The Vampire Diaries, January 17, 2013: “After School Special” and What We Learned

By the Marc Kane At the end of the last episode, Klaus kills the Mayor, Tyler’s mom as payback for Tyler trying to free the hybrids under Klaus’s control. This led Klaus to destroy them, which is a part of Professor Shane’s plan. He wanted to take away something that Tyler held dear. So, at the beginning of this episode, the town holds a vigil to remember her. Tyler leaves; Elena, watching him go, sees Rebekah in the room. At the end of the last episode before the Holiday break, April sets Rebekah free, by removing the tainted dagger that Klaus and Stefan left in her, which puts her in position to be unleashed at the school. Elena exits to try and find Rebekah and runs into April, who informs her that she knows that Elena is a Vampire. She confronts Elena for having mesmerized her, and wonders how many times she took advantage of her that way! No wonder she set Rebekah free, though I am not sure she really knew what she did. Meanwhile, Damon trains Jeremy to be the Vampire Hunter they need him to be, in order to carry out Klaus’s plan to cure Elena, so that he might once again use her blood to create hybrids. He shows frustration at Jeremy and Matt, who keep ordering pizza. With a generous tip, he tells the female pizza driver not to bring anymore, no matter how much they beg. He listens to a voicemail from Elena on the phone. Karoline mourns Tyler’s mom’s death, while Stefan drowns his sorrows over Elena and Damon having sex.

Rebekah wants revenge, of course, so she attacks Elena, which is how she comes to trap Elena in the library of the school. She finds Stefan and informs him that Elena is in danger; along with Karoline, he becomes trapped with Elena. They were trying to free her but Rebekah got the drop on them. Bonnie meets with her dad who lets be known his desire to protect his witchy daughter. He isn’t wrong about the need to keep her safe, because Professor Shane uses Bonnie and her powers for his own agenda that have nothing to do with her. She doesn’t want him to rule the town precisely because she has so much power. Bonnie fears he will try and hinder what she might need to do for the town with her power. He has run from her power once before. Rebekah begins talking about the tattoo and how it would lead to the cure. Rebekah reveals to Elena that Stefan wants to take the cure so that he can live a normal life and grow old with her, and finds out that they are no longer together-- and that she slept with Damon! Klaus finds Jeremy, at his parent’s vacation home. Damon feels that the Hunter is not ready to hunt, but Klaus is not buying that, nor should he. He’s quite frustrated to find out that Jeremy hasn’t killed anyone else. ..but he has a plan. Bonnie receives a bone necklace, formerly worn by a 2000 year old witch, as a gift. She senses that Professor Shane is in trouble and rushes to save him, not knowing that he is not what he appears to be. He has been using her from the beginning, and it will really sting when she finds that out. Rebekah calls Tyler and tells him that maybe he can save Karoline, who she has trapped, playing on his guilt for not being able to save his mom. (I’m not sure that he knows who killed her.) Rebekah’s brother, Kol brings Shane to her. We discover that Shane can’t be mesmerized, so Rebekah has Kol seek the information in the old fashion way, torture it out of him. She wants the information about the cure from him. Then Rebekah gives them a game to play…truth or dare. Elena takes dare. She forces Elena to reveal that, though she loves him, she is no longer in love with Stefan--- and that the reason she slept with Damon is because she IS in love with him. She also confesses that, with Damon, “things feel unpredictable…I feel free”--- but when she is with Stefan, “it feels like I’m a project or something that Stefan needs to fix,” which is why she fell out of love with him in the first place. That pains Stefan, who still fancies that he loves Elena. Apparently, Klaus’ plan to get Jeremy to hunt starts with the pizza girl, who has trouble coming into the house, until Jeremy invites her, because Klaus has turned her into a vampire. When he discovers that she is a vampire, Jeremy takes her life, which, in turn, causes his tattoo to grow. Tyler arrives at the school looking for Karoline. Rebekah uses her mesmer power to make Tyler change so that he might hunt and kill the others. He fights the change because he loves his friends and doesn’t want them to die at his hands. They lock him in the library. Bonnie gets to the school and runs into April, who lets her in on Rebekah’s plan to get info from Shane, at which point Bonnie starts performing a protection spell. It has the unintended consequence of linking April with Shane. Bonnie intends to link with Shane not to link April to him. I think that it might have been a bit of Karma, since April was the reason that all of this occurred: she freed Rebekah , who is having Shane tortured. When Kol holds Shane’s head underwater, April feels the effects, and begins spitting up water from her lungs. Shane reveals that he looks for Cylas, the original immortal, who has the spell to cure