, and not Stefan, who saved her would have cast the whole show in a new and infinitely more complex light which brought the interesting deconstruction of hero versus villain that Stefan and Damon’s relationship could and in fact should be to the surface –……………..

All 6 of Vicariously‘s Vampire Diaries recaps are incredibly good–though challenging for fans because they so accurately assess the moral and storytelling failures of the Season 3 episodes that she covers.  Anyway, I don’t have much more to say.  Just go read it.  Now.

Zach Salvatore–A Case Study: Show at Large

Okay, so this is my first character spotlight….and I don’t know how to do it.  So I’ll be rambly, and hopefully in the future, once I’ve become phenomenally adept at insight and productivity, I’ll return and make it much better.  But in the meantime, here I am now.  And Zach is dead and therefore it’s his turn, and I’ve been cooling my heels for almost two months because the truth is I just don’t have much to say about Zach.  And that irritates me.

Because….personal anecdote time.  Though I know all of the shows’ actors are of age, they play characters who aren’t yet legal and so the only characters it even felt appropriate for me to squee over were Damon and Zach (thank god Alaric eventually showed up).  And I saw interesting opportunities for his character, which I’ll get into.  And when he died, I thought it was a very Big Deal and very shocking, and the kind of event the show and fans would return to now and again.  This wasn’t an unrealistic prediction, since it happened exactly like this with Lexie and she was only in one episode, and only connected to one main character rather than two.  So I was very surprised that no one (in show or out) seemed to care at all that he was gone.  He gets mentioned in one sentence in the next episode, then mentioned in a sentence fragment in “162 Candles; Damon briefly lies about him to Carol Lockwood in “Haunted,” and he’s mentioned for very brief and unrelated exposition in “Bloodlines.”  Then Zach isn’t mentioned again until season three’s “1912,” and it’s only buried in a larger throwaway expository comment.  And so this whole fandom time (since his death) I’ve felt kind of stopped in the middle of a sentence…like I wanted informational or emotional closure on him and no one else seemed to.  But I felt certain that there was so much more to say.  But I’m going to try.

So just to start somewhere, I’ll start with first impressions. 

Why Not Kol?—The Tired Love Life of Bonnie Bennett: show at large

Spoilers ahoy for seasons 1-3.

This is Bonnie Bennett. Look how undesirable, how perpetually single she is.

Okay, so apparently there was a bit of a skerfluffle in the twitterverse between show co-creator Julie Plec and certain Bonnie fans when it was revealed Jamie would be Bonnie’s big love interest.  Jamie, who’s been in like two episodes, is her (non-biological) brother and got all the love from Bonnie’s deadbeat mom that Bonnie never did.  For the record, he seems nice enough.  Apparently some fans thought Kol would be a better match for Bonnie.  Kol, who is prevented from being the most sadistic Original only because Klaus already exists.  I’m not positive Kol and Bonnie have even met in-universe.  So anyway, here are the tweets.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and other websites have, but I’m not getting into the whole thing.  I just want to focus on the opening tweet, specifically “You would prefer beautiful, strong Bonnie to be with a murderous vampire like Kol…”  The irony of that line, coming from the writers who penned the epic love between human Elena and the (former) serial-killing, vampiric Salvatore brothers, is quite rich.  Does Julie Plec think that Bonnie deserves better than Elena does?  Or does Julie Plec merely think that Bonnie is stronger and more beautiful than Elena?  Or does Julie Plec (and when I say Plec, I mean the whole writers’ room) have a double standard when it comes to Bonnie.

“Strong” and “beautiful” are generic enough that they can apply to Elena and Caroline as well as Bonnie.  Caroline has vampiric strength, has been tortured like 20 times and is still able to be positive and empathetic.  Elena doesn’t have physical strength, but she stands up to very scary people for what she thinks is right, and has a proven rhetorical knack for talking people out of killing her and others.  And Bonnie is the strongest witch ever.*  So I want to examine the ways that the show treats the love lives of its three leading females.