Yes yes yes, Snowflakes! Because I have Peacock for a while, and because I haven’t seen this show before, AND because it stars James Tiberius Kirk, apparently?!?!?!, I will be recapping Vampire Diaries, aka Pretty People Talking. Yes, you read that right: I’m a slut for Star Trek. Let’s get started!!!!
We are off to a great start, with a deep mist shrouding the forest and a voiceover about being alone for centuries. Lol. Look, man, if you don’t know how to make friends, fangs can’t do the work for you.
Two people driving through the forest, chatting about a… concert, I think? Guy sounded like James Blunt, we already have a James Blunt, they drove an hour each way! Of course they suddenly hit the fog, and then the guy standing on the road in the fog, just as we drive out of cell range. Of course it’s a vamp, and of course both these people die, and then we get a little title sting.
And the hits keep coming! Our main guy, who is the voiceover and the killer, I assume, is now talking about how he should never have come home… but he had to KNOW HER. Cut to a teenager writing “Dear Diary”, and we are in for a RIDE, my loves. This show is gonna suck, I hope in all the best ways.
The diary entry is all exposition: dead parents, depression that’s stopping TODAY, because it’s the first day of school. So these relationships are all going to be exceptionally age-appropriate, wonderful. She lives with a woman doing a Ph.D and a dude. There is no indication of who these people are in relation to her.
In the car on the way to school, the girl driving our girl (my god do I hope people get names soon) says her grandma says she’s psychic, because their relatives are from Salem. I’m glad I’m not doing any sort of substance game with these cliches, I’d be the first known marijuana fatality already.
MAIN GIRL’S NAME IS ELENA, thank you, damn. A bird or something hits the car, and Other Girl pulls over after a brief flirtation with losing control. She then tells us exactly what we just witnessed: “It was like a bird or something, it came out of nowhere.” Good to know I don’t actually have to, y’know, WATCH the show, they’ll recap it all for us! Also, this is right after OG gets on Elena for looking out the car window like she’s zoned out for the last hour or something, instead of enjoying the scenery while listening to a friend. But OG seems way too invested in car eye contact – you know, when neurotypicals have to be dangerous as fuck so they can carry on a conversation in a car? Such a deficit, they should get some ABA for that – so I guess Elena not drilling holes into the side of her face with her eyeballs is some sort of slight, I guess.
Anyway, the point of all that with the bird and whatever is just to establish once again that Elena’s parents died in a car crash, and maybe that she was in the car? That part is much less clear than the bird thing, so I know the writers really have their priorities straight.
Guy in black leather jacket over black hoodie with black sunglasses enters the high school. Do you think that’s him? Our vampire?!?!?!
Elena and OG are walking in, too, and OG wants to call someone the t-slur?! Damn, girl, wtf. Even back in the day that wasn’t acceptable, at least not in my circles. This is from 09, y’all. Not. Acceptable.
Elena waves at a guy in a letter sweater, but he doesn’t wave back. Ex, apparently. And gets concern-attacked by someone named Caroline.
Outside, the school drug dealer is giving pills to a girl, whose boyfriend walks up and makes some sad early 2000s references. Oh, the drug dealer is Elena’s younger brother.
Elena and OG walk by the office, where James T. is signing up for HIGH SCHOOL, which – okay, I’mma go on a tangent here.
Look, I get why it makes financial sense to have teenagers in your vampire stories. I do, I understand capitalism and how it fucks with art, I’m not a child, it’s fine. But. I am wildly uncomfortable with the romances that then must, by definition, exist in these stories. Like. A 30-year-old Josephine and a 600-year-old Grant is bad enough. You get around it with some character work and the understanding that 30 is usually considered grown enough to make bad choices (for fiction’s sake, at least). But these are LITERAL CHILDREN, and while I don’t think teens are incapable of good decisions, I do think they’re not capable of the kinds of complications that come with relationships with immortals. In short:
I also think that no vampire would go to high school. Ever. For any reason. Like, come the fuck on. Literally no one would go to high school if they didn’t have to.
