The Originals 2.13 “The Devil is Damned”

Can Klaus really learn to trust? Can Kol learn loyalty? Can Rebekah master her new witchy powers? Can Vincent figure out where to find Hope? Can Hayley and Jackson get married before anything else bad happens to the wolves? Can Marcel choose the right side this time? Can Freya’s story be any lamer?

This episode is strong because it focuses on themes of family, and acknowledges them as a mix of blood ties and chosen companions. Kol feels like the eternal outsider, which Klaus (who will never relinquish that crown, bastard hybrid wolf-vamp that he is) finds laughable. He’s dithering over whether to accept Jackson into their clan (kind of unavoidable since Hayley is marrying him soon), but has no doubts about Becks or Marcel (his chosen son). Which proves him correct, because Marcel comes clean to Hayley about Vincent’s coercion just as Kol admits the same to Klaus.

When in New Orleans, choosing Klaus’ side is probably the best bet. It’s been working for Camille for the last year or so, even if he did leave her with a traumatized Elijah and guarding the baby everyone wants, with no powers of her own (not even her dark object collection) to protect her from angry witches (those beings she hates most of all).

Vincent does come for Hope, but his charms don’t quite work on Elijah like they should; and in fact with his other witch siblings working against him, it doesn’t seem even Freya’s endorsement is enough to keep him in the dominant role. When Klaus pits himself as Kol and Beks’ power source (against Vincent’s usage of their parents corpses), it’s all too amazing that Klaus trusts them to revive him with the White Oak Stake of Destruction lying right there. Hope has really changed everything just by existing.

And she may be doing so actively as well, as Camille’s car powers down for no reason as she’s driving home, all to keep her from the explosion that Elijah stages to destroy Vincent once and for all. Now the precociously powerful super-baby is one of the oldest sci-fi tropes lying around (2^nd only to instant pregnancy due to alien/demonic violation), but as I haven’t seen it on any show I watch to recently, I’ll allow it. Somebody has to protect Camille, who’s so accident-prone and clueless she wandered off to town without remembering her cell phone and had to call from a land line? I can’t even!

But Freya may be the real problem here. She seeks out Vincent (as the brother she remembers best), and lets him know that she’s cursed to rise once every hundred years, while being on the run from Dalia since she was first able to escape? How do you run while trapped in a glass coffin? Dalia can’t figure out each hiding place in a hundred years? Garbled nonsense, they’re going to have to get this one together if they want Freya to be anything more than another whiny Mikaelson.

But she’s the wild card, and what’s surprising about this episode of The Originals is that so many of the core characters seem to have finally realized their place, at Klaus’s side.