Yeah, I doubt it will be “an intelligent, perceptive, and deeply moving” episode, but I’m open to surprises today. Let’s get started! (* quote from Roger Ebert’s review of Ordinary People, rogerebert.com)

We open where we left off: Ric in the Lockwood crypt, except this is clearly some amount of time later. Ric’s got a different shirt, and he’s come with gear and Elena. Damon is also there, just… hanging out in the tunnels, I guess. (I’m sure he was supposed to meet them, but isn’t it funnier to think of him just… sitting? I dunno, I’m very high, it’s probably just me.)

The pictograms are what we would expect: werewolves, Norse names, stuff that’s going to open up more lore opportunities that the show will waste appropriately. The highlight for me here is Elena reminding us that the Lockwoods got here in the 1860s, along with the rest of the founders, and making us confront, once again, this show’s assertion that people in Virginia had nothing better to do during a full-on civil war. Again - they could have made it so this was an alternate timeline, with no Civil War. They could have set the founding literally any other period in history. They could have done so many things, but they didn’t.

Sorry, my hip is killing me, makes me complain even when I don’t necessarily want to. I’ve been looking forward to recapping, and I am actually super interested in this pre-historical plot. Oh, and of course, Thorfinn.

Alas, no: the name on the wall in Runic script is actually Klaus. And Elijah. AND Rebecca.

Ooh, Flashback Time (tm)! Rebecca is carving their names into the wall. Klaus tells her to stop using “the blade” because their father doesn’t want her to, presumably because she’s a girl, which - nope, too tired, moving on. But their father only finds out she “uses the blade” (I’m sorry, it sounds so stilted) because Klaus tattles on her!

Anyway, she goes off to help with dinner, he gets a sexist comment in, she hands him the knife blade-first. And he bleeds. I think they’re all supposed to be mortal here?! They should have gone to see Thorfinn. Would have been a better time for us.

Back in the future, Elena says the carvings are just one of Klaus’s fakes. Ric admits they could be, but there’s one more name on the wall: Mikael. And we get our opening sting.

Ric fully documents the pictograms with his own camera, and we cut to him standing over a table covered in developed pictures. Or printed pictures, I suppose, given he’s wearing the same clothes, probably didn’t spend half the day in the darkroom. And this was what, 2010 or something? I don’t think you could still get film developed, let alone in an hour or something. And that would risk having them seen, and I am absolutely, completely overthinking this, which is how you know I love it.

Ric says the pictograms tell a story, and he just has to decipher it, while Damon and Elena spar in the background. Yes, Damon is flirting and groping. Yes, Elena is rolling her eyes. Yes, the writers are bashing their barbies together. Elena says that if the glyphs are the First Family, as it were, they should start at the source: Rebecca.

Whom Elena accosts at cheer practice. Rebecca is snide and dismissive as usual, until Elena shoves a photo in her face and asks why she and her brothers have been running from their father for a thousand years. Rebecca literally blanches - good work, Claire Holt! - and tries to head back. Elena says they’ll just ask Mikael once they wake him. Rebecca warns her not to, but refuses to tell Elena anything else, and finally turns and runs back to practice.

Flashback Time! Elijah and Klaus swordfighting, their iPhone faces in their bad wigs looking so ridiculous [complimentary]. These people are all wearing leather against bare skin and hair down to their waists and it’s so fantastic. Mikael just, like, hates his kids? and attacks Klaus for some reason. Looks like toxic masculinity, might be something else I don’t fucking get, because there is nothing logical about this scene. I dunno. Maybe if you’re not abused, you don’t understand that people abuse for reasons that make sense to them. It’s not pointless to them, even if it feels that way to the victim or looks that way to an outsider.

Ric has some of the more obvious symbols figured out. Elena calls Damon to fill him in on Rebecca’s recalcitrance, and Damon fills her in on Stefan looking terrible. Elena reassures him that Rebecca will come around, and Damon gets off the phone to pester Stefan. Elena gets a text from Rebecca telling her to go to Castel Salvatore (INTO WHICH SHE WAS NEVER INVITED BY ELENA WHO OWNS IT fuck I can’t let that go, sorry).

Damon, meanwhile, is letting Stefan out of the dungeon at the jail? Why? What?

