The Vampire Diaries 5.01 “I Know What You Did Last Summer”

I liked the finale of season 4. But I’m kind of hating on the debut of season 5. It’s not as bad as last season, with strange shenanigans about hunters and hybrids and suicidal ministers. In fact, everything on the surface is as sunny and bright as can be.

But what has been resolved from last season? We got rid of Klaus (yay! Go haunt your own show, fuzzy misanthrope!). Rebekah’s still swanning about, but she’s in a great mood since she spent the summer sleeping around Europe with a Matt unable to believe his luck. Stefan is still in a box underwater. Bonnie is still dead. Damon and Elena have been snogging all summer, so they’re feeling pretty good, except that she’s going to off to college with Caroline now, semi-against his wishes.

Really? Two vampires in college? The only planning they seem to have done for this rite of passage for teen shows (some barely survive; I’m looking at you, Buffy) is to cold-pack a supply of blood. That’s thoughtful, thirsty vamps, but one slip with your daylight rings on the quad and then what? When you literally have the world at your fingertips, is college really where you want to learn and experience? Maybe, but it’s not like these two were ever Rhodes scholars before. Luckily, the vamps seem to have got there before them, giving us an actual mystery to sink our teeth into (sorry!).

Please be better than Silas.

Speaking of which, why is Stefan still drowning in a box? All summer? Trying not to go mad, or turn off his humanity (still playing that card, show? It’s tired). Paul Wesley is having fun playing doppelganger Silas, but he gives up the game pretty quickly in his mad search for Katherine, who took the cure. He’s a sicko with Stefan’s face, but we’ve seen that before from Stefan in a bad mood.

And nobody has noticed that Bonnie is dead? Not her dad? Not her supposed best friends? Postcards from fake world travels (delivered by Jeremy, seer of dead people) are all it takes? Well, Bonnie’s dad’s mayoral run is pretty short-lived, too, thanks to Silas, so this show seems pretty much done with witches at this point. They’re all just angry ghosts. And it might as well be done with werewolves, too, as Tyler blows Caroline’s college dreams off for more off-screen wolf-time in the boonies.

This is an eclectic, indefinite mix of plots with which to debut a season. Choose one, show, and you better make it fresh. Maybe it’ll be about Elena actually doing something other than Damon for a while. Not that I blame her.