The Vampire Diaries Episode 408
“We’ll Always Have Bourbon Street”
Written By: Charlie Charbonneau & Jose Molina
Directed By: Jesse Warn
Original Airdate: 6 December 2012
In This Episode...
Picking up where we left off, Elena and Damon are enjoying each other - a lot. Damon begs her not to tell Stefan about them - he just wants one perfect, private day. As she leaves for school, Stefan shows up. He tells Damon that he thinks Elena is sired to him, which naturally pisses off Damon - he doesn’t want to think Elena only loves him because she has been “brainwashed.” Stefan asks him to do a test, which Damon goes along with. He visits Elena at school with a bag of blood and tells her it would mean a lot to him if she would give it another try - he thinks she will really like it now. Sure enough, Elena drinks the bagged blood and enjoys it. She is overjoyed; Damon is upset that his brother was right.
So now the question becomes, how does he un-sire Elena? As we learn in flashbacks, Damon ran into a similar problem in 1942. He was hanging out in New Orleans, and a girl named Charlotte fell for him. She begged him to turn her, and being Damon, he did. She became obsessed with him, and when it got all “Fatal Attraction-y” he told her to count all the bricks in all the buildings of New Orleans and left. He found a witch who claimed she could break the sire bond, but the cost would be the souls of 12 innocents. Damon slaughtered those 12, but for reasons that are never really explored, nothing else happens with the curse, or with Charlotte.
Damon and Stefan road trip to New Orleans, seeking the witch, Val. Instead, they find Charlotte, who literally counted every brick in New Orleans, then waited for Damon to return. So clearly, the witch did not break the sire bond. She helps them locate Val’s new shop, only Val is no longer alive. The place is being run by her granddaughter, Naomi, who says that she doesn’t practice; she mostly sells voodoo relics to tourists. If a spell like Damon describes does exist, it was in one of Val’s grimoires, which were all destroyed in Katrina. Damon comes back a short time later, believing Naomi to be lying to him. He remembers the first time he visited Val - Naomi was her daughter, not granddaughter. Naomi finally admits that there is no spell that Damon speaks of. Her mother practiced a form of witchcraft called expression (what a shit name) that was darker than black magic. All Val was doing was getting Damon to sacrifice humans for her so she could grow more powerful. The only way to break a vampire-sire bond is the old fashioned way: break up. Damon does just that with Charlotte, in a surprisingly gentlemanly way. He knows that he has to do the same with Elena. He doesn’t want to, especially when Naomi says that the sire bond only amplifies feelings that were there before the person was turned. But Damon realizes he has to do right - not by him, not by Stefan, but by Elena.
While the boys are away, the girls play. Elena invites Caroline and Bonnie over to the Salvatore house to enjoy a case of Dom. She wants to tell them about her and Damon, but Caroline gets super-judgmental the moment Damon’s name comes up. She promises not to mention Damon for the rest of the night, and the girls get good and drunk. Once they pass the “silly dancing” stage of drunkenness and get to the quiet, introspective stage of drunkenness, shit goes downhill. Caroline and Elena again butt heads over Damon, and Elena announces that she slept with him. Caroline reveals that she is sired to Damon and Elena gets mad and tells them to leave. But then they are accosted by Kim and Adrian.
Adrian is the last hybrid still sired to Klaus. He isn’t strong enough to make it through the sire-bond breaking, and Kim, the girl who was broken last week, takes pity on him and takes him from the barn. She and Tyler are at odds: she thinks he is being just as domineering as Klaus was; Tyler is just trying to assert his dominance as pack alpha. Kim challenges this by kidnapping Caroline and torturing her in the barn. Tyler and Elena go to rescue her. Elena offers herself up in Caroline’s place, saying that if they want to get back at Klaus, she is far more valuable to him. Kim buys it, and in the transfer, Tyler steps in and jams his hand into Kim’s chest. He swears he will kill her if she doesn’t submit. So she does, and Tyler lets her live. The rest of the pack bows, accepting Tyler as their alpha.
So the girls make up and the boys return home. Elena tells Damon she knows she is sired, but doesn’t believe it changes her feelings towards him. Damon still has to turn into Angry Damon and “break up” with Elena.
Also: We learn a little more about Shane and Hayley. He needs an army of 12 un-sired hybrids. Hayley has to break Adrian, otherwise Shane is taking Tyler. In exchange, he gives Hayley everything she ever wanted to know about her biological parents. When Hayley finally announces that Adrian has been broken, Shane turns over the thumb drive and tells Hayley that her parents are dead - but that doesn’t mean she can’t see them again. We also learn from Bonnie that the “exciting new nature witchcraft” Shane is teacher her is called (wait for it...) “expression.”
Dig It or Bury It?
Surprisingly, the heightened drama and low level of action didn’t bother me tonight. Maybe it helped that the boys and girls were separate. Maybe it is because we are finally getting some insight into Shane and whatever his evil plot is. Did anyone get the feeling he was talking about zombies when he told Hayley just because her parents were dead didn’t mean she couldn’t see them again? I’m not sure how zombies would fit into the mythology of The Vampire Diaries. It could be ghosts, visions, more vampires, some crazy ju-ju we haven’t seen yet.
Prophecies?
Bonnie and Shane help break Jeremy of some of his hunter instincts, and Elena and Damon just can’t keep their hands off each other.