Elena goes to the house she owns but Rebecca is running for some reason, and Rebecca does a dog-and-pony show with teen girls in homecoming dresses, threatening one and making sure Elena knows who’s in power here. It’s entirely too dramatic, and I say that as someone who has written a literal firebombing of a vampire covenhouse. I know drama, babes. This is too much.

Bonnie brings Ric “the necklace that wouldn’t die”, which the “last time on” helpfully reminded me was connected to the witch on the other side, and that’s why they had to destroy it in the last episode with the ghosts. It has the same design as one of the pictogram symbols. Ric decides it must be “witch”.

Rebecca tells Elena she’ll get what Rebecca gives her, and then tells her her whole life story. Their parents lost a kid back in the home country, but her mom knew the witch Ayana who told her of a land where no one was sick - because they were werewolves. They moved, and then had more children, including Rebecca. Elena says, “You make it sound so normal.”

Elena. Girl. What in the world are you talking about. “My family got bigger, because we were humans and my parents fucked.” “GASP. WHAT. UNHEARD OF.”

Rebecca quite rightly says, “Because it was,” and politely leaves off the “you dingus” I would have added, and then we’re Flashing Back to Ye Olde Medievalish Viking Times (tm).

So they all knew about the werewolves, and would go hide in the caves once a month. Klaus and their littlest brother Henrik snuck out one night and Henrik died. Rebecca says it was the end of peace between them and their neighbors, and one of the last moments her family were entirely human.

Damon calls; he and Stefan are at a bar, because he “went off-book”. He hangs up on Elena’s objections, and this was such a clever little way to switch scenes. Nice job, VD! Damon compels the waitress to let Stefan sip her and give Damon drinks.

To no one’s surprise (except Elena’s, because she doesn’t know she’s in a narrative), the necklace was the Original Witch’s, who turned the family into vampires, and therefore never Stefan’s to give. Mikael designed them to be better than the wolves, from whom he refused to run out of sheer stubbornness and pride.

But to my surprise, Ayana refused to have any part in it, and so their mother - Esther - turned them. The Witch of the Original family. The Original Witch.

She called upon the sun for life, and the white oak for immortality, and then Mikael fed them with wine laced with blood and killed them, then fed them. But of course for every strength there is a weakness - the sun, vervain, the white oak. They burned the oak (because it was that specific one, I guess? I had assumed “white oak” was a species of tree, not a single tree.), but they couldn’t do anything about the other stuff. And the worst part was the hunger and the blood drinking. No one had anticipated predators.

OMG MIKAEL MEETS DAMON AND STEFAN AT THE BAR!

When Klaus first ate, it activated a werewolf gene, because he wasn’t Mikael’s kid. Mikael killed half the village and then came home to kill Esther, after she put the hybrid curse on Klaus to keep him just vampire.

Story finished, Rebecca tells Elena to GTFO, and if she insists on going after Klaus, just know that Rebecca will rip her apart.

Mikael asks where Klaus is, and Stefan can’t answer because of the compulsion, so Mikael threatens Damon. Stefan still can’t say, but he does ultimately save Damon by saying he’ll lure Klaus back to Mystic Falls.

Ric has deciphered most of the glyphs from the cave, or at least that’s how they make it look, with Bonnie’s help. Elena comes back from her Flashback Afternoon and looks at the ones they can’t figure yet, and fills in that Mikael killed the witch by ripping her heart out. But what’s that symbol attached to her death? Elena realizes that Rebecca didn’t know the whole story.

So she runs out to tell her. “How do you KNOW Mikael killed your mother?” Klaus told her, but he lied. The Hybrid killed the Original Witch, not Mikael. Klaus did everything he could not to be rejected by another person in his family, like his mother rejected him after she put the hybrid spell on him.

Elena wants Rebecca on their side so badly, but Rebecca’s stunted as a teenager. She almost kills Elena when presented with the truth, and then collapses in a heap of tears.

Stefan and Damon fight.

Damon pops up in Elena’s room to update her that they have Mikael and Stefan on-side, and Elena says she thinks she got Rebecca, too. She confesses that she thinks Stefan will get better because he loves Damon, not her, and then she falls asleep as Damon looks amazed and in love.

I liked this one! It made sense, which always makes a good episode. And we got some solid exposition, which you need in a show like this. See y’all next week!

SGRoA: Vampire Diaries, S3 E8: Ordinary People

SGRoA: Vampire Diaries, S3 E7: Ghost World