The Originals 1.14 “The Long Road to Hell”

… is paved with good intentions? Not from this bunch, c’mon! The Mikaelsons are the current example of shows built around the villains, not the heroes. If there are any heroes in New Orleans, we have yet to meet them (maybe Camille, but nobody can stand her). Every sexy supernatural horror show worth its salt eventually gets around to a haunted asylum episode, and this one features Rebekah as our femme fatale in distress. Turns out, she had it coming.

Also in Sabine’s asylum of insanity (wonderfully distressed and decrepit, with endless halls leading to locked exterior doors and loads of windows letting in light just around the bend, past all the rusty pipes and overturned beds, is Klaus (or “Nick” as revived witch Genevieve calls him), still suffering the torture of the cursed bone knife that imbedded itself in his midriff. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, but it turns out Ginny is more angry with Bekster than she is with old Nick, and is using her new lease on life to turn the siblings against each other. How exactly her ghostly blood is nourishing to Klaus I don’t bother to ask.

Elijah, now that he has Hayley somewhere safe, is all about finding his siblings. He’s nothing if not a multi-tasker; usually smart enough to run all his competing agendas simultaneously. Except for that unfortunate time when he let Celeste die while helping Klaus, of course. Sabine is still not over it, and she curses him anew with an intriguing web of tattooed names that appear on his skin: all the women she’s inhabited since dying, it turns out, leading to one, Clara, who was at a certain asylum in a certain year (1919) that Shall Never Be Mentioned, especially by Becks and Marcel, who Did Something Bad.

It turns out all Ginny has to do to set Nick against them is reveal what it was. And remove the incapacitating knife, which she does with ease. So while Becks stumbles about beset by wolf venom (how else to keep her impotent?), she’s reliving her years as a candy striper during the Influenza epidemic, and she wasn’t really a nurturing caregiver at all, big surprise.

Remember how when we first met Rebekah and Klaus they were flappers in Chicago and Stefan was the Ripper? And then they high-tailed it out of there because Mikael found them? Well, Mikael was their vampire-hunting father, and it was Marcel and Becks who invoked him first to New Orleans with Ginny’s help. I guess he was previously unaware his children had returned to the New World and founded a town. Dastardly! This of course is something I or any sane person would forgive, because Klaus has deserved death at least since the Crusades.

The bad thing from our perspective isn’t calling Mikael, of course: it is that when she got cold feet and asked Ginny to undo the spell (too late), they argued and she ended up purposefully giving both Ginny and Clara influenza and then insuring that they slowly wasted away unattended in the asylum. Which, like, why not just eat them? Were there any doctors or did amateur nurses run the madhouse? How about just compelling them to do what she wanted? Nope, let’s just make sure her new friends suffer as much as possible for no reason was Rebekah’s Gibson Girl mindset, apparently.

What’s going to piss off Klaus to no end, however, is the whole betrayal of a sibling thing. As Becks well knows. And she’s kept the secret for 100 years. Most of which she was daggered for, but still. Elijah realizes all of this, and arrives just in time to keep Klaus from killing Rebekah or Marcel. Happily, the only way to do it is to redagger Klaus! With the bone one, sadly, not the White Oak one that would really turn him off.

Elijah tells our tortured twosome to run, but what good will that do? Is he foolish enough to believe he can reason with a raving Nick? Point out that Mikael is dead now? Allow that Rebekah deserves a love life, as the age of chivalry is long gone? Yes, of course, always.