We posted some details from our Q&A with Vampire Diaries executive producer Julie Plec earlier today… but now that the episode’s over, what else can she share?
Do not read further unless you’ve seen the September 29 episode of The Vampire Diaries, “The End Of The Affair.”
* “This is a big deal for the Stefan and Elena relationship,” she says, regarding the events of “The End Of The Affair.” “I think, in her plucky little heart, Elena – while she’s very realistic and understands the realities of the world – she’s also this overly compassionate savior of her friends and her loved ones. And I really do think that she believed that it was as easy as just getting him out of that environment. And what he made very clear to her is, ‘that’s just the beginning. Your life will be spent taking care of me and worrying about me, and that’s not a life I want for you.’ We’re going to see that theme continue a lot through this season, while she struggles with her desire to rescue this hero in her life. A person that she loved very purely and very deeply. But also, the realities of learning the lesson that you can’t necessarily let yourself be consumed in your own life by saving someone else’s. And that’s a big thing that takes us for a long journey. It begins in this episode and takes us all the way through half the season. As far as where that leaves her and Damon, there has yet to be an admission of that chemistry from her part. In fact, next week’s episode kind of illuminates that a little bit. A lot’s gone unsaid; there’s a big elephant in the room as far as all these fun little stolen moments and romantic banter, and their dynamic with each other, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed with other people. Now that Stefan sort of said ‘go away’ and Elena’s back in Mystic Falls trying to pick up the pieces and get on with her life, it’s the kind of thing that her friends and her loved ones are going to be like ‘Ummm… all right. What’s goin’ on there?’ So we’re going to have some fun with that, too,” she says.
* “Katherine is such a fun foil to our characters, and she’s such a hilarious, wild vixeny showcase for Nina Dobrev, which I’m sure is a nice exercise for her as well – being able to take off the Gap shirt and put on the Barney’s skinny jeans,” she says, which we reported on earlier today. Here’s what we didn’t post so we wouldn’t give away one of tonight’s surprises: “We said last year, Katherine had an interest in Stefan that allowed her to kind of peep in on him over the years, and so what was fun is being able to pay that off and learn that even as she’s hiding out, she’s still keeping an eye on him.”
* Bill Forbes (Jack Coleman) will be back next week. “He’s in next week’s episode. He’s somebody who’s come in and he’s stirred up the pot, and the fallout of his pot-stirring carries us through the next episode,” Julie says.
* Why torture Caroline so much? “She’s so good at it. Bless her heart. She’s just so good at that vulnerability and that emotion that it’s hard to resist,” Julie Plec explains. Sure enough, “Poor Caroline” was trending on Twitter tonight.
* Will this drama affect Caroline’s confidence? “I think the beauty of Caroline is that she’s a ‘pull myself by my bootstraps’ kind of girl, and the irony of that is that she learned that, she thought, from her dad, and all her strength and all her confidence came from her relationship with her father, and now we’ve seen her realize that when the chips fell where they did, that her mom was there – the surprising person that she thought never got her was there to get her now,” Julie tells us. “Caroline gets a few good moments in the next episode, where we get to see just exactly how she’s going to channel the experience into action.”
* Is there some kind of analogy between Bill Forbes wanting to take away Caroline’s vampire cravings and that of gay reparation therapy? “No. I think that it’s a story about a parent thinking they know best for their child, and I think you can apply that to a lot of different sociological situations. I think that if you said to Bill Forbes ‘that’s what you’re doing,’ he’d say ‘please tell me that you’re not implying that there’s any connection between gay and vampire.’ I think he would mock Sheriff Forbes for saying that. But I think more importantly, what we wanted to show was this idea of trying to rescue someone who ultimately doesn’t need to be rescued. And I think that ultimately, the point of her father is ‘yeah, you do.’ And that’s something that we’ll get into in the next episode, as well,” Julie explains.
* Will Stefan’s returning memories change the way things will be for him and Elena later? “Well, first we have to get him back home. And then there’s gonna be all kinds of crazy sh!t that hits the fan, before anybody even has a minute to think about how these revelations impact their relationships,” Plec says.
* Now that we’ve seen Klaus and Stefan actually getting along at a time, will Klaus ever be part of the group instead of a foil for the group? “If I’m being honest about the struggles that we have in this show as writers and as people who really love our actors and love our family, it’s that we have an overabundance of heroes. And when you have to spread heroism across too many players, you don’t really get to dig deep into each of them as much as you’d want to. So, in theory it would be great in the long term to see Klaus kicking it at the Mystic Grill with the rest of the boys, I don’t know, actually, because there’s also something really alluring about a villain driven by emotion and want, just like the best villains are, who never, ever get sucked in to the whiskey bonding at bar side with the rest of our team,” she says.
* What’s the deal with Sebastian Roche’s character, who was introduced in tonight’s episode? “This was a little hint, a little teaser, a little taste of that character, which will get Stefan asking the question, now that his memories have been refreshed. Who is this guy, and why are they afraid of him? People who should be afraid of nothing are afraid of this person. So he’s going to start wondering a little bit about that,” Julie teases.
