AKA, Season 1 finale, or at least the big story-arc end before the shows goes on break for a month and a half (it’s set to return March 25) if there is still more official season 1 to come. This episode was all action, picking up where last week’s left off—with Elena being kidnapped by the vampire Anna—and never really slowing down.
Elena and Bonnie are being guarded by Ben the Incompetent vampire, who nearly lets them escape. Elena is there as leverage to make Bonnie do what Anna wants, namely open the tomb so she can get her mother out. Stefan begs Damon for help, and Damon tells him, “I mean this sincerely: I hope Elena dies.” Damon is turned away from Bonnie’s grandmother’s house, and when Anna calls to propose they work together since the brothers have the grimoire and she has the witch, Damon agrees. Except…Stefan went to Bonnie’s grandmother and had her run a locating spell on Bonnie, and he was able to get the girls out of the hotel room. Elena convinces him the best thing would be to let Damon get Katherine out so he would leave them alone, and Stefan and Gram agree. Elena also manages to convince Damon of their sincerity by taking off her necklace and asking him to use his powers on her. He chooses to trust her again, on the strength of the “understanding” they have.
The witches open the tomb on the condition that all the other vampires be burned (except Katherine), and Damon takes Elena in when he searches as assurance that they won’t seal the thing shut with him inside. Anna shows up with a knocked-out Jeremy and forces Stefan to choose between stopping her from going in and saving Jeremy from Ben; Stefan burns Ben and gets to the tomb entrance, where Gram stops him from following the others. She had opened the tomb but not broken the spell; no vampires could come out. Anna finds her mother and uses Elena’s blood (cutting her wrist) to revive her; when Elena screams Stefan runs in after her. Bonnie talks her grandmother into lifting the spell for long enough to let out the vampires they know, and she agrees. They struggle to keep the spell open long enough…and the only ones to come out are Anna and Pearl, Stefan, and Damon. Katherine wasn’t in the tomb.
Damon is enraged and terrified by this. Anna tells him what happened—that the guard who sealed the tomb had been under Katherine’s spell and had let her escape; the last Anna had seen her was in 1983, Chicago, when she knew very well where Damon was…and hadn’t cared.
The epilogue was in two parts. In one, the blood packet Damon threw against the tomb wall in his rage dripping onto one of the desiccated vampires and reviving him, and him walking out of the tomb after all…. In the other, Elena goes to Bonnie’s grandmother’s to spend the night, and shortly after she arrives Grams lays down and silently, peacefully passes on, as if she used up too much of her power or her energy in keeping the tomb open for Bonnie’s friends.
So, one, what a great and terrible discovery the Katherine thing was. Damon had spent basically his entire existence as a vampire haunted by her and scheming for a way to get her back. He finally managed it, only to discover that she hadn’t needed his help and hadn’t cared enough about him to either come back to him or tell him the truth about herself that would allow him to let her go. Ian Somerhalder played the anger and the anguish and the despair perfectly. He really shone in this episode. I felt he anger. I felt his pain. I was so right there with Elena when she went and hugged him and said she was so sorry and really meant it. He really is fabulous. Two, I also liked how this tied back to the books, in a way; in the books the brothers think Katherine is dead only to discover that she’s not. Here they thought she was in the tomb starving for eternity when she wasn’t. It leaves the door open for her to come back into their lives and screw things up again. I’m also very curious to know what Damon does from here, whether he goes after Katherine or decides to let her go because she was obviously only ever toying with him.
It looks like Anna’s stint is probably done; she told Jeremy she and her mother were moving away so she couldn’t “join his non-crowd” when he finally got around to asking her out, and she left peaceably and promised to leave him alone once she had her mother revived and extracted from the tomb. In the flashback last week, Pearl was clearly the calm, rational one who actually worried about things like their safety and tried to curb Katherine’s…exuberance, so the two of them would be unlikely to stir up more trouble anywhere.
The ending with Grams’ death wasn’t exactly unexpected…when they actually showed her back at the house and acting so tired, I half-expected the end. It was actually I thought a really great turn by Katerina Graham, showing Bonnie’s frantic denial and grief. Probably the best emotional stint we’ve seen from her so far. It also leaves open the question of whether Bonnie will continue to pursue her witch-power or if she will give it up lacking a mentor and seeing that it can kill her if she does too much, or what problems she may encounter if she keeps trying to learn but no longer has that mentor.
No Alaric or Jenna this week, and we saw more Matt and Caroline fumbling around trying to figure out if they’re really ready to be a couple or not. I like Caroline’s growing self-awareness and willingness to apologize for herself and think of other people’s feelings. Tyler Lockwood was brought back in, and although he didn’t really serve much of a purpose in this episode, I expect we’ll be seeing more of him later when they incorporate his plotline from the books into the story, so they wanted to go ahead and remind everyone about his existence.
Overall I thought this was a really great way to bring the tomb story to an end and shake things up. I’m still sad for Damon and Bonnie. I’m also totally bummed it’s off air for this long—I was not aware of that massive gap going into this episode, so it caught me off guard—but very excited to see what happens next and intrigued by some of the casting announcements going up. Still waiting for Meredith to appear…pretty please, producers?
