The Vampire Diaries Episode 410
“After School Special”
Written By: Brett Matthews
Directed By: David Von Ancken
Original Airdate: 17 January 2013
In This Episode...
During a town memorial for Carol Lockwood, Elena thinks she sees Rebekah in the crowd. She finds April crying in the hallway, but it is a ruse. Rebekah is indeed “alive” and she snaps Elena’s neck. Rebekah calls Stefan and kidnaps Caroline and pretty soon she has an Algonquin Roundtable of compelled vampires. She recaps the whole vampire cure deal, but notices that the tension in the room is unusually high. Caroline finally tells her that Stefan and Elena broke up. Rebekah’s interest is piqued; more so when Stefan says, “She slept with Damon.” Rebekah is distracted from the vampire cure to focus on pouring salt on that wound. She compels Elena into admitting that she is no longer in love with Stefan, but she is in love with Damon; she feels free with him, while with Stefan, she feels like a project.
Guess who else is in town? Kol! He kidnaps Shane and brings him to his sister to spill his guts on the vampire cure. Shane can’t be compelled, so Kol starts torturing him. When Bonnie discovers that Shane has been taken by Rebekah and Kol, she enlists April’s help to do a protection spell around him. It quickly becomes clear that Bonnie messed up on the protection spell Shane finally spills some of what he knows to the Originals. He is looking for the cure because he wants to free Silas, the first-ever immortal. Once Silas has risen, he will raise an army of those who died for him (yes! Zombies!) This spooks Kol, who is terrified of the prospect of Silas being resurrected. Rebekah scoffs that Silas is just a fairy tale, but Shane insists he is real. Out of pure rage and fear, Kol impales Shane on a piece of rebar, which infuriates Rebekah. Of course, April takes the true damage from this, leaving Bonnie wide-eyed as she tries to stem the blood. Elena and Stefan, no longer under Rebekah’s watchful eye, burst in and Stefan quickly heals April and send her away with Bonnie. Elena desperately wants to talk with Stefan about what just happened, but he is done. Wise man.
Meanwhile, Damon is still acting as camp counselor for Jeremy and Matt up at the lake house. Damon is not giving this training his all, because he is still pining for Elena. Klaus shows up unexpectedly, and is annoyed to discover that Jeremy hasn’t actually killed any vampires. He assumed that Damon would make a bunch of vamps for Jeremy to kill, but Damon says Jeremy first needs to learn to defend himself adequately; in actuality, Damon just doesn’t want to do anything to upset Elena. After Rebekah releases Elena from her compulsion, she goes home and calls Damon, and confesses that she is in love with him. Damon is overwhelmed with emotions that he doesn’t know how to handle. He assures her that he will get this cure for her, even though he will have to do things she won’t like, then tells her to come to him. Elena is elated. But before Elena arrives, Damon and his charges go meet Klaus at a bar. The bar is filled with bodies and, as Klaus explains, the victims are in transition; it is up to Jeremy to kill them.
Stefan is back at home and Rebekah goes to see him. He has a proposition for her: they team up to find the cure. Whoever gets to the cure first will decide what to do with it, and they both hate their brother. Rebekah wants to force feed the cure to Klaus and laugh when he realizes he is no longer immortal. I am not sure what Stefan plans on doing with the cure, but it is likely that he no longer wants to use it on Elena. Rebekah accepts his offer.
Some other important events from tonight’s episode:
-Shane was behind the explosion that killed the town council. He needed massacres of a dozen to use the bloodshed to perform dark magic.
-Bonnie’s dad, Rudy Hopkins, takes over as mayor. This is the first we are seeing of Bonnie’s dad, whose absence is explained as business travel because his daughter’s witchy tendencies make him uncomfortable.
-April takes a meeting with the sheriff and the mayor to tell them she knows that Shane was behind her father’s death - and she wants the truth to come out.
Dig It or Bury It?
Welcome back, The Vampire Diaries. Tonight’s episode was dark. There was no humor; no lightheartedness; no happiness. Even Damon getting those three little words from Elena was a little uncomfortable - I’m not used to seeing Damon so vulnerable. It is weird.
Devilishly Charming
Okay, there was one line that made me smile. At one point, Rebekah got Tyler to the school and compelled him to shift so she could watch the vampires run frantically. Nothing ever happened with that, but when Rebekah comes across Elena and Stefan later, she rolls her eyes. “Why are my least favorite people always the most durable?”
Prophecies?
Jeremy is not pleased with Klaus’s training program for him. Kol doesn’t want anyone to have the cure. And it looks like Stefan and Rebekah are going to hook up.