Anyway, he mojos the secretary into thinking he has all his transcripts and whatevers, so he can go to high school, instead of just, like, lurking. You really wanna have homework and be expected to be in class, Jim? I don’t, and I’m very human and only 46, so, like, yeah. Tell me another, young adult vampire writers.
Elena runs into her brother and yells at him for being stoned on the first day of school. She’s gonna “ruin his buzz” every time, because she “knows he’s not this person”. I mean. Kid lost his parents, Elena. I’ve seen zero mention of therapy, so…? How exactly does one deal with trauma, then? Drugs seem a pretty good bet, and hey, he’s being entrepreneurial about them!
Every girl in school wants Kirk’s hot, non-teenage ass, but he only has eyes for Elena. We get to see them staring at each other in history class, and learn they’re from Virginia, so… am I gonna have to watch that video on confederate vampires that YouTube offered me for like two months straight? Bummer, I like my vamps European and unaccountable.
After school, Elena heads to the cemetery to hang out and offer us more diary entry voiceovers. She must have said she was fine like 100 times today, and that was hard. 🙁 (I’m not trying to be a bitch, it’s not Elena’s fault. She’s not dumb, she’s just written that way!)
A crow or raven (I can’t tell the difference, it’s a black Corvid) perches on a nearby gravestone and caws. Spooky! And then someone turns on the ground-level fog machines and she runs away, thinking she sees a figure in the fog, only to run into Kirk and accuse him of following her. Oh, his name is Stefan!
To be fair, he does say it STEFan, not stefAHN, so, you know. Of course she’s bleeding, and of course he vamps out, and it looks much better than previous makeup artists were able to do. Paler skin, better contacts, all in all, more realistic looking, so that’s good.
Oh, Stefan has a journal, too! Where he talks about being “unable” to resist her, because he tried so hard, huh? Just couldn’t stop himself from going to her town, going to the high school, finding the office, signing up for classes and mojoing the secretary. Just…unavoidable, really, such a shame he absolutely HAD to do all of that.
Lil Bro goes to a restaurant where his previous customer – Vicki – is working. She blows him off and delivers food to Elena’s ex, who’s her brother, and who’s eating with the guy who picked her up at school, Travis. Also, she apparently hooked up with Lil Bro – whose name is Jeremy – over the summer, and she’s broken it off, but he keeps harassing her. Fun!
Caroline has all the deets on Captain Kirk, which boil down to a lot of nothing.
Kirk shows up at Elena’s house to apologize for bailing on her earlier, and we get to know that she’s living with her Aunt Jenna. Kirk is also returning her diary, which she dropped at the cemetery. She grabs a jacket and invites him in, but he stays at the threshold, making me think “you don’t have to stay out there” 1. doesn’t count as an invitation and 2. he needs one to enter her home. (Such a bizarre piece of lore for a monster, honestly. I should look up some papers about it or something, because it’s never made sense to me.)
This is the part of the episode where we get nine million tiny scenes in a row, all with, like, half a piece of information. I can’t stand TV structure like this, it drives me crazy to constantly bat back and forth. I’m a viewer trying to understand a narrative, I’m not a pinball. So we had Lil Bro and Caroline, and Stefan at the door, and back to the restaurant where OG (whose name I still don’t know) is talking to Elena’s ex about getting back with Elena. His name is Matt, apparently, and now we’re on to Elena and Stefan walking in and Matt being introduced, and now everyone is sitting at one table. Like. We could have just put everyone in one place from the getgo, trust me.
ANYWAY. We’re about halfway through! Some dude who looks like the Andrew Lincoln you get on Wish confronts Stefan about the couple killed in the open. Stefan says it was an animal attack, but Rick Grimes isn’t having any of that, thank you very much. He begs his Uncle Stefan to consider that people will remember him, and he’ll just stir things up. You know, for every long, useless closeup of an attractive person, we could just have dialogue that tells us things and lets people sound like people, not like a setup. But this is a pilot, so I suppose I should be nicer.
