The Vampire Dairies 8.12 “What Are You?”

It’s a little late to deepen the mysteries of a confusing, frustrating season, but I suppose signs could indicate the final four episodes will be a sustained blast. Certainly, the multiple scene changes and plot reversals this week recall the giddy abandon of earlier seasons when the show really got into a dizzying array of power dynamics (usually involving either Katherine or the Michelsons, to be fair). We don’t have those two forces anymore, but we finally have something better than Arcadias and the Sirens. A couple of somethings, by episode’s end.

First, we have family, in Bonnie’s case the tragedy of having just lost her chosen one with Enzo due to a vengeful Stefan. So, what better time for her real mom, Abby, to show up? Abby wants to help, something (as an absentee vampire parent) she’s never been very great at. But, like Bonnie, she’s an ex-witch now, and they have a history that may just be what Bonnie needs to tap into at this low point.

Except that while Bonnie hears Enzo calling her, Abby believes she’s opened a doorway to darkness, and trying to rescue Enzo from death is a mistake. She hasn’t quite been privy to how often nearly everyone (no, everyone, that season they all realized they could use the Other Side as a way of getting a massive do-over before it fell completely apart) has died and returned, but in this case, she may be right. She’d rather help her daughter grieve than help her risk her own life, and can you blame her?

Bonnie has left Stefan to drive around country roads in despair since he murdered Enzo, so it’s up to Damon and Caroline to try to find and rescue him. It gets marginally harder when he’s picked up by the police because he’s covered in blood and oh yeah has been killing waiting rooms full of people for several weeks. Caroline can vampire compel all the mean policemen to go away, but what can she do about human Stefan’s own depressing guilt complex? When he realizes he can still save a little girl’s mom, he tries, only to end up stabbed in the stomach by his former victim.

Damon fares slightly better, as Arcadias says Stefan becoming human breaks their contract, but he’ll go on his own killing spree unless Damon finds a journal that Dorian and Alaric have just given to Matt. It’s a Maxwell family heirloom about the making of the Bell That Tolls Twelve back in slavery days. Alaric and Dorian manage to delay Damon long enough to figure out what is so important about the tome, and it turns out to chronicle how Ethan Maxwell and Beatrice (a Bennet Witch) made the bell to rid the town of vampires but instead were co-opted by the sirens to deliver Cade some souls.

This show has always been about just finding important artifacts and journals at the exact moment psychotic killers are looking for them, but at least it explains how the sirens ended up in the dungeon under the Armory, and it’s always nice when Matt (who definitely was not alive 200 years ago) gets his own flashback to the olden days. I’ll excuse the exact resemblance to his forgotten forbear.

So, what’s that, three story fronts in multiple layers? Bonnie and her pain, Caroline and her guilty fiancé, Damon and his zeal to save Stefan no matter the price, plus Matt and his destiny, and we don’t just stop there. Because a surprise reveal comes totally out of left field at the absolute last second (even more surprising because I thought the actor was busy on Supergirl these days): original Heretic Witch Kai somehow survived his beheading and wants to help Alaric (despite having killed his wife during their wedding). Yep, the final wild ride has begun!