Spoiler Alert!

Mid-season finales all around! …except for Gotham, they had theirs last week.

Once Upon a Time graced us with some unexpected twists, Agents of Shield thrust us towards the end of their Ghost Rider arc, Arrow was emotionally intense, and may have finally become the show we were watching back in its first two seasons once again, and The Vampire Diaries had its usual intricate plot and explored our innards a bit with that knife they’ve long since planted in our emotional guts.

Needless to say, quite the week! And everyone’s leaving us with cliffhangers!

And a bit of news: as we plunge into the Holiday Drought, I obviously won’t be posting “This Week on TV” for a couple of weeks. When we do return, meaning when my lineup returns, there will be one more addition! Long awaited and, alas, returning for its sadly final chapter: Grimm.

All I can say is, they better make this ending pretty dang good! 🙂

Once Upon a Time

6.11 “Wish You Were Here”

The Evil Queen suddenly becomes a bit more desperate in this episode. See, she’s been walking around all confident, thinking that the heroes can’t hurt her without also hurting Regina. Of course, small detail, that has never been shown, or at least not that I have seen. Oh, we’ve seen the connection between the two, as we saw with Jekyll and Hyde, hurting Regina hurts the Queen. But we’ve never seen the reverse happen, not that I can readily recall.

Thing is, Hyde and the Queen both come from Jekyll and Regina. They are the branches of their originals, and while you can’t damage the trunk of a tree without harming the branches, you can easily remove branches without hurting the trunk.

Basically: the Queen gets a wound that Regina does not share. Oh, and it’s with a magical sword that somehow prevents the Queen from healing the wound with magic. Double the “uh-oh” for her, and double the “eager to kill her” for everyone else. 🙂

With Emma, armed, angry, and aware that Regina won’t be hurt by her death, hot on her trail, the Queen looks for any port in a storm. She flees to Rumple, who soundly rejects her. Her little stunt with forcing Belle’s pregnancy along cost him any chance he had with his son, and also with Belle. He is furious, and the Dark One’s anger does not easily burn out, though it may run cold. He not only refuses to help her, he promises, once he gets his son back, if the Queen is still alive, if Emma and hers have not killed her for whatever reason, then he will finish the job. So she has to avoid the Savior and the Dark One both. Not an enviable position that, and one she has thoroughly brought upon herself.

So the Queen goes to drastic measures: she kidnaps Jasmine, holding her prisoner while she takes the lamp and makes a wish. She thought she could avoid any dire consequences by getting creative with her wish, though that proved ill-advised in the end. Emma once confessed that she sometimes wishes that she’d never been the Savior. So the Queen wished for that wish to be granted. And poof! Emma is gone!

She’s transported to a dream world of sorts, one where Regina the Evil Queen never cast the curse, and so a Savior was never needed. She was a princess (a classic princess including songs and flower picking), her parents grew old together in a peaceful kingdom, and she still somehow had Henry. In short, she was nothing like the Emma we know and love.

Back in Storybrooke, Regina, being clever and determined, realized that if the Queen can make a wish, then so can she. She wished to be taken to wherever Emma was, and so she found herself in the world of Emma’s wish, dealing with an Emma that had no memory of Storybrooke, believing it to be a dream, and completely lacked the spine to be a Savior. But the wish world still reacted, bringing Snow and Charming against her before she could convince Emma of the truth, so she had to flee. And where else would she look for help but from Rumple, eh?

He gave her the key to restoring Emma easily enough: a hero becomes a hero in response to a villain. Getting back home, however, involved a magic bean, and for that, Regina had to let him out of his cage, which, without the curse, he would have still been stuck in. So, he’s off making whatever mischief he likes, and Regina has to impersonate her previous evil self. She kidnaps Snow and Charming to try and spark Emma’s heroism, but all Emma does is capitulate. She doesn’t have the will to fight, so she simply surrenders. Driven to desperation, and driven a little batty by the complete lack of Emma’s usual defiant spirit, she rips out and crushes the hearts of the fake Snow and fake Charming. Then Henry miraculously appears, ready to kill Regina, and Regina’s going to let it happen.

Interesting to note: that is when Emma remembers herself, and becomes the Savior again.

It’s not the villains they slay but the people they protect which makes a hero a hero.

