The Vampire Diaries – “You’re Undead to Me” review

This week was all about the ramifications of Damon’s imprisonment in the House of Vervain.  Stefan has been incommunicado for three days while he has been playing jailer to his brother.  He has injected him with vervain, and admits to Damon that his plan is to entrap him in a kind of living death:  if a vampire is not allowed to feed, he will grow too weak to move and eventually mummify, but would not actually be dead (or undead).  Ouch.  Stefan isn’t kidding with that kind of imprisonment. 

Caroline misses Damon and pretends nothing has happened as she sets about organizing the cheerleaders and football team for a “Sexy Carwash” fundraiser.  Aunt Jenna has her dinner with Logan, the reporter, and Elena and Jenna learn that Jeremy is letting Vicky sleep over sometimes.  Elena is worried about how evasive Stefan always is and confronts him about it.  He surprises her by making dinner for her and talking about his past (judiciously edited, of course), starting with Katherine.  He also blows up another vampire myth by handling garlic and claiming to love eating it.  Elena cuts her finger and gets a glimpse of Stefan’s vampire face (and can I start calling that his V-face?  ’Cause that’s just funny) in the window but assumes it must be illusion when she turns and he’s back to normal. 

At the carwash Elena asks about his ring, which is his talisman against the sun; he calls it his family crest.  Caroline is compelled by Damon to go to the Salvatore house.  She finds him in the basement cell and unlocks the door before Uncle Zach can stop her.  He tells her to run and buys her time with his life (sadness!  I liked Zach Salvatore).  Damon’s ring had been removed so he can’t follow Caroline out to the sun.  When an old man recognizes Stefan as looking exactly like the Salvatore nephew of a man killed by an animal in 1953, Elena asks Logan if he can get he access to the old news stories.  He agrees and she finds a video of the body being carted out…and Stefan hiding in the doorway of the house.  Bonnie uses her psychic powers a couple times, first to splash water onto the girl harshing her mellow—Caroline’s second in command who takes over when Caroline leaves to go to Damon—and then accidentally sets a car on fire when she’s trying to evaporate the water from the parking lot. 

Jeremy and Vicky have a fight when she takes him to the cemetery to get high with what he calls her “space-waster small-town lifers,” and he leaves.  He gets home just in time to see Logan slipping out of his room—Gilbert watch in pocket—claiming to be searching for the bathroom.  As darkness falls at the cemetery, Vicki sees a haggard stranger stagger up begging for help.  It is Damon, and he wastes no time in biting her again….

So this episode was good but it wasn’t as dramatic or emotionally charged as some have been.  It was more about story and setting up what is to come than the characters this week.

I thought Elena’s impression of Stefan was hilarious, partly because Dobrev did a good job of capturing some of Wesley’s style of speech.  Spot-on, girl.  Nicely done. 

Zach’s satisfaction in Damon’s imprisonment was moving to me.  His anger at being denied a life of his own because he is the steward for the family property, and afraid to have a family for fear of what Damon might do to them, speak pretty eloquently to the havoc Damon wreaks on the lives of everyone around him.

The town elders prove that they have no idea who to look at when they discuss the fact that “someone who only comes out at night can’t be hard to identify.”  Clearly all they know is that vampires have come back to their town; they don’t know who the vampires are. 

The pendant Damon pulled out of the lining of the Gilbert heirloom box is growing more intriguing.  Caroline kept it, of course, as a memento of Damon.  We see moonlight fall through the clear yellow stone as she sleeps, and it casts the shadow of a pentagram onto her bed.  What the hell is it?  And who was its original owner?  How is it related to the Gilberts?  And what does it have to do with Damon and Stefan’s past?

And does anyone remember the webisodes well enough to say whether the kid driving the clunker, that Second-in-Command is so mean to, was the kid from those who’s been hunting Stefan down?  He kind of looked like it to me, but I don’t remember what he looked like to say for sure.  That might be an interesting twist, to see him come into play.

I found Elena’s diary entry at the end of the episode, where she is trying to talk herself out of adding up the circumstantial evidence about Stefan to what it obviously adds up to—that he’s a vampire—an interesting way of handling her discovery of his nature.  I suppose, since she hasn’t confronted him with the word yet, it might not constitute her discovery so much as her suspicions.  But in the books she is much less clever about figuring out his true nature; she sees him drinking blood, and, well, the human race is only going to have one Ozzy Osbourne at any given time, so there’s only conclusion for her to draw.  So if this is how it comes out in the TV series, then I am going to be pleased with them for giving Elena the opportunity to show off her brains.  Because she’s not supposed to be stupid or vapid, but since (as with all teenage dramas) these kids never seem to have class or homework, she doesn’t have much opportunity to display that. 

I’m not going to call this a disappointing episode, because in a series that is telling a particular story instead of stumbling along aimlessly, there have to be lulls.  But what I can’t wait for is next week, where it looks like we are finally going to hear the unedited version of what happened to Stefan and Damon and Katherine….