The Vampire Dairies 7.19 “Somebody That I Used to Know”

Stefan’s back in his own body and free of the best thing that happened to him in the past three years, Valerie, the once would-be mother of the only child he ever might have had. So what’s the first thing he does? Start bothering Alaric so he can pester Caroline hardcore. Caroline who turned down his offer to flee Rayna around the world three years ago, and who has Moved On With Her Life. Since it’s just Alaric telling him this, Stefan doesn’t listen. When are these silly vamps going to learn to trust Ric? He’s loved more than a few of them, after all. And he really is good at only killing the bad ones.

The broken record that is always Stefan has to wait until Caroline herself shuts the door in his face, which is really his curse. Luckily, he’s not the star this week. The stars are, for once, Bonnie and Enzo, and they make the most of their spotlight.

Kat Graham has proven she needs her name above the title for some time, and she runs with this long unspooling of Bonnie’s past three years, really showing how Bonnie could move from being Enzo’s surprise kidnap victim to his flirtatious lover in pointed subsequent intervals. See, he drugged and stashed her in a cabin to protect her. Crazy, I know, but in their witch-vampire-wolf-mad scientist world it could be true. And realizing that she’s the best thing that might ever happen to him, Enzo starts wooing her, taking advantage of the opportunity her best friend Damon provided by withdrawing to a coffin for the duration.

When you think about it, Bonnie was prime for Enzo’s attentions. Jeremy is MIA, and Elena is dormant. Caroline is caught up in baby drama, and who else does Bonnie have? Matt’s gone off the occult reservation, Tyler’s with Jeremy, and she doesn’t know where her cousin Lucy is. Meanwhile, her mom is a vampire, her father is dead, and her grandma died aiding the Salvatores. Bonnie’s rage at Damon for opting out starts to make sense in the light of her tragedies, and Enzo (his former best friend) filled in that void at exactly the right time.

It helps a little that as Bonnie’s Don Juan, Enzo is the most focused, the most interesting, the most suave and the most driven that he’s ever been. If there is a through-line for this very muddled character, one thing that characterizes him more than anything else, it’s an unfulfilled need for unconditional love. He’s been abandoned by everyone for centuries. Neither Damon nor Lily Salvatore ever gave him what he really needed for long, and he understandably has always hated smug Stefan.

So now he has someone to help and protect, and wonder of wonders, she took what he offered willingly and thanked him for the help. Unlike Damon, whom she could never be romantically involved with given what she knows about his history, Enzo is a blank slate that she can work with. So I get it, and even his repeated jabs at her crummy guitar playing (while she’s locked in the cabin and then in the mental institution where she’s a mole) are kind of adorable.

We’ve got a new McGuffin (a locked room in the basement of the Armory!) and nice lateral estrangements between Damon and Stefan, Damon and Bonnie, Stefan and Caroline, and Enzo and everyone else. So if we could only figure out what they’re fighting for (it was not, apparently, Mystic Falls or the Heretics or their human friend Matt), this season might actually end well. Searching for the rogue vamps freed from the Phoenix Stone ain’t it, because though they are contributing to this season’s main theme of massacre scenes in commercial establishments (bars, hair salons, dentistry offices, frat houses, etc.), if we don’t know the vamps or their victims it’s hard to care. The humor of Bonnie learning how to aim her stake gun higher than their legs (while her witchy powers are suppressed) can only take us so far, though it is pretty cute.