If you’re on the East Coast of the United States, you’ve probably just seen “Do Not Go Gentle,” the April 26 episode of The Vampire Diaries. If you haven’t seen it yet… stop reading now, because you’re about to enter spoiler territory.
Yesterday, KSiteTV attended a Q&A with Executive Producer Julie Plec and several cast members where they talked about last night’s episode, and what it might mean for many characters, especially Alaric, who “did not go gentle,” as it were. What’s next for Alaric?
“He’s very clearly a bad-ass vampire killer with a pretty maginificent, deadly and unburnable stake, so I definitely think he’s going to be a conflict provider. Not to make it an understatement, but he’s not going to be the friendliest version of Alaric that we’ve ever met. He’s going to be pretty hard-core, which is going to be equally exciting and devastating, because he’s one of our heroes who is no longer one of our heroes,” Julie Plec explains, revealing that Matt Davis filming the new CW pilot Cult did not cut into Alaric screen-time at all. She also revealed Alaric’s next move in next week’s show, which is called “Before Sunset.” “Alaric wants the Originals dead, and the very first thing that we see at the head of the next episode is Alaric in the high school where Caroline and Rebekah are having a little post-dance clean-up. So things only get worse from there. It’s a very extreme, hard-core episode of Alaric on a tear, and no one is safe,” she says.
“We knew we he needed to be stronger, as strong, resilient, immortal, fast, furious, fierce… and the idea of the ironic symmetry of having this witch who’s desperate to eradicate vampires, and this alter ego of Alaric who hates vampires, and knowing that becoming a vampire, your darkest impulses and your greatest wants are magnified to such a degree, ” Julie says when explaining the decision to turn Alaric. “It felt like it was this way of bringing the Original Witch’s part in this whole mythology full circle, and her kind of passing the baton to a villain who actually could succeed at the task that she’s been failing at all season,” she continues.
Both Steven R. McQueen and Michael Trevino expressed that they enjoyed filming the sequence where all of the cast stood in the woods to pay tribute to Alaric. “I really love those scenes. Even when there are scenes with that many people, with dialogue. It’s just awesome to be on. We sometimes just see each other in hair and makeup, or our dressing rooms. It was very emotional, but it was fun to be up there with everybody. I enjoyed that,” Trevino says. The sequence was one that Julie Plec had to fight to keep in the episode. “That one scene was the most important scene in the entire episode, for me. It’s funny, because when you hand the script over to production, and they read a script that’s too long, or too many scenes, and impossible to shoot in the schedule, and then they see a line that says ‘everyone gathers to show their respects,’ which is two lines of a 50-page script, that’s the first thing that they say ‘oh, you’ve got to get rid of that. Can you simplify it? That’s going to take six hours to shoot. That’s the equivalent of a seven-page day. We can’t do it. We can’t afford it. That’s everybody. We can’t schedule it.’ And I don’t do this very often, where I pitch the ‘I’m the boss, shut up’ fit, but I just was like ‘guys, I’m telling you, this is the heart and soul. This one little two-line thing is the heart and soul of this episode, and one of the heart and soul moments of the season, and it’s going to stand. Figure it out.’ And they did, and they always do. You just have to push them a little. Moments like that are what makes our show special,” she says.
Alaric possibly going to the dark side might mean Damon has an opening for a new drinking buddy. Julie seems to know who might fit the bill – Meredith Fell. “I think every town needs a nice pretty doctor, and Damon might need a new drinking buddy,” Julie jokes. “We’ve already established her as a day drinker, so maybe there will be a nice friendship that could happen there.” Plec also talked about the possibility of Stefan forming a friendship of his own — or in this case, rekindling one — with Klaus. “I honestly think if Klaus is lucky enough to survive Season 3, that there is an opportunity there in the future for those two to kind of find their way back to each other, because they did have a nice chemistry. Stefan, at this point, has rejected everything about his past self, and the healthier that he gets as he moves forward, the more, I think, he’ll be able to kind of let that go and open himself up to the grays of vampire life,” she says.
Right now, and especially in this episode, Stefan’s being on the mend is the top priority. “Stefan’s whole struggle, obviously this year, was one, he’s hanging on by such a very, very, very tenuous thread for the first half of the season, and then he lost his mind for a nice chunk in the middle. So he’s been terrified of opening himself back up, and letting those feelings in. It’s been a slow permeation of his emotional life over the latter section of the season. In this moment, seeing her at her most vulnerable, and needing to give her the support that she’s been trying to give him all season, it’s finally him saying ‘it is okay to feel. And you know what? I heard you all those times when you told me that. It’s okay to feel, and it’s okay to have hope, and I heard you. And now let me give that back to you.’ I think that all of this is just illuminating, for this girl at this point in her life, with these two men that are so important to her. She has no one, and she’s lost everyone that ever mattered to her,” she says, before looking over at Steven R. McQueen, “Almost everyone. And how do you choose in a moment like that? The last two episodes of the season are really going to be about her asking herself that question and really trying to understand how she could possibly let one of them go, when she’s already lost so much,” Plec says.
The Stefan-Damon-Elena triangle isn’t the only one that was spotlighted in “Do Not Go Gentle.” Tensions between Klaus and Tyler over Caroline are heating up. “What we’ve seen as far as with Tyler, is he’s biting his tongue, especially with this sire bond that he has broken through Klaus. Enough’s enough. In that last scene between the two of them, he’s like ‘I shouldn’t have let him dance with you’ and I think in these last two episodes, if not next week’s episode, we might see him actually take some action against Klaus, and maybe not follow his orders when it comes to Caroline,” Michael Trevino says.
“I just love getting asked the questions of ‘oh, Caroline and Klaus?’ Because Caroline, even though she’s made so many mistakes and put her foot in her mouth, and fallen for the bad guy, this is the first time where she’s staying true to her feelings and not getting caught up in the guy with the accent,” she laughs. “Sticking with her high school love boyfriend. But in high school, how can you not think [when] all of the sudden someone starts putting into your head thoughts of places to travel and semesters abroad, and all of these experiences you’re going to have as you grow up and grow older. It’s hard not to think about them. So I think that’s the only way in which she’s wooed in any sort by Klaus – the idea that there’s another world out there. But right now, in the present, she is fighting like hell to just have a normal relationship with her boyfriend, in high school. It’s all she wants,” Candice Accola says.
And what of romance for Matt? “I’m happy being everyone’s ex-boyfriend,” Zach Roerig jokes.
What did YOU think of “Do Not Go Gentle?” Come talk about it on the KSiteTV Forum!
1 Comment
I never like Candice’s interviews :o/