The Vampire Diaries - Dangerous Liaisons

While Alaric spends the night in the hospital, presumably under the tender loving care of his new doctor girlfriend, and recovers from the latest Alaric death tease, Elena is nearly being killed by Rebekah. Elijah saves Elena, and we are reminded that we are this close to being Team Elijah. We are sad that he is probably going to die. The next morning, Caroline gets a call from Tyler, telling her that he is going to fix himself as per her dad’s instructions and then come back to her, sire-bond free. Aww.

Meanwhile, Esther plans a ball in the family mansion so that she can get a word with Elena and officially mark her family’s arrival in Mystic Falls. Esther sends an invitation to Elena and on the back it says that it’s time the two meet. Damon vetoes this, thinking that Elena needs to stay far from this ball. He and Stefan will attend without her. Have the Salvatore brothers met this girl? If Elena thinks she can help by going to a ball, she is going to a ball. Her parents and Jenna must have left her a fortune when they died, because Elena shows up in one of the most beautiful evening dresses we have ever seen. We think she should have ditched the gloves though. There was already enough going on with that dress.

Elena gets another dance with Damon (!!!) and there is actually a lot of dance partner switching that night, enabling everyone to have the proper threatening or flirty conversations. Stefan helps Elena ditch Damon’s protection so that she can meet with Esther upstairs, far from the festivities. Stefan breaks Damon’s neck when he isn’t looking, and you know it takes at least a few minutes for a vampire to recover from that. Elena remarks that Stefan doesn’t care about anything anymore, except killing Klaus, and Stefan agrees with her. His facial expression says differently. Elena also thanks Stefan for continuing to respect her choices and let her do her own thing, even after the end (or drought) of their relationship.

Esther lays things out for Elena. She wants to kill all of her children, not just Klaus, because they are abominations. Esther needs a drop of Elena’s blood to put in Klaus, Kol, Finn, Elijah, and Rebekah’s champagne in order to magically bind them for killing at a later date. Elena provides the blood. Oh no, it can’t all be that easy. There has to be some more horrible consequence to this. Besides the death of our favorite Original, Elijah, and the crushing of our favorite new ship (Caroline/Klaus). Finn knows about Esther’s plan and is all for it. That’s weird. Leeard was impressed and liked that Finn knew the Originals need to die. Maybe the linking of the Mikaelson children is not to kill them. Maybe it’s for something else. We pause now to chuckle at how clever their made-up surname is.

Rebekah invites Matt to the ball so that she can kill him in order to hurt Elena, with Kol’s help and approval. But Matt is adorable in a tux and acts a perfect gentleman. Rebekah is completely won over as far as Matt goes and who wouldn’t be? He is adorable and we don’t say it enough. We are too often distracted by Damon. Speaking of Damon: There was a discussion about how Damon is starting to feel too much and it’s becoming a liability. Wow, that guy can’t win. We spent two seasons trying to get him to embrace his humanity, and now that he has, both Stefan and Elena have a problem with it. Not fair.

 Damon tells Elena that he loves her, only to have her respond, “Maybe that’s the problem.” Damon gets all Damon-y again when he sees Kol carrying out the original plan to kill Matt. Right in the middle of the party, Damon throws Kol off the balcony and starts thrashing him. When did Damon get strong enough to completely destroy an Original in a fight. Heh. We liked it, so we won’t question it much. Matt gets off with a crushed hand. Someone feed that boy some vampire blood; he has no health insurance. Rebekah follows Matt to The Grill and he turns her down, even though he thinks she’s cute and fun. The whole crazy vampire family thing is just too much. Damon swoops in and tells Rebekah that she needs a guy who can handle her. That’s how she and Damon end up making aggressive, super-hot lurrrrve. We don’t know if we like that. Well, we don’t like it. Damon belongs to Elena. But we don’t hate it either.

Klaus spends the evening trying to woo Caroline, who shows up wearing a dress Klaus sent her, plus the bracelet, looking like a million bucks. He shows her a horse and tells her a story about his old horse, thousands of years ago. Caroline doesn’t like that Klaus is trying to buy her. She tells him that his problem is that his daddy didn’t love him, so Klaus believes that no one will love him for himself. So Klaus has to manipulate and dagger and sire and buy people in order to not be alone. Caroline stomps off, even more awesome than she was at the beginning of this episode.

When Caroline gets home, she finds a pretty good sketch of herself standing next to a horse. A note at the bottom of the drawing says, “Thank you for your honesty.” Aww. Klaus is a good artist. Love him for that! We do realize that Caroline taking up with Klaus while Tyler is off torturing himself in order to be with her would be the ultimate betrayal. But we can’t help but root for Klaus/Caroline anyway. In a lot of ways, they are a perfect, if unexpected, match.

Episode grade: A-