Elena, Damon, and Lily make their way to Whitmore to stop Stefan and Caroline from terrorizing Tyler and Matt. Meanwhile, Enzo tells Sarah the story of how Lily turned him into a vampire. Here is a recap of the Vampire Diaries episode “I Never Could Love Like That.”
Recap:
Elena asks Damon to give his mom a chance. Over breakfast, Lily mentions an upcoming celestial event to help get her friends back. Damon’s noncommittal. A text from Jo draws Elena to Whitmore. She informs Jo about Lily being here and Kai being locked away, then discovers Jo’s pregnant. Elena’s congrats are well-intentioned, but also come with jealousy at Jo’s ability to have a normal life. Seeing Caroline and Stefan’s victims, Elena confides in Jo that she’s scared there will always be a part of her capable of hurting people. On their way to campus, Damon teaches Lily to text. She brings up the cure, which she knows he has and doesn’t want to give Elena.
Enzo takes Sarah to the Salvatore mansion to meet her family, but when Lily opens the door, Enzo bolts. He tells Sarah about her uncles and how Lily turned him, then compels Sarah to forget all this, but she’s on Matt’s vervain. She syringes Enzo, brings him to her place, and ties him up. Flashback to South Hampton, England, 1903. Sick with consumption, Enzo wants passage to see a ship doctor. Lily offers to help. The doc examines Enzo and claims to have a cure, but Lily knows by his heartbeat that it’s a lie. She has a real cure. Singing a tune, she turns Enzo. Back in the present, Enzo escapes his restraints and leaves.
Caroline drops a body from the café rafters, trying to scare the employee to death. Literally. It fails. She tries another tactic, compelling him to have a heart attack. It works. As a reward, Caroline gets to sing karaoke. The entire room is mesmerized with her rendition of “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” until Matt and Tyler enter. They’re completely out of the loop that their friends flipped the vamp switch. Poor humans. Caroline starts a game of Caroline Trivia with her two former lovers and whoever wins gets to live. One point for Matt. One for Tyler. Stefan swoops in and wins the tie-breaker, so Caroline flips a coin to decide who lives. Tyler starts a fight, ending with him accidentally stabbing Matt. Tyler takes Matt to Elena at the hospital, but Matt refuses her blood.
Lily doubts her ability to save Stefan because she can’t make herself feel the way she used to about him. She doesn’t love her sons anymore. To ensure her effort, Damon gives her the Ascendant. Even though Stefan pegs this as a ruse to get his humanity back, he listens to Lily’s words about wanting to be enough for him. Damon coached her on what to say, and it works. Stefan’s back to his brooding, bunny-eating self.
After filling her dad in, Jo calls Elena and Damon to the hospital. Jo tells them that Lily’s friends are heretics cast out of the Gemini coven for being part witch and part vampire. Because they can siphon power from themselves, they’re extremely dangerous. She needs the ascendant back. Now. Too bad Lily’s using it.
Comments:
– “I Never Could Love Like That” had the potential to be a fun, surprising episode of The Vampire Diaries, but it instead took an average, repressed route. While nothing about the content was unenjoyably, it failed to elicit as much excitement from me as the few previous episodes. However, it did do a solid job of setting up interesting future storylines.
– This season (for me at least), Enzo has lost much of the appeal he started out with because the storyline with Sarah is so muddled. It seems like “I Never Could Love Like That” tried to humanize Enzo and make the audience sympathetic toward the character by telling his vampire origin story. Unfortunately, this story was not unusual or unexpected or appalling enough to elicit a feeling of sorry from the audience. From the way Enzo reacted to seeing Lily again, the audience would assume that their history was rife with conflict and terror. Nothing of the sort happened. She saved him by turning him, didn’t terrorize him first or afterwards, and yet he’s scared of her now. The disconnect makes this flashback story look incomplete, but it did not leave off with an indication that Enzo would be privy to her ripper venture.
– Also on the topic of losing appeal are Stefan and Caroline’s humanity-free antics, although I suspect this is more deliberate. The opening of the episode remained as twisted and interesting as their past endeavors, but once Caroline threatened Matt and Tyler, it lost the big, threatening feel. The game of trivia came off as bland and awkward, barely showing the stakes of life and death. Investment in these humanity-free antics can only last so long before the audience grows weary from the repetition, so I suspect that these Matt and Tyler scenes were preparing the audience to accept Caroline and Stefan reclaiming their humanity one at a time. It worked for me.
– Does running water really disorient super vamp hearing? You’d think they’d be able to filter out that noise the same way they can focus on one conversation in a crowd.
– I had a hard time accepting that Damon would carry the Ascendant around in his pocket the whole time. Sure, it’s easier to keep safe when it’s on your person, but it also felt too conveniently easy for him to hand it off to Lily when the plot needed it to happen.
– There were hints of Tyler becoming a werewolf again, which brings up the question of “Will he?” I could see it going either way. As seen with Matt, non-supernatural creatures don’t have much of a place in the world of The Vampire Diaries and get sidelined at the expense of the vampires. With Michael Trevino leaving the series at the end of this season, Tyler could possibly take the Jeremy route and leave Mystic Falls to have a normal life (although Jeremy’s is a lie). Or Tyler could activate his werewolf gene and meet an untimely end. We’ve seen how the cure for immortality works on vampires; it would be fascinating to see what effect (if any) it would have on a werewolf, a mortal species.
– Poor Matt. He has a point about not wanting to make nice with vampires only when it’s helpful to him, and I know that vampires have caused him so much pain, but this episode made me long to see Matt reconnect with his friends. I want to see him in the fold of things, back in the loop, and getting more screen time.
– The heretics sounds incredibly cool and like a worthy opponent for the resident vampires. I can’t wait to see what’s next with them.
– “The good brother recently went bad, and I was hoping to leave you in the care of the bad brother, who actually is less bad now than the good brother.” – Enzo (on the Salvatores)
– “The last thing this baby needs is an uncle psychopath.” – Jo
