We finally meet this season of The Vampire Diaries‘ Big Bad, and she’s a badass. Bad enough to drag her small but effective Phoenix Sword along the pavement, shooting off sparks as she slowly approaches. Bad enough to use the sparks to ignite the gasoline she just poured all over her latest vampire kill, ensuring a fiery doom of no return for poor old Beau. RIP, silent black warrior heretic. You seldom spoke (save for your swan song in this episode), and now you’re dead, but you were never a slave and you were beloved by your fellow heretics beyond race and genre. Beau had been marked all those silent years ago, and now that he’s gone, the mark moves on to Stefan. “Why does it always have to be you?” asks Caroline, quite fairly, as that’s really the biggest plot hole this season.
It’s sort of a letdown that it’s only because she marked him that Rayna the Hunter is after him in the future flash-forwards, because you sort of wanted it to be something more personal. Especially since, as Damon pointed out before nearly falling on her sword, she sort of resembles Elena and all her doppelgangers.
Elena, btw, isn’t dead, and neither is Tyler. Damon was tripping pretty hard when he thought he killed them, and Stefan and Bonnie realize they have less to blame Damon for than they thought, for once.
Rayna, however, isn’t Elena, she’s more tied to the Hunter mythos that affected (infected?) Jeremy, Elena’s brother. Her father was a vampire hunter of The Five, and he trained her until, after losing a battle with Julian, she was vampire-compelled to kill him. So Julian’s hateful legacy persists (you really wondered why they ever wanted him back, and understand now why Valerie and Silas never did). Bonnie’s magic won’t harm her, she can revive from age and incineration, and you can sort of see her point that vampires are jerks.
However, why are Stefan and Damon in particular her jerks to worry about? They’re not part of Julian’s clan, they wanted him dead as much as she did (and in fact killed him with Valerie’s help last week). So our Heretics club is down to Nora, Mary Louise and Valerie, all of whom quake in their boots at the thought of Rayna. The season still has nine episodes to go, so we’re still not quite there in seeing how we get to the flash-forward, or what happens next.
Unrelated but parallel is the struggle for Caroline to survive birthing Alaric’s twins, who are voracious magic syphons in the Kai mold. What is it with those messed up Gemini witches? Valerie is brave and generous in helping Caroline survive, and keeps working when Nora and Mary Louise flee and Bonnie shows up to take their place. She’s become an integral character this season, which I hope doesn’t spell her doom now that Stefan’s had to flee and (hopefully) lead Rayna away from Mystic Falls.
Alaric names the babies Josie (after their murdered mom) and Elizabeth (after Caroline’s deceased one), which is very sweet. But given that Enzo was instrumental in uniting Rayna and her sword, and seems to know more than he’s saying about why she’s come back, the future at the moment is bleak.