Vampire Diaries, Season 1 Episode 5

After Stefan’s cunning capture of Damon, he locks him down in the basement; the plan is to allow Damon to mummify, as a living corpse, then move him to the family tomb, and re-evaluate Damon in fifty years. Meanwhile, things between Stefan and Elena are getting strained; after four days of absence dealing with Damon, Stefan finally returns to school, and promises to explain himself at the Grill later. He doesn’t show until Elena’s ready to leave, and a strange old man claims that he knew Stefan, years ago; he’s shocked that Stefan hasn’t aged. When Stefan denies Elena an explanation, she leaves, tired of the mystery. At the Salvatore home, Zach tries telling Damon goodbye, and Damon almost kills him, –Stefan saves Zach, probably the reason he was late to his meeting with Elena.

In desperation, Damon turns to Caroline, and calls her to him. That night, she manages to ignore it. The same night, Jeremy helps Stefan arrange a romantic dinner for two for he and Elena, in which Stefan manages to share a little more of himself with her. Jeremy is going through his own romantic problems with Vickie, who loves getting high a little too much. The next day at a fundraiser carwash, Caroline follows Damon’s calls. After Caroline leaves, Elena speaks again to the old man who recognized Stefan. She follows up on his story of the Salvatore brothers and their murdered uncle by getting a favor from Logan Fell. Logan is the news anchor who dates Aunt Jenna, but is also part of a clandestine group of vampire hunters that includes the sheriff, and the mayor.

At the station, Elena manages to find an archive video of the news feature covering the death of Stefan’s uncle in June of 1953. Sure enough, in the old black and white video, Stefan lurks in the doorway, in shadows, while the dead body of his uncle is wheeled past on a gurney. Caroline has freed Damon at the Salvatore house, but Zach urges her to run, holding off Damon just long enough, until Damon can escape. Damon kills Zach and chases Caroline, but she manages to escape. At the carwash, Bonnie falls into a trance and sets a nearby car ablaze; the second demonstration of her power that day. Stefan shakes her from the trance, the fire is extinguished instantly, and he agrees to tell no one that she did it. Later that night, Bonnie goes to her grandmother’s house, and doesn’t appear again, –not even in the next episode.

Jeremy leaves Vickie in the cemetery to do drugs with her loser friends, not able to reconcile himself to her self-destructive personality. That night, Caroline sleeps sadly under the sign of a pentagram from the moonlight shining through the mysterious yellow crystal. Logan steals the pocketwatch while at the Gilbert house visiting Jenna, while Stefan discovers Zach, and  mourns the death of his uncle. In her room, Elena puts all the pieces together and realizes what Stefan is. And in the cemetery, Damon attacks Vickie and it looks like this time, she might not survive.

This has been a really depressing episode; for starters, Matt is barely in it, and even though he hardly qualifies as a supporting actor it seems like he deserves to have a little bit more of a role. What was at first a love triangle is now a love… square? Elena is pretty popular; Damon would kill to have her, Stefan would kill to protect her, and Matt is just trying to be a supportive friend. The whole vampire thing is definitely going to put a big dent in what was already a strained relationship, with obvious trust issues. It seems like these human girls who manage to fall in love with vampires, are always incredibly unsupportive, and almost always refuse to understand the plight of their taciturn undead lovers. If you date a vampire, try to be a more understanding girlfriend!

So aside from watching Stefan strive to hold together his and Elena’s fraying relationship, we’re also treated to Zach’s death. How do they plan to explain that to the authorities? And we didn’t really have time to develop many feelings for Zach, but really, how is the Salvatore family managing to stay alive anyway? Just when we’re starting to feel a little sympathetic towards Damon, he goes and kills a bunch of people. Jeez. And what’s with the necklace? Is the pentagram thing good or bad, and what does it do? I kind of hope it protects Caroline, because she’s such a sad little thing. We’re all hoping to find out more in the next episode, especially if we get to know more about the rag-tag group of vampire hunters, the yellow crystal, and whether Vickie survives. Sadly, I’ll warn you now, that Bonnie remains absent from the next episode.