So, the two are ready to go home now, but, small detail, when Regina entered the world of the wish, a wish where one’s deepest desires are made manifest… well, a bit of what she wants came to life too. In particular: Robin Hood. Who appears just as Emma and Regina are about to jump through the portal home. Emma tries to call her back, but Regina is entranced, enchanted, oblivious to the world. Emma almost leaves her, you can see her wrestling with that decision, but she chooses not to abandon Regina.

And thus they are trapped.

Meanwhile, back in Storybrooke, Charming takes a page out of Regina and the Queen’s book. He snatches the lamp and becomes Aladdin’s new master. The two men are confident, practically gleeful, as Charming makes his wish: the that Evil Queen get exactly what she deserves. Aladdin grants it, with pleasure… and then nothing happens. At least, not immediately. These things can take some time, ya know?

Of course, the Queen crows about this. She’s already gotten everything she’s wanted, or nearly such, and she still thinks that what she wants is the same thing as what she deserves. Such is the way of villains, isn’t it? “I’m only trying to get what I am entitled to!” they say. Hah! But, soon enough, she is proven wrong, as a dark figure, tall and hooded and cloaked, soon crosses her path, and leaves her transformed into a snake, trapped in a cage.

So, good news: the Evil Queen is down for the count. And, bonus, Jasmine is able to wish for Aladdin to take them both to Agrabah. I imagine we’ll find out their story in due time. But, bad news: here comes the dark figure from Emma’s vision! The one who will kill her!

And the identity of this person is the last one I would have ever guessed.

Bell and Rumple have been fighting, we know, but they soon find themselves having to put that aside. The Blue Fairy turns up, thoroughly the worse for wear. Their son, Gideon, has been taken from her, by force, by the Black Fairy. His grandmother, the stealer of children, took him away, to a place of darkness, a place where time itself flows differently. And just as Belle and Rumple are united by common cause, their son walks in, full grown, robed in darkness.

Gideon is the figure under the hood.

…what?!

Ok, let’s take a moment and take stock of all the implications there…

If Gideon, son of Rumple and Belle, is fated to kill Emma the Savior, then he’s basically been raised by his grandmother to kill his brother’s woman. As if the family tree weren’t complicated enough already!

Belle and her friends, including Emma, fought hard to keep Rumple from using the shears to sever Gideon from his fate. But that fate, it turns out, is to kill Emma. So if they had cut him from his fate, maybe they could have spared Emma hers.

Which might be a rather useful idea now, ya know?

So, Emma and Regina are trapped in a wish, and Emma’s ultimate nemesis has come to town, and he’s Belle’s son, so simply being rid of him might not be an option. Tense enough for you?

Agents of Shield

4.08 “Laws of Inferno Dynamics”

“I’ll show them. I’ll show them all.” Really. They used that line?

Eli, it would seem, is just another garden variety, self-entitled, needs-to-let-go-of-that-humongous-chip-on-his-shoulders villain. He thinks that because he’s smart, and educated, and worked hard all his life, he automatically deserves the praise of the world, like that is something so grand. Instead, he sees himself as being somehow the victim of unjust disdain, as if that were some kind of persecution. And now that he can manipulate matter, supposedly creating something from nothing, he believes he has achieved godhood, a level that everyone must see and acknowledge and praise him for.

The man is an ignorant child gone off his rocker, playing with matches – no, not matches, a flame-thrower – in a hay-filled barn, thinking he’s the one creating the flame, and thinking everyone will respect him for the blaze he lights. Good grief, he’s a walking disaster!

At the moment, his plan seems to be to use his criminal friends to hold off Shield while he works, making a much bigger version of those boxes we saw earlier, with a small nuke of sorts at its heart. Between that and Shield’s close pursuit of him, people have noticed, and the media are scurrying all around the perimeter Shield sets up. It doesn’t help that a number of quakes are shaking everything up in rapid succession, bringing Daisy, aka Quake, back into everyone’s mind. The media are already looking for her, so if anyone catches even a glimpse of her, it’ll blow up in Shield’s face.

This comes when tensions between Coulson’s team and Director Mace are spiking. They take issue with how he shipped Simmons off to help examine a captive Inhuman, and as part of a deal he made with Nadeer, and he counters with how he had to protect Shield from their mistakes, running around as if they don’t answer to anybody, unilaterally making such decisions as including criminals (Quake and the Ghost Rider) in their operations. Mace had to make a compromise and clean up the mess, and somehow he still has the moral high ground here. He’s doing his best with a bad situation, and he’s right: they don’t properly trust each other.