Stefan opens a cabinet of his old journals while a cover of “Running up that Hill” plays, his nephew’s denunciation still ringing in his ears. Such drama!!!!!!
In history the next day, only Stefan has the answers about the casualties of the civil war battle fought in Mystic Falls, their town. Stefan of course corrects the teacher. Real low profile there, guy.
Big bonfire that night (I assume, all of these scenes feel like they were written separately and then edited together, nothing happens because of something else, everything happens because that’s how you make hit TV, I guess.), and OG touches Elena, apparently has a vision, and instead of using the very visual medium of television to show it to us, she just tells Elena she saw a crow that was following her.
OMG, OG’s name is Bonnie! 24 minutes in! Anyway, she blames her non-visual vision on alcohol, and goes to get some more while Stefan takes Elena off to walk somewhere. Don’t worry, her brother clocks them leaving, she probably won’t die. They recap how they met for us, and then Elena takes like 4 seconds to tell how her parents died (and that she was in the backseat). Stefan tells her not to worry: she won’t be sad forever.
Oh, Vicki’s boyfriend was Tyler, not Travis, and of course he has to sexually assault her for them to break up. Maybe. She’s not interested in Lil Bro Jeremy, tho, either, even though he helped get Tyler off her.
Back to Elena and Stefan, Elena complaining about her ex, Stefan vamping out a little.
Then back to Vicki, because this…. Look, I know it’s supposed to build tension or something, but I’m pretty sure that only works when the people making the media are, like, talented and know what they’re doing, so, you know. She gets stabbed or something, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention because I was writing this paragraph, and also I don’t really care, because someone is going to tell me what happened to her as soon as this Twilight commercial is over.
Matt comes to bother Elena about breaking up with him and moving on, another 2 lines before he’s gone and Caroline is hitting on Stefan for 2 lines and then Elena is talking shit about Caroline to Stefan and then Elena goes after Jeremy and they find Vicki, who is alive still but has a neck wound that makes Stefan run for home. Where a crow shows up, just before Ian Somerholder shows up to complain about the 90s and grunge.
And even they only get like 4 lines before we’re back at the party, Vicki being loaded into an ambulance. Let people talk! Damn! Everyone is still standing around at the underage drinkfest, for some reason, and Bonnie tells Elena that even though she’s not really psychic, she has a feeling this is only the beginning.
Then back to Stefan and Damon (not a Ferengi, unfortunately), where we learn that Stefan eats animals and Damon doesn’t think that’s the stuff, but, like, HOW do you get away with killing these days?! Dude. No. Figure your shit out, because you are putting so many people at risk for your macho nonsense. Anyway, they fight about it, and about Elena, and they’re throwing each other out windows and shit and like, again, no. You do not have breaking windows on the regular money, my guy, I can guarantee that.
We also learn that they have magic rings that let them be in the sun, and what have I done to myself? Taken in by James T’s cute little face and his lovely chemistry with La’an Noonien Singh and I got caught up. Shaking my head at myself. The things I do to entertain… well, let’s be honest, myself, at this point. I’m not sure y’all are out there.
Elena and Jeremy get a little scene where she disapproves of his drinking at the party, though she did the same. And then Bonnie and Caroline, where Caroline laments that no one she likes likes her back, and then Matt watching over Vicki in the hospital. Lotta siblings hanging out together, is that a thing that happens? Mine were all much younger than me, we were never in the same school, but my brothers also never hung out together, and they were all two years apart.
Home stretch, y’all, and I can compliment the music, which is excellent but a little much for teens with fangs, if you ask me.
We do a voiceover wrapup, writing in our little journals, and apparently Elena looks like Catherine, from THE PAST, so we’re hitting all the beats here. Yay? Stefan shows up at Elena’s, and she finally invites him in for reals. (We’ll ignore that there’s no fucking way Virginia is cold outside during August, when schools start. Just be glad he got his little invite.)
Well! That is definitely one of the shows of all time! This is gonna be a fun – *checks how many seasons there are* – THREE YEARS?!
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