There’s a flash-forward rehash at the end of the episode, where we see how everything leads inevitably to the future we’ve been seeing all season. That it makes sense and is still exciting is a testament to the plotting intricacies of this show, though there is a rather gaping hole that they almost expose at the end of that sequence. And that is why Rayna specifically targeted Beau, then Damon, then Stefan. Her real anger was towards Julian, whom Damon and Valerie already dispatched, but she’s ready to take down every vampire everywhere, and it leaves her quite one-dimensional.
The rest of the cast is more nuanced, thankfully. Alaric has decided to flee Mystic Falls with his new babies while he can, and Caroline invites herself along, more attached to the kids than a surrogate mom should be. He welcomes her help, and she’s so serious about it she turns down Stefan’s offer to flee around the world while they can (“hey, come party with me while an insane killer hunts us both down?” isn’t the best come-on ever, but reason doesn’t usually get in the way of Caroline’s affections). Leaving him with Valerie, who is used to the fugitive lifestyle. They have more chemistry, it’s hard to deny.
They were on a search for more of the rare herb that Freya used to treat Stefan’s wound in the Originals crossover, bringing them to a nursery in the woods tended by a much scarred witch who let them know they’d been beaten to it. Stefan is all about grasping at straws this week.
Only maybe he doesn’t have to, because Bonnie goes back to the Armory and finds out that Rayna only has as many lives as shamans who died for her (the Armory keeps the Native American bodies in coffins with glass lids, like museum pieces, just in case you were wondering if the Armory was bad or not), and that leaves about three. Damon kills her twice this episode, once by dismembering her into bloody plastic bags (Somerhalder has his usual fun with a mock cook-out in bloody chef’s apron, throwing the parts down a dry well). Where they burst into flame and regenerate. After almost killing her and Stefan for real, she gets captured by the Armory again, and Damon decides it’s best for everyone if he goes to coffin and waits for Elena to wake up. Which is fine with none of his friends but Matt, who wants all vampires out of Mystic Falls, forever.
You can’t really blame him, vamps have murdered everyone he knows repeatedly, including killing and drowning and torturing him a few times, and Jeremy and Elena’s lives were damaged by vampires, and the only reason Bonnie and Tyler are still around is that they’re supernatural, too. I feel for Matt when he threatens Stefan, inspired by his new cop girlfriend who sees things more clearly than he does. But being at odds with the stars of the show isn’t usually the best way to go.
Still, it’s hard to argue that even Stefan is good for the people around him, or ever has been. These aren’t your baseball playing Twilight vamps, these are eldritch beings stuck in their own worst patterns for centuries, torturing each other to epic degrees.
And yet, when Bonnie shows up in the warehouse in Brooklyn where Damon has hidden his set of coffins, she lets him know that not saying goodbye to her face was the worst thing he could have done, even worse than opting out until Elena wakes up (at Bonnie’s death). I feel you, Bonnie, but aren’t you kind of lucky he’s been intent on saving your life since the spell rather than outright killing you to ease his own suffering? Maybe let sleeping vampires lie, just this once?