This mission, I think, goes a long way towards bringing the team together as a united force. That’s no small thing, considering how the agents have distrusted Mace, how Daisy’s been off on her own, how a demon-possessed Robbie has always done his own thing, how Yo-Yo has been mostly in the background as a recurring character, and, lest we forget, how Aida is an android built by Radcliffe. They’re a mess of moving parts going into a dangerous, complicated situation. But, when push comes to shove, they pull it off. They pass through the fire and come out as one.

Not to make it sound easy!

They start by sending in their three “biggest guns,” Yo-Yo, Daisy, and Robbie. They don’t make it past the front door before they detect a trap, and Yo-Yo checks it out. Apparently, her abilities have developed to the point where she doesn’t get automatically yanked back to her starting point, which has its advantages and disadvantages. I imagine she’d have appreciated any and all help when she set off the trap, which was basically coating the walls in a chemical that bursts into flame on contact with water. The entrance goes up in flames, very nearly taking her with it, but she comes out all right, and Robbie doesn’t care a bit about getting burned, so he just walks right in.

While he’s alone, he finds the big box that’s filled with deadly radiation and steps inside. He withstands it, but can feel it hurting him, and then Uncle Eli arrives. They talk, or threaten, and Robbie makes to bring the Rider out to play, but Eli impales him. A few times. And still he’s alive and kicking. But stuck. The team’s trump card against Eli is stuck. Mere feet from a nuke.

Houston, we have a problem.

Outside, Fitz is vehemently trying to deny the possibility of magic, to find a scientific explanation, and, surprisingly, he finds one. Or, at least, he finds something that helps. He realizes that, since the quakes are not natural and Daisy’s not causing them, the rational explanation is that Eli is causing them. He thinks he’s creating matter from nothing, but he’s not. He’s taking matter that already exists and reordering the atoms to create different materials. That’s how his power works. He killed people, and he stole power from another dimension, and now he leeches material straight from the ground beneath his feet, making it unstable, and he has no comprehension of it. Coulson has it right when he confronts Eli. He’s not a god. He’s just a cosmic thief.

That realization gives the team their key to containing the crisis. Daisy does her best to contain the quakes, which are rising in volume and intensity, exhausting herself and taking her out of the actual fight. She does this so Fitz-Simmons and Radcliffe can hastily construct an apparatus one floor below Eli’s big box of doom, and Aida can create another portal to send it through. Meanwhile, Coulson leads Mace, May, Mac, and Yo-Yo in taking out Eli’s men, shoving Eli into the box, and getting Robbie out. Robbie has to dig deep to bring the Rider out one more time, and Coulson tosses a chain to him, to pull him off the spikes and out. That might have gone better if the rest of the team, especially Mace, had joined in to pull, but it didn’t work out that way.

Eli was getting up, and, being not impaled, could just walk out, and kill everyone in the room. Robbie and the Rider chose not to let him go. They grabbed him. And held him where he was, burning him. They let go of the chain. And went through the portal along with Eli and the box.

Mission accomplished. One man down.

Also, down below, one of Eli’s men found the team and opened fire. Aida took the hit for Fitz-Simmons, who promptly shot her shooter. Then they learned that Aida can feel pain, or seem like it, breaking all their hearts. And Daisy, overwhelmed, needed to get out and get some air now, which she did by launching herself into the sky. Which brought her back down smack dab in front of the cameras.

…awkward.

Mace came through, though, shielding her from the media and bringing her back into the fold. They’re running with the story that she was never really a fugitive, just on an extended undercover mission to take down the Watch Dogs, which, like all the best lies, isn’t too far from the truth. Between that and Robbie’s disappearance, and the team can at least rest knowing that Nadeer has lost her leverage over them, which, I would hope, will enable them to push back, to find her Inhuman brother and help him.

So, another mission over, the world saved once again, and the team picks up the pieces and moves on. Daisy means to see Gabe gets Robbie’s car, though Coulson mentions that Robbie could return, like “the last Ghost Rider.”

…wait, what?! What?! What do they mean? They can’t just make a comment like that without any reference! What’s going on? If the Rider was such a mystery to him, how can he say anything about the last one? Helllloooooo! What’s the plan, Marvel?! What do you got up your sleeve?!

Daisy is finally back where she belongs, with the team. She has new gloves, even better than before, and her color assignment is… blue. Nobody knows what it means, but she’s clearance level blue. Also, Coulson sort of mentions that he’d hoped Daisy could be the new face of Shield. She laughs at that and, Easter egg, refers to the comic book version (in which she did take a turn in the Director’s chair).

