Vampire Diaries: Caroline Dries On “Delena” Bliss, Silas & Going Off To College

With Julie Plec now an Executive Producer on three series (The Vampire Diaries, spin-off The Originals, and The Tomorrow People), The Vampire Diaries has promoted Caroline Dries to a higher showrunning status. Dries has been involved with TVD since the very first season, and before that worked on series including Smallville.

We spoke with Ms. Dries at a press roundtable at this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego, where we tried to find out what we can about the upcoming fifth season of TVD, which starts on The CW October 3. Before anything, she tells us that the season premiere will follow a time jump, and we’ll find out what happened during the intervening time. If you can’t wait until October, though, here are some hints:

“Elena spent the summer vacation kind of on a honeymoon with Damon,” Dries tells us. They’ve just been living happily in bliss, totally unaware that Stefan’s dying and coming back to life and drowning and dying, so she’s all good. She’s like ‘I’m going to go to college. I’m a functioning, normal human vampire.’ And right away, road bump, road bump, road bump,” she says, implying that the bliss might be short lived.

At summer’s end, the characters will be going off to college, and Dries is well aware that there are times when shows took characters to college and things just didn’t feel right to the audience. “We’re aware that sometimes when characters go to college, it’s like ‘oh, this feels like a new, weird show.’ It’s not like that. But she goes and uncovers a big conspiracy at Whitmore where she goes. That’s going to be one of the through-line mysteries of the season,” Caroline says. Despite the new locale, don’t expect TVD to feel like it’s happening in two very different worlds all the time. “That’s kind of hard, because you don’t ever want to have two orbits happening. So, luckily Whitmore is just a car ride away, so it’ll feel kind of like there are two stories in the first episode a little bit, but the characters can kind of come and go.” she says. “We’ll have a fun Damon and his first college experience story; that kind of stuff.”

It won’t be all fun and games for the characters in Season 5, though. Dries tells us that the “Big Bad” of Season 5 is Silas, and “he’s going to be integrating himself into Mystic Falls land.”

“And, of course Stefan… nobody knows he’s missing!” Caroline exclaims. “So everyone, as far as Damon and Elena were concerned, just thought he rode off when he was in the car with Lexi. He’s gone. It’s weird that he hasn’t called, but yeah… Stefan is going to deal with the repercussions of spending a summer or more in this hell. His storyline’s going to be pretty dark this season, but also really cool, too. It’ll be a new Stefan, I’d say.” As for Silas himself… he does appear in Mystic Falls. “But nobody knows it’s Silas,” Dries teases.

All in all, Dries seems prepared for any new challenges she may face at The Vampire Diaries… even angry Twitter fans. To be fair, though, Dries seems to be a pro about it all, and she seems to understand and respect where the rabid fandom is coming from. “To be honest, if they had Twitter back when Dawson’s Creek was on, I would be one of those people too,” she says.

The fifth season of The Vampire Diaries begins October 3 on The CW. Read some of our other Comic-Con Vampire Diaries coverage here!