The Vampire Diaries Season 6 Fall Finale Review: O Holy Moly Night (PHOTO RECAP)
The Vampire Diaries S06E10: "Christmas Through Your Eyes"
What is your favorite Christmas song? The obvious answer would be "Mary's Boy Child" by Boney M., but maybe you're more of an "All I Want For Christmas Is You" kind of girl. That's fine too, as it's pretty much the Platonic Ideal of holiday music. But a strong case could also be made for The Waitresses' "Christmas Wrapping"; in addition to simply being plain fantastic in all ways, its lyrics tell a story that could weaken anybody's knees. Finding love or acceptance or friendship or warmth or comfort or relief seems especially important at this, the coldest and darkest time of year. And who doesn't love a humbug-to-merriment narrative arc? The writing staff of The Vampire Diaries, apparently! "Christmas Through Your Eyes" marked the show's first proper Christmas episode (apparently college years don't require artificial elongation, so it can finally adhere to traditional one-year-per-season timelines), yet, spoiler alert: It was a MAJOR bummer! Not a bummer in a bad way, just a bummer in a TVD way. Yes, friends, it was a Very Vampire Diaries Christmas.
I mean, leave it to this show to finally unveil a cancer plotline during the Christmas episode. Or feature one character celebrating the holiday alone in a parallel dimension before lighting a Christmas tree on fire. While the lack of any major character deaths was genuinely surprising (this was the fall finale, after all), "Christmas Through Your Eyes" was momentous in at least one big way: The magic-free dome is gone! So while the holiday was miserable for most involved, at least all of our beloved monsters get to go home again. At least there's that.
Let's talk about it!
We started in a bustling Whitmore emergency room where Jo was having a hard time understanding a new patient with suspicious-looking stab wounds.
And in a genuinely shocking moment, Kai jumped up all bloody-faced and syringed her right there in front of everybody! That's right, Kai maimed a group of people and snuck into the ER among them, which seemed kind of extreme to me. Couldn't he have just waited under her car or, I don't know, jumped out at Jo in the Burger King drive-thru after her shift was over? That's what I would have done, but that's just because I like that Hershey pie they got.
Meanwhile in a winter wonderland...
Elena and Bonnie were hanging out! Together! IRL! Except, wait a minute, Bonnie's hair was much too long for the scene to be present-day. That's because it was not present-day. It was a "winter festival" from before Elena or Bonnie knew about vampires. Oh, those were simpler times, weren't they? Still, it was undeniably cute to see the two ladies seem so care-free. Just no way of knowing that a pair of undead Italians were about to arrive and permanently destroy their lives in almost every way. Also, the high school parking lot looked pretty sweet:
Haha but then the most brutal cutaway happened. Here's what was going on in 1994 world:
Just Bonnie dragging a tree that I guess she'd sawed down by herself and setting it up in an empty parking lot before cussing out the sun.
We've all been there, babygirl.
Meanwhile, because Caroline could not physically go home without dying, she'd decided to spend Christmas in the dorms. Which, again, damn. But in what might be considered a sliiiightly better situation, Caroline's mom showed up to crash in the dorms WITH her.
Good thing crimes don't happen at Christmas! That's one of the biggest rules of the Criminal Code. Except just when it looked like things were going to be festive and uncomplicated, this guy showed up:
Apparently Sheriff Forbes had strongly encouraged Stefan to come by and hang out with them and Caroline was NOT thrilled about it. That's because sometimes when you tell someone off real good, it only works if you don't have to be around them anymore. So this was kind of awkward, if I'm being honest.
Then we got this amazing montage where three different teams of people planned their day.
So, Jo's magic dagger was definitely back in play. Alaric and friends decided to snatch it up before Kai could get to it. Meanwhile Tyler and the twins wanted it, probably because Kai had recently held a broken bottle to Tyler's neck and that's what he was after. Anycrap, everybody wanted that dagger! Also Matt had decided to become a cold-blooded killer, because why not? It's the holidays! And now that Jeremy was taking a break from boning randos, Enzo was toast.
Next: Page 2
(Continued from Page 1)
Back to the magic knife, the episode pulled an Ocean's Eleven-style twist when it became clear that the debate about stealing the knife was a flashback. Because just when Damon was bragging to his friends that he already had the knife in his special hiding place, this happened:
Liv and Luke had already stolen it from Damon! Now Kai was waving it around in the Salvatore tomb while Jo was getting some much-needed rest:
Then another flashback!
Ha, such a bummer. In maybe the cruelest bit of dramatic irony in The Vampire Diaries' history, they all talked about their still-alive parents. But in classic old-school Bonnie fashion, simply having still-alive parents didn't guarantee that Bonnie had somewhere to go for Christmas, so here she was, getting invited to Elena's house instead. Poor Bonnie, once and forever. Meanwhile, the last remaining Mystic Falls parent was suddenly not as totally alive as we'd thought!
That's right, as hearsay, medical tests, and doctor-compulsion would reveal, Sheriff Forbes HAS CANCER. Which I wasn't even sure existed in this universe, but apparently it does. Still though, that didn't slow these ladies down when it came to boy talk.
Meanwhile the two pairs of Gemini Twins' plans were starting to get nicely complicated! For instance, Luke and Liv were only helping Kai because if he and Jo merged it would take the heat off of them. Of course, the downside of that would be Kai becoming a super-powered warlock who would kill them all. But it was still a gamble worth taking! However, in order for Kai to merge with Jo, she had to have her powers back. He couldn't just steal the magic from her knife and then his younger siblings and then... Wait, why couldn't he just absorb everyone's powers systematically? I don't know. But anyway, let's keep it simple, Kai needed Jo to regain her powers so that he could then merge with her or whatever, so he tried to stab them back into her!