Mac, after his experience with the Rider, seems to be directing his attentions where he most wants them, aka, Yo-Yo, and to heck with the rules. He knows what he wants, and he cares for her. That makes him a little more protective of her than he needs to be, though after she nearly got burned to death, that might be understandable. Still, she’s confused and frustrated, and he only gets through to her by making a real move, and kissing her. With Coulson and Daisy looking on, LOL. You just know that Daisy is quietly cheering her friends on! 🙂

So they still have work to do, but all’s well that ends well! …right?

…weeeeelllll… that only holds true when it really does “end” well. The episode ends with an agent sent to retrieve all of Radcliffe’s data on Aida and the like, so he can do his work under Shield’s umbrella. That agent, unfortunately, stumbles onto Aida’s secret, and pays for it with his life. She’s keeping Agent May captive and unconscious. The one that Coulson is breaking into a bottle with is an LMD, like her.

…oh dear. We all knew it was coming, of course, especially now that she has the Darkhold knowledge to make herself a brain, but it’s still coming on pretty fast! Shield vs the LMDs! Radcliffe is going to be is so much trouble!

I have to say, I really hope we see Robbie again. I also hope Shield can see some genuine magic sometime. The Ghost Rider arc was really well done, but it also ended rather quickly and suddenly, ya know? I want more! More Rider, more magic! 🙂

Arrow

5.09 “What We Leave Behind”

I could be wrong, but I do believe Arrow may have just finally achieved, once again, the quality it had back in the first two seasons.

Which, I note, were not particularly pleasant seasons for any of the characters!

Yeah, this episode hit hard.

It starts with Evelyn the turncoat delivering photos of Team Arrow, to complete the set, to Prometheus. She’s eager for the final confrontation, but Prometheus states that he does not mean to simply kill Ollie. He means to make him wish he were dead. Which bodes not well for pretty much anyone in Ollie’s general vicinity.

Shifting to a happier scene, it’s Christmas! And for once, they have a party which does not get crashed by the villain! I think that might be a first for this show. Instead, there’s just plenty of awkwardness as Thea and Felicity see Ollie with Susan, Felicity and Ollie see each other with their dates, Felicity and Billy Malone have awkward relationship development, and Felicity (notice a theme with these awkward moments?) accidentally punches a hole in Curtis’ cover story with his husband. And then Prometheus strikes, not in the party, but just outside of it, putting Curtis in the hospital and scaring his husband silly.

That’s when Prometheus leaves the beginning of a breadcrumb trail. He injects Curtis with a chemical, one familiar to Ollie and Digs, as it hails from their earliest vigilante days.

…huh, a flash back to something that happened back during the time frame of the first season… that was unexpected. And surprisingly fresh. Things are coming around full circle, it would seem!

It turns out, back in those days, Ollie dealt with the head of a pharmaceutical company. He and Digs thought, at first, that they were just dealing with a stupidly greedy corporate executive, one who jacked up the price of life-saving medicine just when it was needed most. Some strain of tuberculosis was hitting a nearby area, one that was not economically rich, and the children there were dying from it. Their parents could have afforded the medicine before the rate hike, but not after. Children were dying, slowly and in terrible pain, all for money. That alone was reason enough, in my book, to take the man down, but it got so much worse.

This company was owned by a larger group, one invested in creating biological weapons. The TB outbreak was a test. They created the market, and charged a small fortune for the medicine now in demand. Ollie’s first visit was meant to persuade a man who was merely greedy, but his target was a flat-out murderer of children, and gloried in their deaths. “Nobody cares about them,” he said, “I’m thinning the herd.” Ah, but Ollie cared! And he would not be the only one either! Visit number two was the bloody visitation of vengeance, and Ollie left a number of bodies in his wake, most especially his target’s.

Now, I do have to admit, Ollie knew nothing of all those security guards or their lives, and he did not need to simply kill them all. That, to my way of thinking, was the real crime he committed that night. Instead, however, we focus on the target himself, a man whose hands were soaked in the blood of children. If Prometheus really is, as suspected, the son of that man, then he is even further in the wrong then I thought. Yeah, he might be avenging his father, but his father really did have it coming.

Even so, even when you are clearly in the right and your victim is clearly in the wrong… there are consequences for playing judge, jury, and executioner.

Whether he is that man’s son or not, Prometheus certainly has a personal feud with Ollie, resulting from Ollie’s own actions.

