The Vampire Diaries 4.10 “After School Special”

Rebekah’s back, and the fang gang is gonna be in trouble. Seems that April did unstake her after all, so she’s gone on a crude and swift information gathering spree: compelling Elena, Stefan, Caroline and Tyler to stay in high school detention after the awkward memorial for Tyler’s mom. The official explanation is that poor drunk Carol fell; but most have figured out that Klaus drowned her, in retaliation for Tyler’s failed rebellion.

Klaus, weirdly, has moved on to making more hybrids as soon as possible, which he can only do if Elena is cured and human again, a change he can only effect if Jeremy keeps killing vampires and building his skin map to where Silas is buried. It’s complicated, and Rebekah wants to know why it didn’t all happen during her dormancy. The short answer: because Elena broke up with Stefan and is now dating Damon.

Bekky hates Elena, ever since she pretended to be her friend in order to take her down a season or two ago, and she’s also one of the many who’s kept the eternal teenager from ever making it to any high school dance. She actually staked her in her party dress, so Bekky is delighted that Elena is still stringing along the Salvatore brothers and making their un-life as miserable as possible. Then she tells Tyler to kill them all because she wants the cure even if no one else is focused enough to get it, because she wants to hurt Klaus (who will always choose his hybrids over her).

More interesting stuff happens with Shane and Bonnie: he tells her she’s graduated his impromptu mystic school, and she saves him when Kol finds out he wants to bring back Silas and skewers him in panicky fear. Seems all the recent mass murders were about gathering power for an “Expression” spell which will return everyone to life, including Shane’s and April’s dead families and Silas, the most Original Original ever. Or. Something?

The coolest scene in the episode, actually, is when Rebekah and Kol torture Shane in an old janitor’s closet, because the eerie lighting really makes the two Originals look like gothic statues indifferent to the fate of their human victim. This show doesn’t go enough into its special effects potential to have all these revenants look less than pretty from time to time.

Lots of convenient plotting keeps anyone from really getting hurt (though April has to bleed from her midsection again a few times, poor thing), except for all the vamp newbies impatient Klaus is making to test Jeremy. Stefan tried this route until getting disgusted, Damon (“and here I thought you were the FUN brother”) has been cautiously training Jeremy in advance of any field tests, but Klaus has created a bar of hungry vamps for Jeremy to fight his way out of. So, that’ll probably go real well next week.

Apparently the Originals are getting their own back-door CW pilot soon, so that means they won’t kill them off and some of them are going to have to turn sympathetic unless the show will be only about their victims. There’s a slight problem in that TPTB seem to think they’re already sympathetic (fail); the whole lot of them can’t get out of Mystic Falls fast enough for this reviewer. Let’s get back to Elena’s love life and her ever unspoken quest for polyamory, shall we?