Vampire Diaries - Small Screen Review

Vampire Diaries - Small Screen Review

Episode 8 Review - "Ordinary People"

That was a history lesson and a half as we learn the origin of the Original family and how they came to be the Original vampires. Having to reveal this much information might have been a drag, but thanks to the always good Vampire Diaries flashbacks and Rebekah (Claire Holt) as a narrator this was far from a bore. It also helped that this amount of exposition was combined with a separate Damon and Stefan story. This once again showed how great these two are together and how much this dynamic has been absent for most of this season.

Elena's plan to have a "mean girl power struggle" with Rebekah actually worked in getting her to spill her. Elena has spent enough time around vampires to know how to manipulate the conversation to her advantage, all that time playing Katherine's mind games has paid off as she got Rebekah to reveal all the important details.

Protecting family is the key theme of their backstory- first from disease in Europe, followed by the predators in the US (long before it was the US). Klaus (Joseph Morgan) is at the heart of all of this as it was his intrigue about the werewolves that led to his younger brother being killed, which in turn led to the creation of vampires. No wonder Klaus turned out the way he did, that's a lot of guilt right there. The big reveal in this story about how they became vampires isn't that Mikael (Sebastian Roché) is their father, as this is something I think most had guessed. The big surprise is that their mother Esther (Alice Evans) was a witch and not just any witch, but the witch from the Original family. It is her talisman, which she received from another powerful witch that has been the source of much of this seasons bother.

The even bigger twist was not in the version of the story that Rebekah told, Rebekah believed that her father had killed her mother by ripping out her heart, but in reality it was Klaus. This destroys the 1000 year relationship and unsurprisingly turns Rebekah into a sobbing heap. How will she react when she sees her brother again? Which won’t take too long considering Mikael has threatened Stefan and Damon in order to bring Klaus back.