And the course he chooses to take his revenge is not simply the path of blood, but that of darkness. He wants to drag Ollie back down, throw him into the murderous abyss he came from.

Being so driven, Prometheus is one step ahead of Ollie and Team Arrow for the entire episode. He leads Ollie by the nose towards their first confrontation. He fights Ollie and has a clear upper hand in physical combat. He displays and gloats over Evelyn’s defection. Then, after they’re gone, he leaves something behind to ensnare Billy Malone.

He and Felicity have been at an awkward stage these days. They have strong affection for one another, but they haven’t really said the words. Now Billy knows Felicity is helping the Green Arrow go after Prometheus, he’s not about to sit idle. He wouldn’t anyway, being a detective, but now he’s extra motivated, wanting to protect her. So he follows the lead to the abandoned company building, and he finds a baby picture, which he sends to Felicity. About half a second later, Prometheus grabs him. This was exactly what he wanted, and expected, to happen.

With one of their own gone, the SCPD and ACU, strained and threadbare though they may be, are up in arms. Julian Chase talks Ollie into giving them the order to shoot on sight and shoot to kill. It’s not much, but it represents Ollie himself making that decision as Green Arrow. He’s choosing to kill rather than just subdue.

Thea suits up again, though she’s mostly there as moral support this episode. It’s while talking with her that Ollie puts the pieces together and goes to confront Prometheus and save Billy. He walks through a recreation of what happened that night, past fresh corpses laid out where he’d left corpses four years ago, to find Prometheus himself. And still, Prometheus is one step ahead, guiding Ollie exactly where he wants him to be, doing what he wants him to do, and being what he wants him to be: a killer.

I saw it just a fraction of an instant before it happened. When “Prometheus” stepped out, and Ollie put three arrows in his chest, I knew it wasn’t him. Ollie saw it too late: the speaker taped to the man’s chest, the sword duct-taped to his hands. That wasn’t Prometheus he’d shot and killed, the knowledge hitting him worse than any physical blow. He dropped his bow, and fell to his knees, pulling back the mask to reveal Billy Malone, mouth taped shut, eyes wide in a silent scream.

With a fresh weight heavy on his shoulders, Ollie returned to the team, and told Felicity what happened. It is to his credit he didn’t try to hide it or avoid it. And it is to her credit that she placed blame exactly where it belongs: with Prometheus. Still, it’s a devastating blow to them both. Thea can only hug Felicity. And Ollie tries to tell the team they should leave. They answer by standing closer around him. They’re not going anywhere.

For Curtis, that comes at a high price. His husband just called him on the lies, learned the truth, and demanded that he quite the team or the two of them are done. That was more complicated than it might have seemed at first. He’s actually seen how happy Curtis is, doing what he is, how he loves it, and he can’t keep Curtis back from that. But he can’t stick around, just waiting for Curtis to die sometime. So the ultimatum was actually for his benefit, making his choice easier by solidifying Curtis’ choice in his mind.

So, as Ollie goes to find comfort with, of all people, Susan, Felicity and Curtis are both mourning the loss of a loved one, albeit two very different kinds of loss. The episode ends with Digs being drawn into a trap by the military. Looks like that particular thread needs tying off.

Oh, and Ollie comes back to the lair to find Laurel waiting for him.

…Laurel?!

Huh?! What?! How?!

The Vampire Diaries

8.07 “The Next Time I Hurt Somebody, It Could Be You”

This sort of gives new definition to an awkward Christmas dinner with the relatives.

It being Stefan’s last day of freedom, he is determined to end it on a happy note. And what’s happier than Christmas with the family, eh? So he and Caroline are preparing a little feast, inviting Alaric and the girls, Bonnie and Enzo, and Matt and his father. Just as the first of those guests shows up, so does a not-so-dead Damon, with Sybil on his arm.

It turns out, having a boss like Cade has its perks. Among them: you get killed, you have a chat with him, and he sends you back to your body. That’s what happened to Damon, and Cade would very much like such a conversation with Stefan. So, Damon kills him. Temporarily, at least.

In the living world, Caroline manages to finish preparing dinner and presents, hosting a fine celebration while chatting up Sybil and getting information out of her. That sends Bonnie and Enzo on an abbreviated search for the pitch fork. With Caroline’s information, they find Seline, who gives them the fork in exchange for letting her talk to Alaric, wherein she informs him that she’s left a psychic scar on the girls, which she needs to see them once more in order to fix.

