The Vampire Diaries 4.17 “Because the Night”

This episode had me from the moment I heard the title. Because: Patti Smith. Of course they can’t afford that Springsteen co-written track itself, but they do get a cover band to do “Ask the Angels,” and two versions of “Psycho Killer” to boot, which really sets the mood. Basically, the flashbacks this week mean Damon and Lexi (yay!) might at any moment run into Spike or Nikki, and while it doesn’t make much time for Blaxploitation (they should totally do a Blacula episode! Of course for this show vamps are white and witches are black, but it’s not a strict rule…Omega Man flashbacks kicking in, must return to review … ) this episode is all about disaffected New York punks and how sexy that was.

Which explains Damon’s new haircut (surprisingly neat and short so they can blow it out for the flashbacks), but not Elena’s (which is the current version of kinda punk with blue highlights and cute as can be, but so not connected in any way to a music scene that occurred long before she was born). Seems in the 1970s he and William (who he killed just last week) hung out not at CBGB’s (“too high profile”) or the Factory (“too clean”), but at Billy’s, New York’s version of the raucous dive bar where everybody’s too wasted to mind a little sexy open vamp feeding time.

Elena is ready to party (hence the new do), but Damon is actually there to go through Billy’s pack-rat files to find out how he came to be Katerina’s minion (and thus find Katherine and the Cure she stole). CBGB’s may be gone, but I suppose it makes sense that Billy’s is still around and churning out the punk rock since the owner was immortal and everybody digs the music all over again.

Anyway, that’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is that while Damon thinks he’s playing Elena, Elena reveals to Rebekah (who keeps turning up like the bad penny she is) that she’s playing him right back, and these two frenemies actually form a believable alliance of their own. Rebekah almost tries to like Vamp Elena as much as she hated Human Elena, except the girls still work each other’s nerves regardless.

Their alliance leads to them stealing Damon’s car right from under his nose. Serves him right for what he did to Lexi back in the day, when he fooled her into believing he cared about her and almost killed her. He even explains his guilt over that trick as the reason he killed her finally in season one, which is a twisted kind of Damon-logic that only makes sense when Ian Somerhalder tells it. Poor Lexi, but at least this show believes in regular flashbacks so we’ve seen her a lot anyway.

Meanwhile, in Mystic Falls, Bonnie tricks a bunch of witches (some of whom are white and male, finally) to gather and link their powers to cure her of her Expression-addiction (good witches work with “the Spirits” instead). Sadly, these line-free stiffs don’t realize how vamp-involved Bonnie’s life has become. Thus, in order to save Bonnie, Caroline kills the head witch, which ends up killing them all, just as Silas planned. Third mass murder completed!