I am loving the song titles this season. There’s definitely a wacky sense of fun again. Not that pre-historic witch wars and love affairs didn’t have their moments, but when the best episode of the previous season is when Katherine’s long-suffering and beautiful daughter dies, it’s not really an upbeat time.
This year it’s all current witches and Kai, and except for Enzo it’s been going pretty well. Liv is teaching Josette how to up her magic game (since she’s been focusing on being a real medical doctor for the past twenty years, she has to admit sheepishly to Alaric “It’s not at all like riding a bike again!”), while trashing the Salvatore manse in the process. Jeremy is still pouting over all the dead girls (but shirtlessly, so there’s that), and Liz is actually dying of actual cancer. Which is not good, but mostly because Caroline is still her spoiled little mommy’s girl and doesn’t plan to begin her immortality without her mother at her side.
Caroline suffers from an atypical vampire dilemma. She tries to be moral and high-minded, but she knows she has the power to do things the easy way, especially when they start getting hard.
It’s a very different dilemma from Elena’s, who’s all too willing to use her vampire abilities, if not really ever knowing what for. If she has one consistent character trait, it’s materialism. Elena really likes her stuff. I’m prepared to say the real reason she broke up with Stefan is that time he threw her cell phone out the car window. She never got over that (shout outs to Cindy at lesscynical.com for her many scathing jokes on that subject).
And this episode she is freaking out as Kai’s wild magic dissolves her daylight ring (completely ignoring that Kai is probably going to stick her out in the parking lot at noon just to see if he can do a cloaking spell while divining enough water to keep her from becoming a torchiere). She is pretty clever however at setting him on fire the chemistry lab while he tortures her at the empty high school, at least long enough to call Damon for help (on a landline phone no less!).
Cloaking is the other big effect of the episode, and never has a witch family had a more perfect signature ability than this one. Invisibility is the best way to cause all sorts of inexplicable plot complications, while keeping characters from getting really badly hurt and springing surprise reveals before every commercial break. Sadly, when Jo tries to cloak herself and Damon to Elena’s rescue, and then add Elena to the spell for an escape, it’s far too taxing for her (and like nothing for Kai, who has yet to burn through the overload of Traveler magic he absorbed from Mystic Falls).
By taking shortcuts, Caroline makes a big mistake. Enzo pretends he’s not still out to ruin Stefan’s life (after Stefan leads him right to Sara, his niece 4-times removed), and Liv admits to Luke that he’s the more powerful of the two and she’s as doomed as Jo if they ever face off. Which their family requires them to do. Because, reasons.
It’s a mess, but it’s a blisteringly fast, emotionally resonant one that would be almost perfect, except that Bonnie is MIA again, despite her pre-holiday cliffhanger of despair.