immortality. They don’t know if the door they have blocked against Tyler will hold, and he, as a werewolf, aggressively seeks a way out to kill, as is his wolf nature. At some point things go quiet in the library, as Tyler in his werewolf form tires, fighting his way back to his human form. Kol stakes Shane through the heart, which infuriates Rebekah because she needs him to get the cure. We see April begin to bleed and loose her life, Bonnie screams for help, trying to keep April from bleeding out. Then we see Shane pull out the stake, figuring out that Bonnie must’ve done a protection spell, which did indeed keep him alive. Tyler comes to his senses, Karoline holds him as he expresses guilt over all that has occurred with his mother and with his friends. Karoline thinks he just needs to relax and heal. Rebekah tells Stefan that she can mesmerize him into forgetting all about his love for Elena, all of his hurt over her choosing Damon, their whole relationship erased, like Klaus did to him to make him forget his love for her. He says that he wants her to do it, she had hoped he would say that so she could refuse him, and at the same time torture Elena with the knowledge that he did not want any memory, even the good ones of her. She wants him to suffer for eternity, the ways she feels she has since Klaus took Stefan away from her. This shows me that Stefan must not really love Elena, because he wants the good memories gone as well as the bad. That doesn’t sound like any kind of love I know; he should still want the good memories with Elena even though it didn’t work out—especially if he hopes the cure can bring them back together. It tells me that he stopped really loving her when she died and he had to have her resurrected as a vampire. He could accept her as a human and love her as such, but not as a vampire, which makes me wonder why he didn’t let her die as a human and keep her humanity pure. Even if she is able to become human again, even if they mesmerized her into forgetting that she was ever a vampire, she will never be the same Elena again. Stefan wants someone who doesn’t exist anymore and never will, so, no, he doesn’t love Elena. Stefan gets there in time to save April from bleeding out by feeding her just a bit of his own blood, which causes her come around to consciousness. He has her taken elsewhere as he talks to Bonnie and finds out that she protected Shane from death. Furious, Bonnie confronts Shane for almost getting April killed. She learned about some of his plan because of April’s link. He assures her that she is the key in this plan so she will stay safe. How he is so sure of that, I don’t know, but it does reveal that he has planned to use her all along, so she should be wary about associating with him. He did, as April discovered, cause the fire that killed eleven people; she doesn’t even know about the hybrids that he sacrificed. Dark magic afoot there for sure. Damon calls Elena and she tells him what she discovered during her ordeal with Rebekah. Even though it might be the sire bond, what she feels for him is the most real thing she has ever felt, and she has never felt this way about anyone. She says “I love you Damon!” He lets her know that he will do some horrible things that she doesn’t like to get the cure for her, but he wants her to get into her car and come to him immediately. His love for Elena is so much more pure than Stefan’s. Damon is willing to get the cure for Elena, if she no longer wants to be a vampire, but he loves her both in her human form and her vampire form. He would never choose for her what she should be. If she wants to be human, well he loves her as a human. If she decides she wants to stay a vampire, well, he glories in her vampirism, as well. Her choice completely and neither decision will disappoint him. Rebekah goes to see Stefan, and he lets her know that Shane is still alive. She doesn’t understand why he told her that because he could have just kept that to himself especially since she had played with his emotions earlier in the episode. He says that Damon has Klaus, Elena and Jeremy, that Shane has Bonnie, the super witch, but they are on their own. He wants her to join with him to find the cure. I’m not sure why he still wants the cure since he doesn’t love Elena, but Rebekah reveals that she wants the cure to give to Klaus so that she can permanently put an end to him. She laughs at him for asking her to join forces with him, but didn’t say no. I believe that Stefan will find his way back to loving Rebekah, which is great since I don’t believe she ever stopped loving Stefan either. Finally we get to Jeremy, who Damon takes to a bar to meet up with Klaus. He wonders why, until he sees what appears to be dead bodies, and he inquires of Damon why, he thought they agreed on another way. Damon says he thought about it and this was the best plan. He tells Jeremy to commence to hunting like the hunter he is. Then we get scene with April at a table with the heads of the town, including Bonnie’s dad, about what she has learned of Shane and how he set into motion the fire that killed eleven people and how his intentions are not so pure, since he is using dark magic to accomplish his goals.