She did not love this.
Meanwhile in some weird room somewhere, Matt summoned the target of his ire, Enzo, and tried to trick him by presenting him with a folder full of Salvatore secrets which was actually just a folder full of scratch paper.
And that's when Jeremy attacked!
BOOM. Enzo went down. That'll teach him to murder guest stars.
I liked this moment:
Maybe she was trying to rationalize her betrayal of Jo, but Liv talked Jo up as being super strong and capable of beating Kai in a merge. Which, she had a good point! Maybe they shouldn't've just automatically assumed Kai would win. But then Kai ran in and sucked out a bunch of Liv's power and then, rudely, began zapping it back into her brain!
Which made Jo feel bad, so she gave in and agreed to reabsorb her magic. Now it was ON.
Except then a guilty-feeling Luke tipped off Damon and Alaric about what was going on, so they showed up and grabbed Kai and pulled him to the other side of the magic-free zone and almost blew his damn brains out!
But Jo stopped them, because if Kai died and Jo couldn't merge then one of her younger siblings would have to die. Because reasons. These people talk a lot about how the Gemini Coven MUST have a new leader, but is that true? They've been doing pretty okay without a leader for two decades now, and it just seems like the Gemini Coven is a terrible family and maybe it's time to break tradition, but that's just my opinion. Unless one of their traditions is giving Luke a haircut, because I'm officially against his haircut now. Sorry, Luke.
So then Alaric wrapped Jo in a blankie and mouth-attacked her.
But while they were sucking face, Kai was sucking all the magic out of the ground!!
That's right, he realized he could absorb all of the Travelers' magic that had created the magic-free zone. I guess I'd forgotten that a magic-free zone was magic in and of itself! Also, I was like, "clever girl, writers" because THIS was the reason Kai had magic-absorption abilities in the first place. To kill the dome! Guys, this is just elegant writing. So into it. But it was a classic good news, bad news scenario because Mystic Falls was now very magic-capable, but also Kai was a super-powered warlock!
Next: Page 3
(Continued from Page 2)
See? Good news:
Enzo didn't die when Matt drove him across the border!
But, bad news:
Damon had bad reception due to a magic-storm and then Kai thew Alaric against a tree. (And Alaric's human again, so you KNOW he's gonna need some Advil after that.)
To Enzo's credit, he did not immediately kill Matt.
His reason was that he needed Matt's help to sufficiently destroy Stefan. Or something? This goal seems just as arbitrary as anything else Enzo's been up to lately, but whatever, at least Enzo is still on the show. (Also, poor fella!)
And in one of the most simultaneously sad and ludicrous moments we've seeon on TVD yet, here was the explanation of why Liz's cancer cannot be healed by vampire blood:
You know? Like, I'm glad Stefan manned up and wanted to be the one to help Caroline through her grief, but the whole, "If vampire blood could heal cancer, wouldn't we have heard about that by now?" explanation was a straight-up slap in the face. We're talking about something that can knit bones and reconfigure the central nervous system and undamage irreplaceable brain tissue, but it can't take care of a cluster of irregular cells? Okay, show. But then again, vampire immunity has never made much sense, considering they heal lightning-fast but can also get drunk. (Sobering up is a primary feature of the immune system, but whatever. SCIENCE!) So yeah, maybe we should just focus on the simple takeaway, which is that Caroline's mom has incurable cancer and is probably going to die.
That made this flashback even more poignant:
Also it set up this tiny moment where Stefan (I guess this was after he'd transferred back into school but before Caroline was a vampire) gave Caroline a crappy keychain for Christmas and then in modern times we saw that Caroline still uses it as her holiday keychain (people have holiday keychains?), which implies that she has loved and cherished him for a long time. That's pretty cute right there.
Meanwhile, in 1994...
Haha poor Bonnie. That was easily one of the most devastating images in the show's history. Loved it.
Yeah, this whole section was just a bad-times montage:
But then we had this cute moment: The boys were finally able to return to their home, and Stefan revealed that he'd secretly restored Damon's car in his memory when he thought Damon was dead.
It's to The Vampire Diaries' credit that I hadn't exactly been longing to see them back in this underlit, ultra-brown mansion, but it still felt cozy and reassuring when it finally happened.
This was awkward:
Haha Damon straight-up shut the door on Elena! But it turned out it was because she'd been cloak'd by a prankster!
And Kai's follow-up prank? Bashing her in the face with a tire iron.
Ugh, very rude. Not on Christmas!
It's truly saying something that for as miserable as these characters were in "Christmas Through Your Eyes," I still totally dug and appreciated the Christmas sensibility; it was kind of like an hour-long version of the Phoebe Cates monologue from Gremlins. Sometimes Christmas works even better with a major dash of horror. The episode had some great stuff in it (I'm kind of expecting the cancer reveal to pay bigger dividends later), and in ending the Travelers' curse from last season, it became a proper and satisfying fall finale. I've said it before and I will keep saying it: The Vampire Diaries Season 6 is outstanding so far. It's a Christmas miracle!
OKAY HAPPY HOLIDAYS BYE
QUESTIONS:
... Will Jo defeat Kai in their merge?
... Should Luke get a haircut, be honest.
... Have you ever set a Christmas tree on fire in a parking lot?
... Which volume of A Very Special Christmas will Bonnie be listening to most? Trick question; it's Mannheim Steamroller.