For her, knowing that Hell is waiting for her, since her sister sold her out purely out of spite, she also knows how much she has to answer for. Georgie’s murder is only the most recent in a long line of fatalities, and she wants to redeem herself somehow. Basically, she’s going through the motions, trying to cheat her way out of Hell by doing the right thing now. I highly doubt that would work, what with Georgie supposedly going to “Hell” because of one stupid decision and an accident, while Seline has thousands of years of deliberate deeds. to make up for. Not good prospects, those.

Alaric does listen to her, and let her heal his daughters before her departure, wiping their memories of her completely.

Interesting detail: Seline’s coping mechanism, right then, was writing down the names of the people she’s killed. Sound familiar? Oh, yes, she has met Stefan Salvatore once before, back at the very height of days as the Ripper of Monterey.

It is to that day that Cade takes Stefan. He once massacred an entire workers’ camp, children included, on Christmas Eve. And the next day, he regretted it. The massacre caught Cade’s attention, and Seline’s as well. When she went to kill him, though, she found him willing and eager for it. She found anguish in his soul, not evil. (again, how does Georgie go down when a freaking Ripper gets spared?) So she went against her master’s wishes, and spared Stefan. She erased his memory of the event, gave him a chance at some form of decency for the rest of his life. He still did terrible things, and he did good things. He tried to do good things, but he still has so much innocent blood on his hands.

You know it’s bad when the boss of Hell has taken an interest in you. And why not? So much bloodshed, and yet his servant Seline’s encounter with Stefan broke her will to keep doing Cade’s. And now he has that selfsame vampire coming into his service? Oh, heck yes! Cade leaps at the opportunity!

And it’s not just killing that Cade wants Stefan to do. He wants corruption too. When he met Elena, she had no ill deeds to her credit, but over the years, she gained quite a few. He wants that. He wants those souls “who would get into the pearly gates by an inch to miss it by a mile.” These are apparently quite juicy, tasty souls for one like him, and he greatly desires to feed on them.

And Cade has the gall to call other people “evil.” Wow.

He himself once tried to help a man overcome his worse urges, and was killed for it. Now he wants to corrupt the innocent, so he can feed on them for all eternity. Fallen, he most certainly has.

Here’s the thing about punishing the guilty: it’s supposed to protect the innocent who remain. But Cade, in his ravenous hunger, wants to do harm to all the innocent, in their very souls. How twisted is that?

The festivities eventually end, with Damon failing to fulfill his promise to kill the worst person at the party, when Bonnie and Enzo return, pitch fork in hand. Sybil screams in pain, but so does Bonnie. That surprises Enzo just enough that Damon is able to swoop in and get Sybil out. She’s happy about that, how he instinctively protected her. Then they open Caroline’s gift to him, which Sybil mistakes as a gift from him to her, and it turns out to be… Elena’s necklace. Or one just like it, at least (didn’t it get destroyed or something at one point? I forget). That jogs something deep inside Damon, a trigger buried deep in his subconscious, bringing back his memories of Elena herself.

So, as he makes as if to put it around a smiling Sybil’s neck… he rips her heart out. And leaves her on a bench in the middle of town.

Promise kept after all. He killed the most evil person at the party. Funny how that worked out.

Stefan and Cade come to an unusual agreement at the end of their conversation. Stefan sees Cade’s greed and plays to it, offering everything he wants and more, in a shorter amount of time. This intrigues Cade, and he agrees, if Stefan pulls through, to let him go free after one year of service. Of course, Cade thinks that version of Stefan won’t want to leave after the year is up. Stefan is certain he will. Which is what makes things interesting to a being like Cade.

So Stefan kisses Caroline, one last time, and leaves. Damon picks him up. And off they go, listening to Christmas music, humanity switch turned off, the murdering Salvatore Brothers.

Oh, and Bonnie and Enzo put a small piece of the puzzle together: as the pitch fork hurts sirens, Alaric’s daughters, and Bonnie, there must be a connection. Bonnie remembers that magic has its roots in psychic power. Interesting, then, that she can still be hurt by the pitch fork, having lost her magic. I guess she’s still psychic on some level, eh?

This further backs my theory that Cade’s “Hell” is just another dimension like the Other Side or the prison worlds, which were all destroyed. So, if they can destroy this fake Hell too, everyone trapped there goes free, and Cade is crippled, perhaps even destroyed, thus eliminating any need for anyone to serve him.

I’m guessing/hoping that’s the direction they go in. 🙂